The Cold Side of the Mountain...

...is the inside.

So last night, I made a new friend.  We are staying in the same room at the hostel and she offered to share her dinner with me.  Obviously, this calls for instant friendship.  I would tell you her name, but she's Korean and I can't remember how to pronounce it, or spell it for that matter.  So instead, here's a picture:

Anyway, she told me she was going to Jungfrau today and asked if I would like to join her.  So I decided it might be more fun to go to the Top of Europe and have someone to talk to all day.  (I was right by the way)

So, we left this morning around 10, heading for the train station.  The train took us as far as Lauterbrunnen, where we had to switch to a cog train.  From here on out, the view on the way up was simply stunning.  The whole trip takes about 2 1/2 hours all the way up, but it didn't seem that long at all.  Here are a few shots we took:

Here's a cog train with the mountains in the background

 And a picture of pretty much how I pictured Switzerland

 The mountain still looks huge here, although we are nowhere near the ground anymore

 I like this one because the sky is so blue and you can see for so far

 This one is a picture of a crazy biker who was going ridiculously slow (granted, I would've given up long before this)

 And another shot of us before we got to the top.

The last part of the journey was through a tunnel that went directly through the mountain and took about half an hour to pass through.  We stopped at a few observation areas, but didn't stay for long.  Then, we finally arrived at Jungfraujoch, the highest train station in Europe.  It's somewhere above 11,000 ft high, but I don't remember how high exactly.  And here was the view from there:

 Absolutely beautiful

And, of course, we had to go play in the snow a bit

Warm and snowy, it was perfect.  However, this was where we discovered that the cold side of a mountain is the inside.  You have to take a tunnel (on foot) from the station to get out to this area and the tunnel was freezing.  People would put their coats on just to go inside and walk through the tunnel.  Seriously cold.

Then, we decided to go up to the highest observation deck for a look around:

Apparently, you can see parts of Switzerland (obviously), Spain, Germany, and Italy from here, but I have no idea which one was where:

There was also this.  It says "The Jungfraujoch - Top of Europe Welcomes to Switzerland the first group from China under the "Approved Destination Status" agreement - 6 September 2004".  Kind of cool...and so recent.  By the way...those are all locks.

We had also heard tell of an Ice Palace, so we knew we had to go check that out.  We definitely were not disappointed.  Although I might have been a bit over-excited about a "palace" carved out of glacier ice:

The whole thing was really cool though (haha...bad joke).  There were ice sculptures everywhere.  I particularly liked the seals

 And of course an ice photo booth

 And a random blue ice passage

 This passage was very small, but kind of long.  Of course, after I got halfway through, I ran into somebody and had to retreat because there was no room to pass.

 And here I am again, overexcited about life.  (=

All in all, it was a wonderful day.  I love the mountains and these are some of the best in the world.  But soon enough, it was time to head back down to Interlaken:

Tomorrow I'm going canyoning with Candace, so there will likely be stories and hopefully a video.  No pictures though since my camera isn't water proof.

Until then,
KT