Luzern & Engelberg-Titlis, Switzerland

Last week I went to yoga class on Wednesday. It is offered weekly and from what I can tell it is free for students, so I plan to do that every Wednesday henceforth. She initially was speaking entirely in German, which I had not considered. I thought I could just watch the people next to me, but when they are doing things like tightening their buttocks, it's pretty hard to tell. She caught on fairly quick that I was lost and did the rest of the class in German and English, thankfully. Saturday, Koryn, Jeff (American guy) and I took the train to Lucerne. We spent the day doing some very touristy things, which even though I usually hate were kind of fun. I think because the things we did were rather quirky. For example, we went to a place called Gletscher Garten Luzern (Glacier Garden Lucerne), which starts out showing the natural landmark left by the glacier in 1873, proceeds to a glacier museum, then turns into a teddy bear museum, then a mirror maze and finally ends with the Lion Monument which is a sculpture that commemorates the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution! Very strange. The next place we went was Bourbaki Panorama which is a circular painting from 1881 that is 112 by 10 meters. It was quite stunning, but unfortunately I was unable to take pictures. After that we had lunch at a Swiss restaurant and I finally tried some Swiss culinary specialties...fondue, raclette and rosti. They were all very delicious. And Evelyn, I have included a picture just for you! After lunch we went to another unusual museum, Depot, which has bar codes on all of its objects and using a scanning device, you point it at the bar code of the object that interests you and the information appears on the scanner. You could even play games where it tells you a story on the scanner, sends you to find a particular object that you read about and then asks you a multiple choice question after about it. It was very interactive! Naturally after a long day of touring, we hit a pub for a couple pints and then I turned in for the night at my hostel (https://www.backpackerslucerne.ch/index_en.php). It was really great actually and only $32/night! The next morning I got up and hopped a train to Engelberg-Titlis to go boarding. The ride there was absolutely beautiful. I had about the worst day of snowboarding of my life and was back on the train only a few hours after I got there. I was following the crowd and kept going up, up, up, not knowing that I should have got off a lot earlier and ended up way too high and the only runs down were beyond my experience level. I got a serious case of the nerves and then I took a pretty nasty spill and called it a day. The week coming up consists of school, homework and celebrating St. Paddy's Day of course! Luckily my classes that day were cancelled and I don't have class until noon the next day! Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!