Where Am I??

Time for a combo blog posting & "Where in the World is Ross?"

When we last left off, your hero, Ross, was getting ready to go canyoning in the treacherous waters in Interlaken. What Ross didn't know was that he'd be doing 3+ hours of canyon jumps & rock slides with a killer hangover. That's what happens when the hostel bar changes happy hour from "1 hour of 2 for 1 beers" to "3 hours of $5 (Swiss Franks actually) jack & cokes."

Ok enough of talking in the 3rd person. Canyoning was incredible, like nothing I've ever done. If you watched that youtube video from my last post, it was exactly like that. The only difference being that I did far less flips into the water than they did. (Quick side note: I'm following the Sox on espn.com, and I just nearly threw up when I saw Papelbon has 2 guys on with 2 outs in the 9th with the Sox leading 6-4 in game 3...so I guess after 4 weeks of not seeing them, I still care about Boston teams.)

I do have a couple pictures of the Canyoning experience, but they were put on a CD by the professional photographer & my dinky ass computer doesn't have a CD drive. I will have to wait until I can upload them on a random hostel computer, and then be able to share them with you all. (Oh and now it's 6-5 Sox with Papelbon letting up a double. Why am I even watching this?)

There were some points on the Canyoning adventure where precision was important. For instance, our guide gave us this little gem of info before the 2nd or 3rd jump we did: "Ok guys, on this one you definitely don't want to hesitate. You need to jump out as far as you can towards that giant rock, and at the last second, you need to turn your body one-quarter to the left so your back is up against the rock. Then you just let the rock guide you down into the pool of water. If you don't do that, you're gonna hit a shallow spot & maybe break something."

(I would comment further, but Papelbon just blew the game & series for the Sox so I'm gonna order another bottle of wine from the hostel bar & think happy thoughts about guys falling over on Segways.)

Shit, now I'm depressed. While I'm thinking negative thoughts, let me tell you about the first really really bad experience I had with the trains yesterday (Saturday). My plan was to hop on a train in Interlaken at 7:30AM to head to my next destination. I would have to take 4 trains to get to this destination, but it all looked good for me to get there by 11:30AM. So about 4 hours total of traveling. No big deal.

Unfortunately train #2 decided not to cooperate & got me to the station 15 minutes after train #3 departed. Therefore I was stuck in some really small town where not even the train station employees spoke English trying to figure out how to recover from this. One of the workers seemed like he was telling me the 10:17 train would be the next to get me to my next stop (the original one was for 9:17 so not that bad). Good advice except that train was full. I now had to wait another 2 hours, 40 minutes. I finally got on train #3 at 12:55, about 1 hour 10 minutes after I was supposed to be done with the trains.

I got to the next station in time to take a 3:10 train to my final destination, except again it was full. Had to wait another hour, getting me to my final stop at 5PM. So yeah, long day of travel that was highly unexpected.

One fun moment came on my final train. I was sitting next to a guy who claimed to "love guessing where people are from." (Personally I think that's a dangerous game given my lack of intelligence about foreigners.) He knew I was from America, but guessed that I had "Egyptian ancestry." His reason: I apparently look like Pete Sampras, and HE has Egyptian ancestry.

With that, reason #47 on how I know my hair is getting too long: people think I look like Pete fucking Sampras.

Finally, here are some pics of where I am right now. Please feel free to submit a guess. It can only help cheer me up from the Sox playing this series as if they were going for the better draft pick next year.

(By the way...the pictures on the boat, please pay close attention to what the majority of people are wearing for clothing & what I'm wearing. And then feel free to guess who royally screwed up the "weather to appropriate clothing ratio.")