When we woke up on Day 9, the rain had not subsided. We were quite taken aback, because we had planned for a visit to Jungfraujoch. We decided to still go, since there was nothing to do in Interlaken on a wet day, anyway.
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It was quite a pleasant surprise, when our train from Interlaken pulled right into the town of Grindelwald, it started snowing! Great! I've never seen snow falling before...We bought the train tickets to Jungfraujoch and walked around Grindelwald, soaking in the Christmas atmosphere. The town is right below the imposing Eiger mountain ( but we couldn't see it due to the snowfall), and was nicknamed the 'glacier village' for its proximity to two large seas of ice.
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After an hour in Grindelwald, we boarded our train to Klein Scheidegg, where we were to change to Jungfraubahn ( Bahn = Train in German). Along the way we saw multitudes of snow-covered pine trees and small huts with smoking chimneys...i really felt like i was in the land of Rudolph and Santa Claus =) The last leg of the train journey passed through nearly 10km of a rock tunnel. This tunnel took 16 years to drill in 1912 and it overcomes a gradient of 25%, covering an altitude of 1400 m.
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Midway during the train journey, the train stopped inside Eiger and Monch to let passengers down for a 5-minute visit to the viewing platforms. It was a very very very foggy day, so no passengers went down for a look. Finally the train pulled into the sci-fi Sphinx metereological station. Wen Lee and I tried to get outdoors but the wind that day was between 70-90 km/hr...i almost flew away from Top of Europe...!
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And so, we went to buy some postcards to post home from the highest post box and highest train station in the world! WooHoo~ With that done, we visited the Ice Palace within Jungfraujoch. There were a variety of ice sculptures and it felt like being in an icecube at this place... it was minus 8 deg C in Jungfraujoch, so you can imagine how chilly i was, considering the fact that i find even air-conditioned rooms far too cold.
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Later we took the train back down, not to Grindelwald but to Lauterbrunnen instead. It wasn't snowing in Lauterbrunnen, which was lucky for us because Lauterbrunnen has countless beautiful cow pastures and stone walls. We walked along the unpretentious town, towards its famous waterfall, Staubbach Falle. I was astonished when i saw the waterfall because instead of the gushing water i saw from the travel booklet i was holding, i saw a semi-frozen waterfall. Darn.... We had our late lunch/early dinner at a small eatery in Lauterbrunnen.
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We took a train back to Interlaken, and shopped in town. We purchased some watches, and the old man at the shop talked to us. He asked where we were from, and he surprised me by saying that he comes to Singapore/Malaysia for vacations frequently and named us the places he'd been too, including Kuantan! Haha... Hearing him rattling out the names ( Lumut, Kuantan, Melaka, Penang, KL, Genting Highlands, Kota Kinabalu, Redang, Kuching and his next intended destination Langkawi), this Swiss man has officially been to more places in Malaysia than i have!!
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As usual, we got back to the hotel just after sundown, with Wen Lee enjoying her beer. Beer there was cheap and she had been meaning to get a big can and so she finally got her wish!
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