Mobbs' Memoirs 2: Epic Switzerland

Even to this day, I consider Switzerland to be my second favourite place in terms of beauty, Nepal taking the number 1 spot. Switzerland has incredible housing architecture, beautiful mountains, clean modern streets and so on.

Some years ago My sister, her friend and myself decided to go on a road trip from England and across Europe on a massive budget in a rickety old car. What could go wrong? Well a lot, but I'm not going to talk about those in this post.

We drove down to the bottom right of England and launched the car onto a boat which, unbeknownst to the captain, allowed us to cross the European border without the hassle of the hefty visa regulati - oh wait, that's the future. Either way, we got on the boat and entered via the Netherlands I think. At first my sister was panic-stricken by the roads being all reversed, and with her friend shouting at how easy it was all the time, it was pretty fun in general to watch from the back seat. I'm pretty sure at one point she went round a roundabout the wrong way.

It was almost a non-stop drive to our first stop, though we did stop to sit on this bench:

We also stopped at a ludicrously-priced McDonald's, which cost me about 7 Chinese McDonald's for a burger. There were some great sights as far as I'm concerned, like this dog:

So anyway, we arrived at this ski resort lodging place up a mountain which might have been on the French side of the border I can't remember but it counts as Switzerland for today. It was nice enough that we decided to stay there pretty much the whole time instead of moving about.

It was within a forested area which was also beautiful and great for exploring.

One night we went in there to look around and got totally lost in the darkness with little streams and a cool looking salamander.

When we went into Proper Switzerland ie; crossing the border, it was so, so majestic yet wonderfully quaint at the same time.

However, we suddenly ran out of money but kept enough spirit to go see Chillon Castle in Montreux. This had amazing views, birds that weren't scared to chill out on your arm or hand, and castle toilets that are just a 200 feet drop into the beautiful blue lake.

_{There was a lot of interesting and fascinating stuff in the castle, which itself was brilliantly maintained and realistic}

We also decided to drive as high as possible, which turned out to be really damn high. On the way there we went through some of the most quintessential Swiss towns with beehive houses, almost fake grass with sun-yellow fields, icy mountain tops and so on. And for some reason a military patrol.

Further up we got to the peak, as you can see... Amazing! You could see the whole of Geneva lake pretty much, including the giant fountain we walked by earlier! I wanted to wait around to get some awesome sunset shots but I was outvoted, so I only got great sunset shots.

Every house was uniquely designed that we passed.

We went to a supermarket by more water which had a Freddie Mercury statue - not interesting, but it just looks great compared to what I'm used to here in Shanghai. They even had digital price counters on every single item. In fact, I noticed a lot of weird stuff I'd never seen before in this supermarket:

Most importantly, and perhaps most disappointingly, we went to CERN, the European Organisation of Nuclear Research. It was wonderful because we got to go to this museum thing and whatnot, but disappointing because it turned out interrupting scientists busy at work in the depths of the Large Hadron Collider, was not a thing we could do at that time. Still, a fun experience.

After a bunch more stuff we moved on to France, which you can clearly see here.

There was also a cow with an actual cowbell around its neck. We followed the sound from a mile away thinking it was an amazing church somewhere. Oh France.

Then we moved on to Germany, but with our money magically disappearing, the holiday was cut rather short. I have every intention of going back one day and doing everything right!

Thanks for reading!