New Year’s Resolutions: Made to be Broken??

Hello everyone! I’m sure you were all convinced I’d finally fallen off the face of the earth, but I haven’t. In fact, I’ve been in my own little bubble, hiding out and procrastinating anything which makes my last few months here seem final. So, I have a lot of catching up to do on keeping you up to speed with the things I’ve done/seen…I haven’t written anything yet in 2008, and the end of this week marks the beginning of spring! The funniest bit about my nearly 3 month absence from you all is the fact it was actually my New Year’s Resolution to blog more regularly, and I haven’t even attempted to try once in the last few months…which leads me to the ever-popular conclusion that most NY’s resolutions are made to be broken: diets, exercising more, gossiping less…these are all good ideas but the reality of doing them just because one has decided to “start the New Year right” is mostly absurd!

So I guess the best place to start is to just jump in at the beginning...of the year that is…For the New Year’s holidays this year I took at trip to Zermatt, Switzerland with my friend Danielle (Australian-I’m surrounded by ‘em) and one of her friends from home, Debbie. The girls went down a day before me so I trained it up there alone to meet them. It was such a nice ride through central Switzerland and then the mountainous Valais region near Zermatt. This is a part of Switzerland I’ve wanted to visit since day one and I was finally there! Of course there is the very famous Matterhorn…you know, the one on the side of the Toblerone chocolate bars…but the whole village was just completely charming. Most of the main areas are car-free so it should have made walking around easy, but the whole place was covered in ice and snow… the streets/foot paths mostly ice…and as I’m still nursing my ankle quite a bit it made getting around more difficult that it should have been!

The day I arrived we quickly went to the hostel (we were so lucky to find something in the village for this holiday weekend) to drop my stuff and then head up the Gornergrat, a ridge overlooking Zermatt…it gives a great view of the Matterhorn. It just so happened that December 31^st was a beautifully clear day and the visibility was so great that our pictures look near perfect! The railway station at the top is at 3,089 meters above sea level, which is over 10,000 feet…that’s pretty high! I’m attaching some of the pictures we took at the top, including some fun ones with the Matterhorn.

That evening we made our way back to the hostel and cooked our own dinner, as we did for nearly every meal in Zermatt…it’s just so much more affordable that way! We were sitting in the community area eating our food when we met up with a group of dentists who go there on ski holiday every year. They asked us to join them and they let us know all the good info for New Year’s Eve celebrations. We were told that the only parties were pay-to-enter and filling up fast, but still we’d opted to wait until that night and then just hope we could get in somewhere…as it turns out we were quite lucky to have not paid in advance because we were sorely misinformed and there was a spectacular party in the center of town. The guys asked us to come along and we were so glad to go…and so it was…us and 2000 of our not-so-close friends in this town center that wasn’t very big. We got shoved around and of course things spilled on us but it was just great. We got to ring in the New Year with new friends, which consequently we haven’t spoken to since that weekend, and see some great fireworks. Then we proceeded to somewhere indoors, as it was really, REALLY cold that night and we celebrated long into the night.

The next day was a lazy one. We slept in and just took our time getting ready. We planned to see a bit of the village and then go up the Klein Matterhorn (Little Matterhorn) to an area called Glacier Paradise. We fooled around all day until we’d just missed the last lift up the mountain. We thought we’d have plenty of time but the next day showed us just how long it takes to get up to that altitude. We went back to the hostel and our friends were there so we made our dinner and then went out again with them for another fun night.

January 2^nd-leave day…we were DETERMINED to go up to the Glacier Paradise so we woke early and left before any human person should be up to get to the lifts. The ride up took over an hour, if I recall correctly more like 1 ½ hours. This is the highest lift in Europe; we had to take 3 different cable cars to reach the top. At each station, we’d get out and it would be oh so much colder than the last one because of the increasing altitude. The temperature when we reached the top was -19 Celsius, which is just below -2 Fahrenheit. I don’t think I’ve ever been colder in my entire life. I had on 3 or 4 layers, I can’t remember exactly how much now but I remember layering up on the way to the top. The height is 3,883 meters or 12,740 feet above sea level up there. When you arrive you come in at a base station and then climb up a few flights of stairs to the peak. I didn’t think my legs would make it to the top because I was shivering so much and out of breath due to the high altitude. I had to stop and rest several times.

But…from the top…it was a sight I’ll never forget! You can see into 3 countries from there: Switzerland, Italy, and France and there is actually an entrance into Italy from there but you have to ski over, a very popular thing with skiers coming to that area. The fog was most thick; it looked like a lot of little peaks coming up out of pea soup, when in fact the mountains you can see from there are giants compared to any you see in Georgia. We couldn’t stay long at the top because of wind and cold exposure and we had to hurry back down to catch our train back to Zürich.

The trip to Zermatt was the best of all the places I’ve been in Switzerland. I love many parts of this country but I think the people there and the scenery is the best this country has to offer…oh, I don’t know, in the warmer weather periods Ticino is the best…well, just come find out for yourself why don’t you?! Isn’t Switzerland calling your name by now?!?!

Miss you all…more posts to follow in the next few days!

LuLu