Interlaken, Switzerland

Last weekend I travelled to Interlaken in Switzerland. I went with 7 other friends and had an absolute blast there. We decided on Interlaken because it was the closest city that we could travel to from Luxembourg that also had hostels for less than 30 euro! We ended up staying at the "Happy Inn Lodge" which was a really cool and friendly hostel. We arrived about midnight on Friday night due to a late train causing us to miss our connection :( Obviously, we pretty much got into our hostel and went straight to bed in our lovely bunk beds.
The girls in my group and I woke up early on Saturday morning to get some delicious Swiss breakfast. After eating a breakfast of quiche and apple cider (really good actually), we went back to our hostel. Unfortunately, it had started raining during our breakfast and was actually raining really hard on our way back to the hostel. We resigned ourselves to viewing the Alps from our hostel's window and had a pretty leisiurely morning. The rain stopped around 2 p.m. and, after eating a hearty lunch from a grocery store, half of our group went to go canyoning. Canyoning pretty much means climbing a mountain and then falling, repelling, sliding and jumping down it. If you know me at all, the whole jumping off 30-40 foot cliffs is not really my cup of tea, so myself and three others stayed back and explored Interlaken. We spent the day hiking around the city and shopping for some souvenirs (my last name is Switzer, after all!). I got my biggest purchase of the semester, a Swatch, which was very exciting (and much cheaper than the rest of Europe). We completed the day with a dinner of fondue and potatoes at our hostel's restaurant. Funny enough, we actually spent the rest of the night there, talking to some US soldiers who were visiting Switzerland as they were stationed in Italy.
The next morning we got up very early to hike "an Alp" as my friend Kristen liked to say. We hiked up the mountain, Harder Kulm and got some seriously amazing views of the city and the Alps. The hike was pretty rough as it was really steep and quite slippery with all the wet leaves on the ground. For some reason, I did not expect Interlaken, or the Alps for that matter, to have so many trees! I just pictured entirely snow covered mountains. We saw a few of those, but mostly they were all quite green! After hiking, we caught our one o'clock train home. After our 3 hour hike, I don't think I have ever appreciated a train ride more!