Hotel Staubbach


morning walk

my little japanese mum (she's really proud of her japanese-made umbrella)

wish i can do that

cows!!!! and cowbells :P

candid shot by sis

the Lauterbrunnen Valley. there are 72 waterfalls that lead to this valley. gorgeous right?

Staubbach Falls. Waterfall just outside my hotel.

this is what happens when the clouds pass by... visibility almost down to zero!

feels like a different world altogether being up there...

little doggie taking walk in snow :)

ice caves

i'm not the only taking pics obviously...

the bernese oberland

pics!! these are the train ride towards Interlaken. pretty right? Anyway, the idea is if you ever go to Switzerland for a holiday, you will be most stoooopid person if you do not plan to go to the Bernese Oberland. Forget about Luzern or Zurich or Geneva if you need to choose, the Bernese Oberland is the essence of the Scheiwz. I simply LURRRRVVVEE it. Honestly speaking, i've seen a few of the other mountainous sights in Europe, and none can compete with this place. See for yourself... but a little note: these pics can't do justice to the place at all. :)

start of trainride up to Jungfraujoch. it's a one hour scenic ride up up up on the world's highest railway... :)

Back home

I'm back! well... been home for 5-6 days already? Spent the last 2 weeks travelling with mum and sis and i guess i can say that it's been a sweet and sour thingy. I loved it.. but it was pretty stressful too (shan't elaborate). Summary of trip: The Bernese Oberland is just BREATHTAKING. I've been seeing different mountains and none can compare to these swiss alps. Paree is romantic in it's own dirty way but it's way too huge and has horrendous metro signs. I like it.. and it's a pity that i didn't get the full blow of it. but it really depends on who you go with. And i'm in LUURRRRVVVEE with London. I had a bad impression when i went there 7 years ago. but as a 20+ year old, i adore it to bits and pieces. I dunno whether it's because of my lack of exposure to English for the past couple of months, but hearing the British accent just made me excited and happy! haha! My sis and I are planning to make another trip next year in summer (when everything is on sale), really hope it comes true. Will post up my pics soon...

Many peeps have asked whether i missed my time there, the answer is no. Or perhaps, just not yet. heh. I guess i was ready to go home. Anyways, been slowly adapting back to home, it's surprisingly not as simple as i thought. It's not difficult... just that i'm fully aware of everything. I can't help noticing little changes, like my attic has become a storehouse for my sis new home, amanda was wearing a new top when i saw her on sat, the coffee mugs has disappeared from home etc etc. It's silly to expect things to be exactly the same, but somehow i do.

so far, it's been great. pretty much announced my arrival back home to most of my closed ones already. It was great seeing the whole caderas and emix on my first day back.. really miss the caderas peeps. It was an extra bonus to catch my buddy and some schoolmates there. i've cleaned up my room quite a bit, and pretty much figured out where most of my stuff are. It's amazing how i forget these little things... it's like playing a memory game for e.g. i spent the first night staring at the toothbrushes in my toilet trying to remember which one was mine (i decided to change change it anyway).

I'm not exactly on an all out "Let's meet everybody" thingy for now though. Kinda just staying home being 'back-up' for my mum cuz she's still injured and there's some family probs. Nonetheless... looking forward to meeting everybody again.

2nd last day in St Gallen

I'm beat! was supposed to be out chilling with the rest of the Asian students but i'm too tired to move. Never thought two days of exams will render me useless. lol. Spent the rest of the day packing up my room. Still not done yet cuz i'm not sure whether I'm going to stay another night in here although I'm officially 'checking out' at 1.30pm tomorrow but only leaving St Gallen the next day. Rush rush. My bag is a bit too full.. no space for shopping! die... hope my sis got space some where... and hope they brought an extra bag. If not... no chocolates for everybody!! haha..so pray with me :D

My mum and sis will be arriving in Zurich in 6 hours! Can't pick them up from there cuz i'm way tooooo tired, hopefully i will be able to wake up in time to pick them up from St Gallen! lol. Well... the after term holiday is finally here!

Poor zhimin is sick and still has one more exam tomorrow. So naughty... even though he knew he was going to get sick, he still eat up the potato chips. greeeeddddyyy!!! sigh. but cuz of that and the exams, we hardly spend time with each other. And it's really weird that after seeing each other EVERYDAY (with the exception of 3 day Paris trip by him) for almost 4 months (and pretty much almost 24 hrs a day), we won't be seeing each other for 15 days, and probably not calling each other either cuz expensive! 2 weeks was never really a problem for me, but the drastic change probably will affect me a bit. :S Bleah.

gonna sleep! 15 days to home! :)

oh gosh... my exam today was absolute CRAP. i'm sure i didn't even get a single question right considering that i have no idea what they were asking. i've never seen a worse exam set.

utopian tmr. must read 400 pages by then. lol!

eeeeyucks! dunch like studying. Thank god my papers are open book.
i dunno why, but it doesn't feel as if i have an exam tmr.
study study study!

i am growing fat from continuous consumption of SCHOKOLADE!

Last week in St Gallen

6 more days and I'll be out of St Gallen. have exams this coming Wednesday and Thursday, but have been spending my time packing my luggages and preparing for the upcoming trip instead of studying. Despite packing everything up, my room still feels like it's in a mess. I still got to find the time to clean up everything and do the troublesome admin stuff and do the usual farewell gatherings, and yet prepare for my 2 papers. kinda messy eh?

well.. really looking forward to seeing my sis and my mum this friday. They will be arriving in the morning and we got a two week holiday planned out.

6 - 11 July Switzerland (covering St Gallen, Bernese Oberland aka Swiss Alps, Luzern and Basel)
11-15 July Paris
15-19 July London
19 July Back to Zurich and hopefully get to do last minute chocolate shopping for everybody
20 July Flying back to Singapore, will arrive about 8am s'pore time on 21 July

my daddy couldn't join us cuz of work but hope he won't be too bored back home. heh.

hope everything turns out fine! *crosses fingers*

evening trip to rapperswil

Just got back from my little trip to Rapperswil to meet Wingsze. She's my secondary school tennis mate and we haven't met each other for about 3 years? haha. And it was through pure casual wall-to-wall conversations on facebook that we realised that we were both staying in the same canton in Swiss! What a coincidence! We just both wished that we found out earlier cuz we're both missing bit of good gal company over here, and had many boring weekends over here. Nevertheless, it was nice seeing her for that few hours and I enjoyed the journey lots.

i was trying to study during my journey there and back, but the countryside was just too nice to be missed. It has this very nice calming effect in the evening. It's a pity that many swiss people just take it for granted, but i suppose they grew up with it. The train ride home at night was great. ipod, darkness, quiet, moving train. I dunno how to describe the feeling... but I think its comparable to my love for nice rainy days.. maybe even better.

weather confusion

brrrr.... it's cold again.. feels like 11 degrees or something..

it's summer, but it is now colder than springtime a month back. Spring then felt like summer (about 26 degrees?), yet the beginning of spring was colder than their winter days..... europe weather is having a major confusion crisis.

i think i need a blog revamp. it's getting boring.

unifest

after seeing my friend's blog, i got little urge to club again! well i finally got permission to go clubbing without my other half, just hope i can look for pple to club with. lol!

my last clubbing session was some uni party called Unifest. It's kinda cool, where they pretty much convert the whole university into a club. It's like a zouk/mos concept i guess, one area playing the kind of music the europeans like (dunno who to categorize it. lol), one area for hip hop (which was quite empty), and my fav of them all, one area for Latin music! haha. that got me dancing all the way till 4am. Latin music still the best!! hee. Unfortunately, zm wasn't there cuz it was too expensive (25 swiss francs!) so didn't really make full use of it. but it was fun nonetheless, teaching gracia bits and pieces of salsa, bachata and merengue and seeing drunk sea and yvonne.

I was awfully surprised when the swiss guys tried picking us up, but i guess that's not really a surprise when the school population only has 17% girls? But I was still surprised, cuz we're pretty much ignored during school hours... so it was quite a contrast. Plus, these prim and proper looking 'gentlemen' tend to get either ultra friendly or pretty violent when drunk. I almost got knocked down by this tall drunk swiss guy running away from 3 security personnel. i'm quite sure i would have been flattened. :S

The night ended with us making curry with carrots and sausages! haha. we had no other ingredients and we 4 singaporeans couldn't stop thinking of prata. So that was pretty much the best we could produce. And it really feels as if we stayed out all night, cuz the sun was rising from 5am already.. maybe earlier.


arghh.. i miss phuture, i miss o bar, i miss brix... i miss salsa nights.. i miss jalan kayu prata!
someone pls go out with me when i go home! need to do some singaporean stuff! :)

everybody is growing up..

... the thought of it still scares me..

..will i grow up?

French Open

one of the perks of being in st gallen:
I got to watch the French Open over here!! *grins* I have no cable back home and tennis has ceased to be broadcast over the antennae. On the other hand, zm's apartmet got a tv and yeah! they have eurostar in dual channels. =)
Nadal won the finals today and seriously! he can run like crazy! I'm utterly impressed by his play.. just that he doesn't really have a charming character. So though i idolize play, I don't really feel inclined to support him :S Either that, or maybe i'm now in the Schweiz so I'm obligated to support Federer? heh

Anyway, it was kinda cool watching the match today. My sis also got to catch glimpses of it cuz she's working in China again and she could watch it at her hotel (in mandarin though). We were sort of discussing it over msn. lol. Talk about interesting circumstances! =)

project presentation tmr. this canadian girl did the slides and i absolutely hate it. I can't believe she said that she always does the slides back home. well.. gotta rehearse cuz bf says i suck. so yup :( till another time!

going through several blogs... and it's funny how the other exchange students are preparing to go home and are already back. all talking about last days being there....

... and i will be here for one more month, getting ready for the only peak season for this semester. not that i'm complaining.. but st gallen just moves at a totally different pace. tsk tsk. typical swiss. :P

But I think that like the others, I will miss this place when I go back home. Even now, I begin to realise that soon I will stop seeing kebab stalls, or rostis or bratwursts. :S And surprising as it sounds, I'm gonna miss walking up that crazy hill to school.. see the little kids play or sell flowers to the passerbys, hearing the birds chirp throughout the walk, and definitely the nice quiet and cool breeze. It's really different living here.

But this doesn't mean that my massive craving for Jalan Kayu roti prata and stopped, and i will only be able to eat it 1 month and 12 days from now!!

That aside, Siying and some of the Lund exchange students will be staying over one night. I'm not sure how the 6 of them are going to fit into the apartments, but hope it will turn out fine. I just wish I knew more about their plans and stuff cuz i haven't had much contact with ying. I am probably wrong, but somehow it just feels that they are not here to visit us, but just looking for lodging. :S Just hope it will be fun.. kinda getting lonely here.

Family

Random points...

my sis's wedding is coming soon, and the self-claimed wedding planner here ain't there to help out at all. lol. It kinda used to be my dream to be a wedding planner.. it must be nice to have a job that sees happy people all the time right? That aside, my sis put up some of her photoshoot pics on her blog, and she looks soooooo pretty! She always complains that she doesn't look good in dresses, but how wrong can it get when she has big dolly eyes to go with it? *hee*

Btw sis, you look great in the 'kua' too, glad we didn't choose to miss that out :) I'm looking forward to going back home to see your wedding album. And we have to spend more bonding time together before you move out! p.s. can i say that i'm glad that you are only moving to kovan and no longer to somewhere in the east? Easier for me to disturb you for supper ;P

Recently, i realised that I've grown to look like my mum. scary. Not that it's a bad bad thing, but still.. I don't want to know how i look like when i grow old yet :P And also perhaps, I never thought I would look like my parents. Weird as it sounds, but I just assumed that i am just a fusion of my parents genes and never really sided either? It really dawned onto me how much i reflect my mum when i saw this pic, taken at the airport b4 i left for switz. What ya think?

Anyway, happy belated belated birthday to myself. It has been a while since i only celebrated my birthday only once in a year. feels weird.. perhaps a little lonely :S At least i still managed to blow a candle! :)

my st gallen life

i realised that lazy me haven't blogged much about my life at st gallen, so here's a pic of my apartment. I have 4 other apartment mates and we're not exactly very close. More social talk than anything else. I hate it when they don't clean up the kitchen after they eat and makes the whole apartment smell of food. i barely do much here now except hide in my room to do work or sleep. Other than that, I'm with the rest at zhimin's and ian's apartment... doing our work, chilling and cooking over there. It seems to be the girls' hideout in general.


As for food, the group of us have been cooking everyday. soup, congee, pastas, rosti, variations of potatos. i made shephard's pie and panfried ham and cheese sandwich the other day! In general, the girls and more hardworking than zhimin and i. we have simple quick fix meals... we can make a meal in half hour if need be! :) Anyway, just some pics of our earlier products. I know it doesn't look that appetizing but it satisfies me :)
p.s. did you know that bratwurst sausages originated from St. Gallen? :P

Anyway, i have about 8 weeks more here and i haven't been using my secret stash of food much. haha. I still have so much local food left! so i'll be busying trying to clear all my instant noodles and instant rice and sardines and bakuteh packets the next couple of weeks!

uob mini card hoo ha

I was skyping with my parents the other day and my mum told me that she has just received my UOB mini card bill and that i had a bill of about 500 francs.

i was thinking "what?!! i haven't even used my mini card to buy anything! and why would i be crazy enough to buy something so ex?"

the only time i tried to buy something with my mini card was 10Euros of skype credits. which i accidentally billed it to zhimin cuz for some wierdo reason, i was holding his card and he was holding mine! (don't ask us how that happened) And he kept teasing me about it and insists that he should tax me on it.

(wait a minute... exchange of cards...500franc on a mini card.. sounds tooooo familiar)
"Mum, is it 545francs in Zurich?"
She gave me a positive answer.

(!!!!!) Mr Leong Zhi Min used MY card to buy his CHF 545 Tissot Watch! *growls*
shouldn't it be HIS job to buy me a 500 dollar watch?

Obviously, my parents response to this was along the lines of "how can you be so careless" etc etc., and it ended with "why my daughter so stupid one, seem to get the worse end of the bargain".


sigh.

bye bye ipod nano

I lost my ipod nano. that f-ing sucks. i dunno why it happened, cuz i consciously kept it.
it's not fair.
it doesn't even have a scratch on it.
it just ain't fair.

If anybody in singapore wanna lose weight, spend a month in switzerland. Food here is sooo expensive that I think all the singaporeans here are losing weight. Zhimin shrank a lot and lost all the fat he gained from internship and more :S ... I'm happily spending my time eating chocolate, milk and cheese and not have to worry about growing fat. gee. tt's a new feeling.

Anyways, i'm supposed to be doing my readings for tmr's class, Utopian Practice. I'm clearing it as GE Arts and it's kinda cool. And i'm glad i just have to worry about a pass/fail grade. It's kinda weird just going into my 3rd week of school here and everybody back home has either finished their exams or having them. (with the exception of modified term students like Amanda. hee)

I wish I can go for Dance Camp too. Really miss dance. Plus they are having workshops.... classes that i've always wanted to give a shot. oh well, you gain some and lose some.

back to my readings!

Switzerland Easter Trip

Last weekend, I went travelling around switzerland during the Easter break with Zhimin and Rox. Though most of the time the shops were closed, we still managed to see quite a bit of stuff :)

voted my fav place for this trip. The old town is really beautiful and brings one back in time. Zhimin and I managed to find a Salsa club which had a nice rough feel, the down point is that we went too late. We heard about 4 salsa songs and then the music changed to hip hop. Well.. at least we heard something. (boy am i deprived!) Shopping is alright, the church was gorgeous (we went back 3 times and different times of the day), and the bears were adorable. It is believed that Bern was named after the bears.

From Bern, we went to the French side of Switzerland. Everybody speaks French and the pple here are also more snobbish than the German side in general...

The three of us all didn't really like Lausanne. There wasn't much to offer and the town seem to lack urban planning. Luckily, the Chateau de Chillon (about 40mins away from Lausanne) saved the day. It was gorgeous. Very organised tourist site too.

Ticino - the Italian Switzerland

Spring is here!