Day 7-9 Couchsurfing Paella weekend!

This weekend has been spent in the good company of many seasoned couchsurfers. It was a Paella-party “@ Vince place in Gossau (Switzerland). We had so much fun with everything from going to an adventure bathing house, Free hugs events in St. Gallen, LOTS of massage (yea, those who know me are probably not too surprised on that one 😉 and most of all SO many super-interesting wonderful people to interact with, I have made many new friends the last couple of days!

Ok… some pictures to show what I am talking about 😛 This first one is from our car-trip to the bathing-house. The guy in the middle (Ulf) was hosting me in his tent during the weekend.

People chilling in the grass in the afternoon.

The big Paella. The guy leaning in on the one in the back is Vince who arranged the whole party together with his fiancé Annie

Vince and Anni kissing. (They ARE getting married this fall :-P)

Me and some nice couchsurfing girls

Rachel doing her “sad dragon face”. (‘She is a globally responsible for safety and member disputes… a VERY empathic and nice lady!)

Some CS:ers singing a song the wrote to Vince and Anni (in the yellow hats)

The happy cheer once the Mohito was made exactly as it was supposed to be… (One guy was the master at making it and everyone took it VERY seriously… they made about 60 liters or so….)

Someone had brought glow in the dark sticks… LOTS of them 😀

People sitting in a chain giving each other massage

Ulf trying an alternative way to use a condom…

Me lifting up Klara (I am going to visit her next weekend in Holland)

The CUQ-team (the guys who answer questions when people want to know something on the homepage)

The member dispute team… Rachel who is leading the team said “do something inappropriate to me” so they did 😉

A very cool church in St. Gallen

Me on the Free Hugs event. (you go around and give strangers free hugs :-P)

Me and Chris fooling around…

It is more fun to eat cake if someone else feeds you 😛

Day 6 Doing some real mountain hiking in the Swizz alps

Today was a quite adventurous day… we decided to try some hiking and our wonderful host offered to drive us to a trail that tourists usually never find… now I know why 🙂

It was a quite challenging trail as you will see from the pictures below… and it wasn’t until we reached the top we realized that the trail was actually closed down because it was deemed to be way to dangerous to use (since June 2009). Good that we didn’t know that beforehand because it was a quite cool experience… (even though it was a bit scary sometimes when you where skidding around on a small path with a steep fall on one side…)

This is a picture of Pilatus, the mountain we went up… we actually managed to get all the way to the top… (starting at 1200 meter climbing to 2300 meter)

Ok, this is the view from the mountain 🙂

This is to show how it was to pass some of the parts of the mountain 🙂

Walking up the mountain…

Me surfing a rock… with a pretty nice view behind 🙂

Åsa climbing up the mountainside… (eh, actually she was preparing her camera for a group photo) 🙂

The result of Åsa’s climbing 🙂

Looks almost like a fairy-tale land… we had some VERY beautiful views…

We actually walked up to that little church to the right… and then all the way to the top on the mountain to the left 🙂

After the church the fog started to become thicker… this was one of the last pictures we could see something… after that the visibility was about 4-5 meters. (The fog came within a few seconds and with the wind it became VERY cold!)

Just arrived to the top… and found all the warning signs about that the path was sealed off….

A bit more of the signs…

At the top the fog cleared out after a while (and it disappeared as fast as it came… within a few seconds we had a miles-wide view again!)

Me and Åsa riding a dinosaur 🙂

You can see a part of the path that we where walking on below

I got quite cold from all the wind and walking… so a group hug was definitely welcome 🙂

Me and the cows… (the path went through their pasture) We also saw lots of mountain goats…

Åsa wanted to pet one of the cows…

Day 6 exploring Luzern

Quick update on a few things we saw in the city of Luzern, they have an old medieval wall and some cool bridges to see…

Posing in front of the bridge

View of Luzern from a wall tower 

Walking down inside the wall tower.

We found some cows… but they didn’t quite seem to interested in us… even though we offered them nice grass…

Day 5 Scenic route traveling

Not so many pictures today… we where mainly in a train and well… it didn’t quite make sense to take that many pictures through the windows…

In the evening I found a wonderful host in Luzern. We connected directly and since it turned out to be his birthday we went out with one of his room-mates to a nice pub in the evening. Stayed and talked for quite some time about everything from politics to hiking, great fun!

Ah, the first picture is actually from the day before… we went to the French/Swiss boarder and took some photos (it was within walking-distance from our host in Geneva).

Ok, now I am going to terrorize you with some pictures from the train, below is from a waterfall that we saw through the window… (The white thingy there in the middle.)

This is the city of Montreux, which we only say quickly from the train.

Some more nice veiws from the train…

Day 4 – Exploring Geneva and meeting old friends…

Hi all!

Today we did some touring around in Geneva, everything from playing chess in a big park, surfing the longest park-bench in the world, seeing former colleagues from P&G doing garbage collection, bathing in the Geneva Jet d’Eau and trying out Raclette (melted cheese on jacked potatoes) for dinner.

Playing a game of chess with Daniel… I won 😉

Surfing the longest park-bench in the world

The three musketeers rides again!

Meeting Peter Roessler outside a church… apparently I left P&G just in time… I saw several hundred P&G:ers picking garbage from the streets today… well that’s what happens when you come up short on targets I guess 😉

The Swiss like making watches out of everything so why not flowers right?

Daniel thought an umbrella might be a good idea when passing the Jet d’Eau…

Me in front of the Jet d’Eau… you can’t see it but I am actually soaking wet J

Me hanging on the border between Switzerland and France… I even managed to be at two places at once (stand with on foot on each side of the boarder)

Hanging by the UN headquarters in Geneva…

Day 3 – a big travel day

Hi guys,

For you that have my e-mail updates: sorry for the strange messages lately, I have just installed a new blog-updater so that I can update the blog offline…

This is Monday: and today was a big travel day, starting in Zurich in the morning we covered Bern, Lausanne, a short stop in France during a boat trip, and then finally arriving in Geneva in the evening.

The parliament in Bern

The Swizz national bank, sort of the bank of banks 😀

The view from the parliament was quite amazing!

We stopped to watch a clock that struck once an hour… but I found it more fun to watch all the Asians who where gathering in Bern to watch it rather than the watch itself 😀

Lausanne, which is a quite small city, still had its own subway system… and a very neatly kept one!

Posing by the water… can you tell we are on vacation?

The steam-boat that took us on a 4 hour trip on the Geneva lake.

Some pics on the actual wheel that propelled the ship

The engine room… very neatly kept!

And I managed to add a small movie 🙂

A short visit to France during the boat trip… observe the flags behind us!

Me posing in front of the Geneva water-fountain-thingy…

Our host in Geneva to the right and an intern that was staying with her to the left. Really cool place with LOTS of animals. I think she had 11 dogs, a cat, several hens, rabbits, guinea-pigs, ducks and so on… quite cool to have 11 dogs jumping around you when you eat… some of them where just sooo cuddly and cute!

Doing Zurich and a LOT of travelling

Hi again guys, During Sunday we went around in Zurich and had a quite nice day…

We started the day by eating breakfast on the roof with our host, beautiful view over the city! Had a few fun adventures, heard a Swizz group performing finish sonngs, posing with mamuts and other stuff 🙂

At the train-station we found the following poster… for those understanding Swedish you can probably appreciate the humor 🙂

We then went to this museum…

Where I got to pose with this dude…

Then we happened on a german group (still in the museum) that sang a Finish song I think a few of you have heard… 😉

(ok, I’ll get back with this one when I have found a good way to publish videos 🙂

Ok… if you have a river… why not make it into a water-polo field 🙂

The day ended with us chilling in Hannes appartment with his flatmate Eva (who is also on couchsurfing…)

Arrived in Zurich

I have now finally started my trip… and yepp… after some threats of hating me if I didn’t by a camera to document the trip (you know who you are 😉 There is now a new small camera in my pocket 🙂

Me, Magnus S. Daniel at the Zurich trainstation… don’t you like my new backpack 🙂

A memorial we found of Michael Jacksson… apparently quite popular in Zurich…

we found a Transformer outside a toystore… of course I needed to pose with him 😀

We went to a LOT of churches… this one was quite cool because the tower was so thin!

Of course you will find the largest clock in Europe on a church in Switzerland….

We found some nice swans at the lake… do you wonder why all of them came to us?

Yea… here you have the answer 🙂

How can you turn around a stone that weights 1 kg… well… with some water Daniel can be superman!

This was built as a tribute to the world exibition in 1963 in Lausanne, they start it twice aday (it can actually turn around :-D)

Magnus found a tree with cherries and immediately climbed over the fence to provide some for us 🙂

That was all for the day-update… tonight we are having a barbecue on an island… the only thing is that we need to swim to get there… and I am not really allowed to bathe… we will solve it somehow but I probably wont be able to bring the camera…

Vienna Calling

I had a great time in Vienna meeting people like Casey Fenton (founder of CS) Tripple T, Gadget and lots of other “celebrities” in CS. I also made a lot of new friends and found a new wonderful city.

The Friday was mainly spent with the ambassadors forum for CS, listening and learning on how the organization works, what the future plans are and what the main goals are currently. I was definitely impressed with how professional the lead team of CS is!
In the evening we had a big party, they had booked a whole club only for CS, I heard rumors that we where 700 people there… and another 300 in cue just to get in, crazy!

During Saturday I was chilling with my host during most of the day, Anna was just a wonderful person and we had so much to talk about. I the evening I met up with the CS crowd and we went to this nice little restaurant “12 Apostelkeller” where we had a “real” Austrian dinner with lots of pork and sauerkraut… interesting but almost a bit too salty for my taste. During the night we had a tour of the city monuments… was quite cool to go and see everything at midnight… the monuments where lit up by lights and our guide was very knowledgeable… fun!

On Sunday there was a CS barbecue and I went swimming in Danube… cold but not too bad… warm up for the canoeing trip in August :D.
Monday was vegan day for me… no meet in sight for the whole day… and Tuesday… well we that lead to a hospital visit as you could see in my last post :-S

I could also mention the catacombs under the cathedral in Vienna… they actually give tours showing the tourists bones from old skeletons there… not quite sure how tasteful that really is but I guess it does give a nice revenue to the church coffers…