Allison's Working for WHO?: Grindelwald and Jungfraujoch

After a great reshuffling of offices at work, I had my own office complete with name on the door (which you can almost make out in the picture below) for about a day last week. Then they realized that another intern was coming in the office this month and so my supervisor Raymond asked for me to share his office so he didn't have to share with a new intern. But I took some work pictures before that happened so I can sort of look official:

Now on to the next weekend travel adventure. This weekend we actually headed back to the Jungfrau region where Interlaken is, but this time stayed in nearby Grindelwald. Jill and I woke up incredibly early so that we could make a 6:45am train to Grindelwald on Saturday so we could arrive and still have a full day of hiking. We got to Grindelwald around 10:00am:

We went to check into our hostel, Naturfreundehaus, first --- unfortunately we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up climbing the world's steepest hill, but when we got there, the place was pretty much adorable:

The room was very cute (and we got one to ourselves) and the couple who run the place were very sweet --- the wife not only gave us the correct directions to walk to the hostel next time (and how to take the bus, which is what we ended up doing that evening) but also offered to make me a GF risotto for dinner in the evening even though she was making spaghetti bolognese as the entree.

This sign probably wouldn't have been any help getting to the hostel, but at least there's a sign pointing to literally everywhere in Grindelwald outside the hostel...

After dropping off our stuff, we headed back down to Grindelwald for lunch. Here's the view from downtown Grindelwald:

Not bad at all. After lunch, we took the gondola from Grindelwald to a town called First. Here's another map to orient you:

As you can see, we took a gondola from Grindelwald (1034 m/3393 ft) to First (2168 m/7113 ft), and then from First we took the "First Flyer" back down to Shreckfeld. The First Flyer was essentially a downward-sloping zipline (you sit in a chair for this one) --- the line was a bit long but the experience was fantastic! About 45 seconds long, but I'm glad we did it! Here are pictures of the gondola line and you can sort of make out the zipline route from our platform up in First down to the platform at Schreckfeld in the last picture:

From Schreckfeld, we hiked all the way back to Grindelwald. The downward slope was a bit steep at times, so it was quite a work out on the calves. But the weather was incredible!! We really lucked out with another beautiful hiking day. Amazing views of the mountains all along the way:

And we even had time to stop at play at the park:

Okay, not really --- I just felt like taking that picture. After stopping in Grindelwald for ice cream when we got back from the hike, we took the bus back to Naturfreundehaus for dinner --- GF salad and risotto:

Then it was off to bed since we had another early start the next day. This morning, we woke up early enough to walk back down the hill to the train station to catch a 7:47am train through Kleine Scheidegg all the way to Jungfraujoch --- the highest point (3,454 m/11, 333 ft) you can reach by public transportation in Europe and the ridge below the Jungfrau mountain, known as the Top of Europe since it is the highest point in Europe at 4,158 m/13,642 ft. Here's the route:

Unfortunately, the weather didn't agree with us today so it was a bit rainy on the way up and snowy/windy at the top, but that didn't stop us from being overly excited the entire train ride up and leaping out of the train each time they stopped at a different vista for 5 minutes to let us "see the view" and take pictures. Here's Jill and I with our Jungfraubahn train:

So instead of the views from the lookout points, you can just see how I advanced to higher and higher altitudes:

At Jungfraujoch, there were several exhibits including the Sphinx Observatory (above) and the Eispalast, or Ice Palace, which really was made out entirely of ice:

And there were ice sculptures:

And ice windows:

And I made sure to do my part to keep the ice ceiling from falling down:

But by far the craziest thing we did was go out on the Plateau --- we actually went outside on Jungfraujoch at approximately 11,333 feet in the freezing wind and biting snow. I am including all of the pictures just so you can see how ridiculous it was:

This is me freaking out about the fact that I just went outside in weather like that (and the fact that my face was completely exfoliated by the snow being whipped at it):