Saturday Evening Paaaaarty

This is us trying to make it through the crowds of people to get to the lake. Yes I'm holding two beers.
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Ok, a little background, basically once every four years the people of Zurich decides they don't want to be quite as uptight as they normally are and throw an enormous party along the lake and river. It only lasts for one weekend and it is PAAACKED with people.

We started our evening at about 7pm and headed for the train to Zurich. We obviously were not the only people with this idea as the train was full. We arrived and once we finally gathered everyone together we went to the party. The fireworks were scheduled to go off at 11pm and it pretty much took us 3 hours to fight our way through the crowd to the lake where they blast the fireworks off.

There were a bunch of aerial presentations going on during the day too. Apparently there was a helicopter doing stunts earlier, including a backflip. Too bad we missed that.
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Now the fireworks are amazing, they shoot off a million francs worth in one hour and it's all synchronized to music. It was AMAZING, I think I've said that already, but it was, really! AMAZING! I don't know if you guys will be able to see a video that someone posted on Facebook but if you can look at Jaret Radford's videos he has a video of the fireworks, you'll see, awesome! errrr amazing! After the fireworks were done the group split up into smaller groups. I went on a couple rides, went on the most expensive ferris wheel in the world, I haven't verified that fact but it was 5CHF for one ride so I'm going to say it was the most expensive ever.

Fireworks!
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The rides aren't nearly as cool as they are at Stampede, but it's cool because they're placed all around really old buildings that are hundreds of years old. It's all really neat. Anyway, as the day came to an end we hopped on a train and headed back home.

The legal drinking age in Switzerland is 16 for beer and 18 for liquor and I think they have a very big problem with kids drinking too much. While I was there I saw some kid passed out on the train platform by himself with paramedics checking him out. There were also people all over the place who were waaaay too drunk and looked like they were about the pass-out or throw up on the street.

More fireworks!
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Anyway, small trip, but it was tons of fun!