Heck of a Town

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Interlaken was another amazing city.  We arrived to find ourselves without very good directions to the Hostel and started walking to where abouts we thought it was on a map just outside the train station.  Well after about 30 mintues of walking beside the river that connects the two lakes on either side of the town, we finnnaly came to our Hostel which looked pretty nice.  It was in HI hostel situated right on water with a yard with volleyball, table tennis and a fire pit.  It also had a huge breakfast and a diner  if you didnt want to go out to eat.  Even though the hostel was outside of the main town, we recieved a free bus pass for our stay so we never had to pay. Everything seemed great until we went to go to bed the first night and there were 5 kids in our rooms, kids as in 7-10 year olds.  So we ended up being pretty dissapointed with the fact that they let kids stay in the YOUTH hostel, and in the morning realized that the hostel was really more of a family get away place.

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The first day we were there we decided that we should do some kind of extreme sport being in Interlaken that is known for this.  We looked into parasailing and even tickled the idea of sky diving but really the only the we could ever afford on this trip was Cannyoning.  This is basically going up a mountain with  two wetsuits, a harness with clips and a helmet adn then going down some extreewmely old river.  It sounds kindof lame but we chose the hardest one because we had heard anything less isnt worht the money.  So we headed off to do something we hadnt heard about unitl 24hrs before hand and were pretty excited.  Well the first jump was a 10m jump into a waterfall.  The only thing was you had to land in a psecifc spot because of rocks all around and at the base of the waterfall.  Luckily everyone made that fine and it was on to other jumps and naturalling created slides.  The water had erroded natural slides that were basically very steep slides that you went down.  Some ending in a jump and other just smacking you into the water.  It was quite a treck down the mountain but it was loads of fun.  Being lowered by the harness into down one waterfall with it right ontop was very cool.  After they had a lunch and beer  waiting for us which was the cherry ontop.

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The next day we ended up just walking around town and seeing all the sights of Interlaken.  Well once again Interlaken isnt known for its massive sights but more for the extreme sports.  Luckily though it was the 1st of August and this is Swiss Day, their national holiday.  So they had some parade which had some pretty odd and unusual things to see.  The most odd was the bell ringers club which as far as we could tell, rang absolutely massive cow bells, and we decided they drank a lot aswell since ringing bells can only be fun for so long.?. In the evening we saw the most incredible fireworks we have ever seen.  If you can picture the finally of a set of fireworks where they just go all out, that is what the entire display was like.  They had a huge park in the middle of the city and the fireworks, from the ground up, just lit up the sky. Literally.  They were just amazing.  The first set lasted 5 mintues and me and Shawn thought it was over since they couldnt possibly out do it.  But the entire show had 4 parts to it and lasted half an hour.  The third part being lit off one of the sides of a surrounding mountain and then coming back to the park infront of us.  The finally of this show to end all was speech impeeding, and we were all completely blown away.  After the show they proceeded to take a evergreen tree growing in the middle of the park and surround it with a huge pyramid of full size tree trunks, then light it all on fire to make the biggest bon fire I think I have ever seen.  As we headed closer to the fire we ended up seeing some guys we had gone cannyoning with the day before and all of us went of to a club.  The night was something to rememeber and I just wish everyone reading this could have seen it.  But this was the end to our Swiss adventure for the mean time, with absolutely no complaints of our time spent there.