It was so early that even at the Lausanne station there were only a few passengers.
So long, Lausanne...we never did figure out what natives do at night. How the hell did my father spend a month and a half here??
From Lausanne we headed to a place called Zermatt. To get to Zermatt, we had to transfer at Visp. Nothing exciting there. It started to get colder as we got closer to Visp. Still a little cloudy, then as we got closer to Zermatt the sun started coming out.
I'm guessing Zermatt is like any other ski resort type places. They had a lot of two things. Souvenir shops and Asians. Yes, Asians. It seemed like 1 out of 5 people were Japanese tourists. I'm not sure why it's so popular to Asians, especially the Japanese, but I guess it's no mystery because Japanese tourists are everywhere. My friend and I were talking by the lockers trying to figure out how to use them and a Japanese girl approached us asking if we're from Japan.
We spent a couple of hours going up the main street and checking out the stores. Too many things we can't really take back...like the Swiss Army Knives, of course (we didn't check our luggage). Oh well. There was one store with a Japanese owner that kept talking to us. OK we missed being able to understand what people are saying but we didn't expect it to be in Japanese in of all places, Zermatt, Switzerland.
We checked out a few restaurants to try authentic Cheese Fondue. Yes it's only lunchtime but we didn't care. We picked one of the restaurants that were on our guidebooks. We sat down and a few minutes later, two Japanese men sat at the table next to us.
Awkward.
They just wanted to have coffee and kept complaining about the coffee, service, etc. in Osaka dialect. Where are we again?? After about 20 minutes they left.
The cheese fondue here was not as good as we hoped. I've had better here in the US. Something weird with their cheese. The bread and wine were good.
We walked some more and hopped on the train to head up to Gornergrat. That's where our hotel is. On the train, the concentration of Asians remained very high, but this time with Chinese tourist group. We were able to open windows to take pictures of the amazing Matterhorn.
We heard that some people stay for days waiting for good weather to see the Matterhorn, so we were super lucky. By this time it was completely clear.
We made our way all the way up to Gornergrat...I don't remember how long it took. It was the last stop.
This was our hotel. 2nd floor, 2nd window from the right.
Here are a few more pictures of the Matterhorn.
After we checked in, we took a little break and went back downstairs to take a look at the sunset. There was a viewing area in the back of the hotel but it was a hassle getting there. The walkway was all icy and everyone was slipping and sliding!!! I walked on the side on the rocks and snow to get up there.
The hotel only has a restaurant, cafeteria (when the restaurant is closed), and a gift shop. We had dinner at the restaurant with everyone that stayed there that night. The dinner was included and we had a choice of shrimp or duck. Kind of felt weird to pick shrimp at 3100m altitude, so I picked duck...even though duck is probably just as weird.
The dinner was nice...except for the 20 or so Asian tourist group that I mentioned earlier. We're all trying to enjoy our dinner, but they were so loud that everyone in the room stared at them hoping they'd get the message. I was really close to saying something, but...what am I going to say? I guess I should have used the universal "shhhh" now that I think about it. The woman that was sitting at the table next to us went to complain to the manager and she told the man that was standing up and talking to the group to keep it down. Whew.
After dinner...there was really nothing else to do. It was pitch black outside and the TV was mostly in German. I tried to watch James Bond in German while my friend worked on her computer. There was free WiFi at this hotel!!!
Continued to day 4...
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