Switzerland has always been famous for chocolate, its snowy mountains (I thought as a kid the snow on the mountains was actually icing sugar) and most of all, how painfully expensive it is. I wasn’t planning on visiting Switzerland until I had escaped from the student budget but an opportunity arose when a friend of mine asked me to visit her for the weekend. And naturally, being a cheapskate, I said yes.
My friend lives in the German speaking part of Switzerland and when I actually saw her she gave me a rough idea of what the weekend would involve; cuddling her pet rats and her “showing me around”. When she said the latter, I assumed that she would just show me around the city she lived in (which is Basel and it is beautiful). Instead, she took me on a six hour train ride across the country and it was hands down the prettiest train journey I’ve been on. I was fully fangirling over the lakes and the mountains we rushed passed and it gobsmacked me at how there were kids who were glued to their phones. We went past black-blue rivers at the bottom of cliffs and rocky crevices which had their waterfalls frozen to the point they looked like glitter (as well as a great slide to go down).
Towards the end of the journey we ended up at St Moritz, which is a ski resort near the Italian border and I think is famous for holding winter Olympic events. It was a tiny place, but the scenery was beautiful and all around the actual resort were snowy mountains or pine trees. My friend dragged me into a bakery and brought me a Nusstorte (a tart with caramelized walnuts mixed with heavy cream and it is amazing). The only downside to that place was that it was eyewateringly expensive (to put things into perspective a meal for 3 people who ordered pasta and hot chocolate cost more than my Swarovski ring). After getting into a nearly physical fight about who was going to pay the bill, we left the restaurant, walked around the resort a bit more and got the next train back home.
If I was to review the country in numbers, it’d be 10/10 for scenery and 2/10 for how expensive it was.