The Great Alpventure: Part 1 - What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

At the beginning of my final week of Christmas break, I set off for Switzerland with my dear Capernwray friend, Esther. I got dropped off at Manchester airport on Friday at 8:30am, only to discover that our 10:50am flight had been cancelled, and the only other one they could get us on left for Zurich at 7:00pm. Fending off despair, I met up with Esther, who had just gotten off an overnight flight from Seattle and accordingly, had not slept all night. My trails were nothing in comparison to hers. Upon finding a café and getting food, we began our 10-hour airport languish. If you want to travel the world, you have to learn how to languish well. It’s all part and parcel of the trade. At one point, Esther somehow managed to get a sugar crystal from the table lodged inside her elbow skin, the upside of this bizarre occurrence being that we killed some time trying to extract it with tweezers.

At long last, we boarded our flight, and arrived in Zurich around 10:30pm. We then had to navigate the Swiss train system, but fortunately all the signs were double-printed with both German and English, and pretty much everyone spoke both languages, so there really weren’t any language-barrier issues. We did have one exciting adventure when, upon asking a random girl which train we could take to get to Interlaken, she figured out that there was one leaving in 2 minutes –from the platform about two tracks away. There was then a mad dash, with suitcases wheeling along furiously, and Esther struggling to lug her enormous case up and down about 4 flights of stairs, and quite a bit of squealing and laughter, albeit in a slightly panicked tone. I am proud to say that we did get on the train, and we at last reached Interlaken in the early hours of Saturday morning. The place we were staying is a resort called Credo run by Torchbearers, the same organization that runs Capernwray. One of the staff members collected us from the station, and at long last, our journey was at its end.

We slept in the next morning, as was our right, but unfortunately that meant that we missed breakfast. Esther managed to procure a cup of dreadful instant coffee, but it tasted so bad that she couldn’t finish it. We at last got something to eat at lunch, but it was a weird, sausagey smorgasbord thing, which was not the best meal to hit my empty stomach with, first thing after waking up. Still, t’was food. Afterwards, we went exploring around the Credo grounds, which play host to the ruins of a 12th century fortress (!!!) which we had a grand time snooping around in. Right out back of Credo there was a playground, and I was very excited to discover that there was a rather steep tunnel slide built into the hillside. Naturally, there was nothing to be done but to test it out. With Esther waiting faithfully at the bottom, poised in readiness to Snapchat the event, I began my descent.

The descent turned out to be very slow. Apparently the material of my jeggings was not particularly traction-free, and I ended up going at roughly the speed of a chair-lift, accompanied by both the sound of Esther laughing at me from the outside, and a sort of wheezing, squeaky noise generated by the rubbing of pants on metal. It was a slide that served as an excellent metaphor for life: full of disappointments.

After that, it was time to hit the ground running and really get a jumpstart on our Swiss adventures, really invest our time wisely. So we spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, watching Shrek 2 and Back to the Future.

That day was New Year’s Eve. At dinner (which was amazingly delicious and I’m drooling as I reminisce) they had these little rocket shaped things set on the table, each of which had a little fuse at the bottom. After dinner, we lit the fuse and the rocket shot into the air and released a cascade of party favours. Everything about it seemed incredibly illegal, and it was the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me. Later in the evening, the Credo staff did a devotional service and we rang in the new year with prayer, which was rather lovely. We then went outside to set off fireworks and drink mulled wine (pause here for gasps and shocked expressions from the home-schooled section of the audience). Actually, I am technically under a contract not to consume any alcohol until after I finish school at Capernwray, so it’s kind of ironic that the place where I was being served the sauce was another Torchbearers centre. It was delicious and I regret nothing. (Pause for people gasp again and make the sign of the cross).

And so went the ringing in of the Swiss new year. I’ve heard that it’s a Swiss tradition to drop ice cream on the floor on new Year’s, and I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t do that, but we did get to eat ice cream at dinner, which is a much better use of the substance anyway. We had a grand old time, and the best part of it all was that with 5 more days of vacation ahead of us, the adventures were just beginning.