Davos, Switzerland

After taking a 4 pm train to Paris, getting on a plane to Zurich, and then getting on a train again Tim and I were in the middle of our second transfer on that train and had about an hour to kill in Landquart, Switzerland. It was 10 at night, we hadn't eaten since noon and of course all that was open was the Burger King. Now I'm not positive this was a poor life decision, because we were both very hungry, but I wouldn't generally approve of what we did next. We both ordered what was essentially a whopper meal. The problem was this was that it was 14 swiss francs. The part of me that was hungry tuned out my business major brain and just paid with my monopoly money (it's very colorful). Welcome to Switzerland, the only place where I can pay $15.50 usd for a whopper meal and not get any cheese on it.

Now that we weren't hungry anymore we took the 11pm train from Landquart and got into Davos-Wolfgang, a small town just down the road from Davos, at midnight with only an address for our apartment. We assumed we could find a hotel or bar that would tell us where to go, or at least call a cab for us. We assumed wrong, literally nothing was open. Not the bars, not the hotel. After 20 minutes of stumbling around in the dark a local bus passed, which we got on and the driver (who spoke no english, french, or spanish) took us on our way speaking swiss German to us. (Much different than normal german). After 5 minutes on the bus we pulled over and he pointed out to us where our house was. Perfect, but then he hesitated. He asked if we had the phone number for our landlord. Unfortunately we did, and after talking with the landlord and laughing in german for 10 minutes he pointed us in the other direction... So off we went down dark snowy roads until at 2 in the morning we were giving up. The garage we found earlier where apparently no one was currently staying looked really nice. And just when all hope had been lost and we ran into the street sign where our house was located. It was a miracle and neither Tim nor I are still quite sure how we ended up getting there...

The rest of our trip went something like Snowboarding, taking pictures of the Alps, more snowboarding, and snowboarding. We each spent like 25 swiss francs at the grocery store and ate like kings for the rest of the weekend (so about 2 whopper meals), doing all the cooking ourselves.

An oddity of Davos ski resort is that we never found a lodge. We found lots of restaurants and places to eat, but everywhere would kick us out if we had our own food. And you wanted your own food, the prices at the ski resort make Whistler seem like a Goodwill. Meals cost anywhere from 25 swiss francs to about 60. And this was at the place that had chicken fingers and burgers...

The skiing was awesome. Friday was sunny with lots of fresh new snow, Saturday was nice and got pretty warm and melted a little bit of the snow meaning that Sunday was nice and icy. The area of Davos was 5 different mountains of which we only went on 2.

Disclaimer: Other than the Burger King and the food on the mountain everything else was pretty comparable to the U.S. The grocery store had normal prices and lift tickets and rental gear was really comparable to any resort mountain on the west coast. Our apartment was also really cheap for 4 nights, which might just be cause we booked last minute.

Our last adventure was on Monday morning when we work up at 4 and walked over a mile to get on a train at 5 to get back to Brussels in time for class. Good for us.

Tim