I would write this post in German, except that I feel a little bit rusty at the moment. I have admittedly been getting a bit of practice in this week, but I still find it shocking how much of a language it is possible to forget once you don’t use it for a period of months. I know that all my German knowledge has not seeped out of my brain, that it is in fact just resting in a dark recess somewhere, but it is requiring conscious effort to pull it back out to the front again. So many words are getting stuck on the tip of my tongue

Munich is probably the most expensive city in Germany but also the most beautiful and exciting, and I am determined to drag Babel there one day soon, although preferably in the summer. I am going there with my family tomorrow for a mad Christmas market visit, and am very excited A full blog report on exactly how much delicious German food I managed to cram into one weekend will follow at some point next week, but not Monday because I’m seeing Babel for his birthday. (more…)

Babel and I had a nice time at the weekend when, it being rather wintry outside, we decided to go to the cinema. I don’t think I’d been to the cinema since I saw Cloverfield earlier in the year - that film being so bad that I was rather wary of suggesting we see anything else. But Tim had the idea that we could see the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, and I thought that sounded like a plan, because there’s a limit to how bad a James Bond film can be (more…)

I’ve just had one of the most enjoyable weekends I’ve had in a long while It started (too!) early on Saturday morning, when Babel arrived to collect me with a car-full of Esperantists. It is a firmly held belief of mine that one should not get up before half ten at a weekend unless there is an exceptional circumstance, and I was unsure as to whether this qualified as one We were headed to Worcester, where we were holding the latest JEBmeet-up. I don’t know Worcester terribly well, and so had decided to be prepared by emailing Babel a selection of maps for printing. Sadly, I emailed them to his work address, under the mistaken impression that he was working on Friday evening, or else I made a stupid typo, because he never received them, and so finding our way to the agreed meeting point became more traumatic than I had hoped (more…)

Yesterday was one of the most exciting and nervewracking days I have had for a long time. We have a social club at work which forcibly deducts £2 from our salary each month, then usually squanders it on copious amounts of alcohol at the Christmas party. This year, however, they decided to do something more inclusive, and offered us the chance to buy tickets for Drayton Manor at the highly subsidised price of £10. I hadn’t been to Drayton Manor for a good ten years, so it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, and I decided to bring my boyfriend and my sister along to hold my hand, because I’m not normally a very adventurous sort of person. (more…)

I was relieved to wake up on Thursday morning and find I didn’t feel ill, and Thursday turned out to be an absolutely fantastic day, despite the fact that it was raining far too heavily when we got up to even contemplate going for a walk.  Normally when the weather is appalling on holiday we resort to catching a bus somewhere, and we decided to try out this familiar plan in Grindelwald too.  Because of its geographical location at the end of a valley, long distance bus routes from Grindelwald are a bit limited, and in fact there is only one place you can catch a bus to:  Meiringen.  So, erm, to Meiringen we went (more…)

The weather on Wednesday wasn’t as bad as the forecast had led us to believe, and so we decided to go back up the First cable car again. This time we wanted to walk along the opposite side of the valley, with the aim of attaining a place called Bussalp. Bussalp is a popular destination for tobogganing in the winter, although the main thing it has to recommend it in summer is that it is lucky enough to have a bus-stop. Logic tells me that this fact cannot have anything to do with the fact that it is called Bussalp, but most of me would rather believe that it did. (more…)

The next few days, we decided to take things a little slower. It wasn’t entirely straight forward to extract my parents from their beds on Sunday morning, and it must have been 11am before we left the apartment. We headed in the direction of the Pfingsteggbahn, a small cable car which we could actually see from our kitchen window. This departed from a station just down the road, and ascended a short distance to a little ledge on the opposite side of the valley. It was rather an old-fashioned sort of cable car (Swiss old-fashioned = small) and the way we were all crammed in like sardines meant there wasn’t really much of a view. (more…)

On Friday evening I gave my parents a stern talking to, and we all agreed that we were going to make a special effort to get out early on Saturday morning. We were planning to make the most exciting excursion in the entire Bernese Oberland; a journey on the Jungfraujoch railway to 3454m. If the mention of that altitude doesn’t impress you, imagine three Snowdons on top of each other, and you’re not quite there yet (more…)

Our aim for Friday was to get to Muerren, a tiny car-free village which perches on a rocky outcrop on the far side of the Lauterbrunnen valley. It is car-free not due to any particular environmental sentiments, but simply because it is scarcely reachable by road. The sides of the valley are literally so sheer that the only real public access is by cable car! Since Grindelwald lies in the neighbouring valley, the most straight forward way of reaching Muerren would simply have been to take a train to Zweiluetschinnen, catch another train to Lauterbrunnen, and then ride up in the afore-mentioned cable car. Because, however, we were in possession of super-duper train passes, we decided to do something a little different (more…)

We had a slow start to Thursday due to my mother complaining of various ailments, but eventually we all succeeded in boarding a train in the direction of Wilderswil. Wilderswil is the small town which lies on the railway line between Interlaken and Zweiluetschinnen, and as far as I was aware it had nothing to recommend it. In fact, all I have ever thought about it is that it would be a dreadful destination for a skiing holiday, because all the trains carrying people to the slopes fill up at Interlaken Ost, with the result that there is hardly any space on them at all for those holiday-makers who are saving money by staying in the lesser-known Wilderswil. In summer, however, Wilderswil is the starting station for the ancient funicular railway which, in a journey of around 50 minutes, ascends 1300m until it reaches the Schynige Platte at 1967m. (more…)