After a breakfast of pastries from a local bakery near Heimo’s place and a list of suggestions for things to do in Munich, we set out for Switzerland. (Heh. We went to Munich later.) The Deutsche Bahn takes you from Freiburg to Interlaken in about three hours, and you get to go through Basel and Bern.
We arrived at the train station in Interlaken in the early afternoon and struggled with our luggage through the streets to Balmer’s Herberge, which bills itself as the oldest private hostel in Switzerland. Our room was in the main building, and we had paid a little more to ensure that we had a room to ourselves. It was cute, on the second floor with a window overlooking the street. There was a sink in the room, and linens were provided. The shower was just down the hall, and it was gross. There was a condom wrapper in there. (The mere thought of that is just disgusting but anyway, that’s why we had shower shoes.)
After we dropped our stuff in the room, we went to a local deli to get a late lunch. There was almost no one in the deli, since it was probably 2 or 3 in the afternoon by this point, and about midway through our meal, we realized that they didn’t take credit cards and we didn’t have any Swiss francs. So Lisa ran to the ATM, and we calculated that the exchange rate for the franc was much better than that for euros. Not that this saved us any money. After lunch, we walked around Interlaken, which had a nice park. There were a bunch of hotels in the area as well, and we noted that one, the Hotel Schuh, advertised a chocolate-making tour. That was enough to sell us, so we headed inside.
We asked about the tour at a candy counter featuring display cases full of chocolate. The tour was something like 10 swiss francs for the two of us, but then at the end we would get a 10CHF voucher for the hotel dining room. We were told to wait in the lobby and the tour would begin momentarily. I am sure the “tour” was just a way to get people into the hotel to eat, because it was hilarious. A guy in a chef’s apron came out from the back, introduced himself as Luc, and said he would be our tour leader.
Luc led us through the kitchen area, down a well-lit alley and into a room somewhere in the back where the chocolate magic happens. I don’t really remember the specifics, but he showed us how the molds work and how the chocolate is hollow. He demonstrated this by breaking the head off a chocolate cow. Then we made him pose for a picture with us and the broken cow and another, unbroken cow. I'm sure he thought we were weird. It was funny. After the tour, we both got pieces of chocolate cake, and it was absolutely divine. I tried a bite of Lisa’s and it was good, too (but not divine).
Once we finished the tour, we walked around town some more, taking pictures of the full moon rising. We checked out the local grocery store and the European cereal and then headed back to the restaurant/bar/club-type thing at Balmer’s for fondue. It was here that my camera crapped out and I freaked because what the hell was I going to do the next day AT THE TOP OF EUROPE WITH NO CAMERA? But I guess it was just hot or something because it worked the next time I tried it.
Back at Balmer’s, we were talking to the guy who was on host duty that night, Chris, who had graduated from an Ivy League school with a degree in political science. This came up when he mentioned that we were older than most of the kiddos who came through the hostel, and Lisa mentioned that some of them had an age limit, but not Balmer’s. Then we got this great idea to pose for a picture with him, and for some reason I hoisted my leg up on the counter (why? why?!?) and he put his hand on it and acted like he was going to pull up the cuff and I had to smack his hand and clamp my pants down at the ankle because I had not shaved since we got to Europe, and even though, as Lisa pointed out later, European girls are not known for shaving, Chris was American and anyway nobody needs to see that.