Getting settled in Florence

Sorry I haven’t posted that much lately. We’re really busy in Italy and have had some problems getting on the internet regularly, so it’s been hard to do the blog.  But we’ve been in Italy for a couple weeks and it’s really great!  Because we’re having a lot of problems time-wise and internet-wise, we’re going to just post some pictures with captions and combine some of the stuff we’ve done in Italy.

We got to Florence and settled into our apartment on via Pier San Maggiore.  We’re in a great location, right near the Duomo, one of the main things in Florence – a huge cathedral with a giant dome on top (as you can see in the video we posted!).  There’s also a tall belltower, called the Campanile, and a building called the Baptistery where children used to get baptized.  They are all hundreds of years old, and the Baptistery is even more like a thousand years old!  All 3 of these buildings are really interestingly colored – dark green, rosy pink, and white.  They don’t look like any buildings anywhere else (except for the church we saw in Siena, which I’ll talk about later) especially in America!

To me, in some areas, Florence is pretty dirty and graffitied, but in most places, there are really old buildings everywhere you look and that is pretty cool.  It’s really neat being in a city, too – there are so many restaurants, great people watching, and you can walk in the streets because there aren’t many cars (though you have to watch out because there are some cars, and lots of crazy bikes!).  There are little narrow backstreets leading to all different places, and beautiful churches and towers and piazzas (which is what they call squares).

We’re also in a great location, store- and food-wise too.  The apartment has a great sandwich shop right nearby and a lot of great restaurants with amazing pizza and pasta, like Mastrocilegia (which we think might mean “master of cherry” -- don’t ask).

We have 5 really good gelato places right near us – our favorite so far is Rivareno.  Gelato is like ice cream but a hundred times creamier and sweeter and I can’t really explain it but it’s SO good.  They have like 50 flavors and the way they’re presented is CRAZY: let’s say the flavor is coconut: they would have real coconut on it sliced in half and the gelato is piled up in these HUGE stacks.  It’s really awesome.  If it was chocolate they’d have huge chocolate bars on it for decoration.  Some of our favorite flavors are cioccolato (chocolate), straciatella (vanilla and chocolate chips), menta (mint), cioccolato bianco (white chocolate), tres di cioccolato (triple chocolate), and the last one is vaniglia e cookies (vanilla and cookies).  We’ve had gelate every single day so far!  (Even twice a couple times).

 

Our apartment is really different than home.  It was really creepy at first.  It is really old, it has huge high ceilings, and it was pretty dark (the hallway light only stays on for 4 seconds before turning off), before we got some lamps.  It’s really big and is usually a dorm for students and mine and Dylan’s room has 4 beds and mom and dad’s room has 3 beds – 7 beds in all if you can’t do the math!   We have a nice kitchen and living room with an amazing arched brick ceiling that it lit by a modern lamp different from the rest of the apartment.  It has a balcony overlooking the street and a little piazza.  It’s really fun to people watch!  I’ve gotten really good at climbing up onto the window (which is really high) to watch the piazza.

Dylan and I decided to make our room a bit more homey.  So we decided to make our beds decorated with stuff we’ve gotten on our trip and give them themes.  Mine is “Casey’s Tropical Hangout” and Dylan’s is “Dylan’s Warrior Hideout.”  Mom, Dylan, and I devised a pulley system that we can use to pass notes from one bed to another (involving a rope and a basket) that is really awesome!

I’ll post more on Florence soon!

A little Florence video

Here is a video we made the other day in Florence using an app called Vidrhythm. We made it mostly while we were on top of the bell tower in Florence, which was built in the 1300s and is right next to the famous church, the Duomo. You can see the giant dome in the video. We climbed to the top of the tower -- 414 steps on a very narrow stairway! It was pretty tiring but the view of the whole city was amazing!

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPUaWoivRFU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Trip to Bachalpsee (or Lake Bachalp)

We woke up later than usual and had a wonderful buffet breakfast outside, at our hotel. We headed out for the gondola ride to the stop called "First," which was WAY up the side of one of the huge Alps around Grindelwald. The gondola ride was beautiful, filled with rocky cliffs, snowy peaks, foamy waterfalls, lush green meadows, and flowers in bloom. When we got to First, we began our hike to Bachalpsee (Bachalp =Bachalp, see=Lake). It was an awesome hike with all the snowy peaks, shortcuts (which were great, really fun, but one resulted in a mud and snow covered child), and snow along the path, perfect for snowball fights, which we had quite a few of.

Here is the view we had while on the hike:

Here is me after slipping and sliding in the snow and mud:


More views along the way:

We got to the lake hidden up in the mountains and it was so cool!  Bachalpsee looked amazing in the magazines we saw, but the pictures totally DID NOT do justice to the real thing.  We had a snack and played on the snow at this amazing place for a while.

On top of the world!

We hiked back from the lake and had lunch with great hot chocolate on a big deck on top of the mountain.  (My dad tried a traditional Swiss dish called “raclette” that was really gross and weird, but I don’t want to go into it because it makes me want to throw up.  It was basically a pool of melted cheese with some potatoes on the side.  Blech!).

Then dad and I did this awesome thing that was sort of like a zip cord, but not really.  It was called “the First Flyer” and it was basically a kind of harness that you sit on and get strapped in to and then you fly down from one cable car stop all the way to another cable car stop, which is way down the mountain.  It looked crazy and scary and you couldn’t even see where you were going to end up in the distance. 

Here is a poster advertising the "First Flyer" that we saw after doing it (we didn't get any good pictures or videos of the real thing because, well, we were ON it):

You put your feet up on this gate in front of you and then the person helping you says “Ok, you ready?” If you reply “yes,” then they press a button and the gate goes away and you just zoom out into open air and zoom down the mountain at like 90 mph.  It was AWESOME – so much fun!!  Dad and I were both at equal speeds at the beginning, but then he started getting faster and faster and I got slower, but then suddenly I passed him and flew past him.  The ending was NOT as smooth as we expected – we thought you would slow to a stop, but not at all.  You go just as fast as you do in the beginning if not faster, since you just went down a huge mountain, and then suddenly you see ground and a house in front of you and you brace yourself for the impact and when you’re about to hit it, you go “pweeechk” – you swing up in the air really hard.  

Dylan was too young to do it, so he and mom hiked down to the next stop – it took us 36 seconds and it took them 25 minutes!  (That tells you how far our flight was!).  They had a great hike though – they even got a little lost and were worried they wouldn’t make it to the last cable car. 

We all met up and took the cable car down and went back to the hotel and then rested and had a last dinner in Switzerland.  Tomorrow: Italy!!

Trip to Jungfrau mountain: "The Top of Europe"!

In case you don’t know, Jungfrau is one of the highest mountains in the Alps and it has the highest train station in all of Europe -- it is at 11,000 feet!  (That's why they call it “The Top of Europe”). 

The morning we went to Jungfrau, we had to wake up very early. We got on our train with 30 seconds to spare. (Literally! The guy we got our tickits from said we had 30 seconds to make the train!) The train ride was about 20 minutes long before we had to switch trains at a station. As we kept going up the views became bigger and more spectacular, until the amazing-ness stopped at no trees, grass, or any sort of life.  Here are some views from the train as we started to go up:

We were surrounded by snow, more snow, and tons of mountains completely covered in snow! In the middle of June! It was crazy!  Here's me on the train, bundled up, and the view along the way:

When we entered Jungfraujoch (“joch” means train station), we decided to go first to the “Alpine Delight,” which was basically these really weird sculptures about the Alps (sort of).  From there we went into the “Ice Palace” – that was amazing!  You actually go inside a glacier.  Imagine being in a room completely made out of ice, not a single scrap of wood, bricks, metal or anything like that.  There were sculptures made out of ice, like penguins and bears and wolves, made out of ice, and the floors, walls, and ceilings, were also made of ice.  We were basically inside an ice cube, with mazes and sculptures.  Also, something funny: in one of the walls you could see Scrat, from the Ice Age movies, stuck in the ice with his acorn! 

After we slipped and slided our way through the Ice Palace, we went out on the snow on the “Plateau,” where you could look around the view of snow-covered mountains and play in the snow a little bit.  You had to make sure you didn’t fall off the edge – that could be awful!  The sun was shining, but it was pretty cold and we were all decked out in winter jackets, hats, and mittens.  In June. 

This is the view from the top -- of a giant glacier:

Then we went to the Sphinx -- the observatory station at the very top of Jungfraujoch.  This is what it looks like (from a postcard):

From up there, you could see mountains in almost every direction.  It’s almost every because on one side you could see little towns down below in the valley – you couldn’t even really tell which was Grindelwald.

After a good Indian lunch in the station, we went on to my favorite part of the day – “Snow Fun”!  This was completely out in the snow, on a hill underneath the mountains, with lots of activities: “tubing” (where you ride down a fast track in a tire thingy), “sledging” (sledding down a steep hill), skiing, snowboarding, and so on. 

First we did something called a “Fox Flyer,” which was a huge zip-line over the Alps.  You climb up a huge ladder on the cliff, a guy puts you in a harness, and then pushes you off the cliff and you zip through open snowy air until you cross over the “snow fun” area and then crash into the snow on the other end.  You didn’t stop slowly at all – you just crash and burn.  It was so much fun!  All four of us did it and we all loved it.  Here are videos of us actually zipping on the zip line!

!

Here I am with Dylan just after the zip cord:

Then Dad and I did a lot of tubing.  Luckily none of us got stuck in spots where you could get crashed into by people behind you.  It went pretty fast down a tobogganish (is that a word?) track.  Sometimes you could even catch air!  Then we tried sledding for a long time too.  It was a really quick, steep downhill path and it was really fun.  I got crashed into by one guy who was out of control and barely got missed by another. 

 

Another view of the mountains:

After that awesome day, we left Jungfrau and took the long train down the mountain back to Grindelwald.  It was an amazing, adventure-filled day!

Lucerne to Grindelwald, Switzerland

We got a great breakfast at a café, and Dylan and I fed some sparrows on some steps where we had a picnic.  Aftewards, we walked up to see the old city wall and towers that were overlooking Lucerne. 

We climbed up to the top of two, one small and one big, and the bigger one had clock gears in it and pendulums and that was really cool. 

We walked back down along the city wall and went back to the hotel to pack up and leave Lucerne.

We took two amazing trains to Grindelwald, a village way up in the Alps.  There were waterfalls and mountains, waterfalls IN mountains, and huge snow-capped stony structures (also known as mountains – I didn’t want to write mountains so many times!).  This is from the train ride into Grindelwald:

We got to Grindelwald and were presented with four ginormous mountains right in front of us – Eiger, Wetterhorn, Shreckhorn, and I don’t remember (nice name, eh?).  The view from the hotel was spectacular.  They gave us a fruit bowl.  And chocolates.

Then we went on our first cable car up to Pfingstegg, a stop pretty high up the mountain called (I don’t remember).  

There was a little playground up there with another trampoline – I think that’s a thing in Switzerland: putting trampolines on top of mountains!  We had a little snack on the deck with an amazing view:

 and then rode back down, and later had dinner at the nice Italian restaurant on the deck outside behind our hotel, right underneath the giant mountains:

The view from dinner!

New email address, more posts to come!

Hi everyone -
Sorry I haven't put up a blog post in a while.  We've been really busy getting settled in Florence!  I'll post something soon about the rest of our stay in Switzerland.  In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that something weird happened to my AOL email account and I can't get into it.

So I just got a new Gmail email address.  From now on, my address is:
cregmusic4058@gmail.com

Please email me at my new address!  Hope you're all doing well!

This is where I'm sitting right now, on our balcony, in Florence, Italy!!

Day 4: Mt. Rigi

The morning we climbed Mt. Rigi we got up early.  We went to the boat that would take us to Mt Rigi – the boat ride was amazingly scenic, even more beautiful than we expected and our expectations were high!  There were tons of snow-capped mountains in the distance, such as the Alps and we could see Mt Rigi and Mt Pilatus looming over us.  To top it all off, the weather was beautiful.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky (well, almost).  When we got to the Vitznau, we waited and then got on the train.   The train was amazing!  It had open windows, so I was afraid we could fall out the windows as we went up.  It was really steep and was at something like a 50% angle, which is very steep!  The views as you went up were breathtaking.  You could see the mountains even closer than before and you could also see the whole of Lake Lucerne with all the mountains surrounding it, which was completely WOW.  You could see the people who live up on the mountain, near the top, and that was really cool.  At one stop, we saw a young boy in a traditional Swiss outfit carrying eggs.  He got on the train and we thought he was maybe bringing eggs to someone who lived closer to the top.  It was really cool imagining someone whose life was so different than ours.

We got to the top, which had even the best views of all.  I felt like I was on top of the sky!  We walked over to this huge antennae radio tower thingy and climbed it to the highest point we could get to, which was the highest point of Mt Rigi, which I found pretty cool.  We had a picnic snack at the top, on some green grass which was covered with pretty flowers, and an amazing view of all the Alps.  Suddenly we heard this loud but beautiful noise and we turned and saw these two people playing the longest horns you’ll ever see – really!  They were like 15 feet long!  They played some somber pretty songs, which sounded like we were at a funeral.  We found out later that these instruments were called alphorns. We hiked down Mt. Rigi for a while, until we got to our next stop with a restaurant and a playground. At the playground, they actually had a trampoline!  It seemed really weird and cool to jump on a trampoline on top of a big mountain in Switzerland.  We jumped on the trampoline for a bit, ate lunch on the deck, and jumped some more.

Then we hiked some more for a long-ish time, until we got to the cable car place. There was a few fast downhill spots on it- those were fun. We left Mt. Rigi and got back on our boat to Lucerne. We stumbled on big festival, with ethnic food and kid games with stilts, a weird bouncy ball thing, and an awesome but REALLY weird ball contraption thingy. We had dinner at La Bonne Cave, a nice restaurant. It was a great, fun-filled day!

On the boat to Mt. Rigi.

Here is a house near the top of the mountain where people lived.

The top of Mt. Rigi!

We thought this was a funny sign -- how do you say "mmhhh"?   "Mmm-huh?"  And what is "lecker"?