Day 54: Into the Alps

A single afternoon in Lucerne and I'm already a bit smitten. After travelling for much of the day, plagued by little things going wrong thatjust added unnecessary stress, I had planned to check into my hostel, take go for a short walk and then take it easy for the evening. Once I got walking and enjoying the scenery and the town I just didn't have much desire in going back for quite awhile, so I ended up covering just about the entire city center and following one shore of the lake until it reached dense forest. It's late and I don't want this to be too long, so I'm not going to bother with explanations right now (if people really want details let me know and I can add them later), but here's some pictures to give an idea of what town's like.

The best part is that I haven't even gotten to the fun bits yet. With the 3 full days I have left my original plan was doing something naturey the easy way, doing something naturey the hard way, and spending a day checking out the city. Now that I've basically done the city part already I might squeeze in even more nature time. As for what "the easy way" and "the hard way" mean, stay tuned. Looking at those first two pictures though, I'm sure people that know me well have a good idea.

My only complaint - and it is a significant one - is that everything is ridiculously expensive here. A swiss franc is very close in value to a canadian dollar, yet food here is marked up 50-100% over what I've paid anywhere else so far. Pretty much impossible to get any decent meal for under 15 franc, and even food at the grocery store is pretty outrageous. I'm only in Switzerland for 4 days, so it's not a huge issue. The currency in general is pretty awesome. All the Americans that think our money is too colourful and looks like monopoly money have obviously never been to Switzerland. They also have the equivelant of a $5 coin that is massive in size and weight, and could probably be used as a deadly weapon.

On an aside, the visas for Asia are still killing me. It's looking like I'm going to have to cancel flights I have booked already, spend a bunch of extra money to fly somewhere extra to get visas done, and just generally make a chaotic mess of all the plans I had made. If I do go through all that and still have trouble getting the visas I'll really be upset, because then the tours I'm booking at considerable expense will be in jeopardy, and the entire Asia part of my trip could basically be ruined. Ugh. Nothing I can really do at this point but plan to give myself the best possible chance of getting everything I need in time and going from there.