Crouching cograil hidden Chachi

Early mornings... are not pleasant. Especially when you have to get up to do dishes for the breakfast rush. Now I'm not complaining about the actual work. We get to eat before everyone else and it isn't so much cleaning dishes as it is taking them to the kitchen and scraping them clean before handing them over to a Contiki rep who does the actual cleaning. My issue is the early morning wake up. If you know anything about me, you know that sleep is basically a religious act for me.

But anyway, on to the cooler stuff. After the breakfast was handled we then headed off to the train station to begin making our way up the Jungfrau mountain to see the snow and some other cool stuff. Now, the train we were to be taking wasn't exactly a normal train. It was a cog rail. The train doesn't run just on tracks but has a cog system running down the center of it which actually moves the thing. Now I thought that this was pretty cool but not exactly necessary, I mean, why not use a normal train?

The mountain. That is why you don't us ea normal train. The angles that this thing climbed at was rather entertaining. What was more entertaining, however, was the spectacle of watching a severely hung over Chachi. He seemed to be chatting for a while but then gradually dropped off and that's when the fun and games began.

The entire contingent of people in the Contiki group that were in our carriage decided this would be an awesome time to get one over on Chachi. Various plans were discussed and plans formulated before we decided the old reliable, felt tip marker to the face. I forget exactly who it was that went forward to perform the deed, I think it was Em, we all waited with baited breath as she slowly crept up on him. At which point he demonstrated to all of us that he was not in fact asleep.

Now I have seen many people pull pranks and try to scare others before, but never have I seen anyone jump that much. Our pen holding accomplice almost jumped back the entire length of the carriage we were in while emitting one of the most piercing screams I have ever heard. Unfortunately the fun and games couldn't last as we pulled in to the station half way up the mountain. It was there that we had to wait for the next train to take us the rest of the way up the mountain. Once the second train arrived it was a relatively short and uneventful trip up to the top... except for.. well...

Other Guy had decided that it would be a good idea to get himself righteously slaughtered the night before and he was not looking exactly good. And by that I means he was so pale he was almost transparent. He could have acted in a Casper movie with no makeup on. Needless to say just before we reached the top he decided he was about to throw up and had us move off of our seats (we were sitting directly opposite him so you can imagine how eager we were to comply with his request) so that he could try and lie down.

Lie down isn't exactly the correct word tho, what he was look like he was on his knees praying with his head on the seat while throwing up into a packet. The smell was... delightful. Anyway we managed to make it up the rest of the way. without further incident and my god, was it cold up there. And damn, was there quite a lot to see. There were a few observation decks which we went to to take a gander at the scenery which was white almost completely white as far as the eye could see.

One of the really cool things they have is called the Ice Palace. What it is, is a section of the ice peak at the top that they have carved corridors into as well as various sculptures. It's rather impressive to be perfectly honest. Some of the sculptures were really awesome. But enough about the ice cold palace, next we moved forth to the snowy mountain top itself... wow did I have fun. And I say I and not we because I think I came off better than she did.

It seemed mildly amusing to throw a snowball at her, having never been in a proper snowball fight before. This of course progressed to her trying to pelt me with one... which failed. And so she progressed to trying to get snow down my top. Okay, maybe I did do it to her first but it was funny when I did it. If she did it as well it would have just been killing the joke... right? Anyway, an amusing snow fight later, and taking a look at the awesome husky dogs, we headed back in where I discovered a rather unfortunate problem with my glasses.

Now, my glasses have those chameleon like lenses where they go dark when in the sun light so that I don't have to have those stupid looking clip-ons or have to carry a separate pair of prescription sun glasses. Now I don't know if it was the cold, or the fact there was no pollution blocking the light from the sun, but my glasses didn't want to go back to clear glass when we headed back inside. The problem being that there was fairly low lighting inside, so with my glasses on I couldn't see much. This of course led me to grovelling so that she would lead me around because I was basically blind. Now I could also take off my glasses, which I did do, but for anyone that knows me you know that that wouldn't really help my situation.

Anyway, after some more photos and some looking around we decided to head back down the mountain and head back to the camp site for some relaxation and dinner before turning in. We weren't planning on getting hammered like some of our Contiki group as we seemed to understand a very important fact that most of them apparently still hadn't learned, being hungover on the bus is NOT cool.

Score:
Me: 2
Her: 4
New Guy: 3
Chachi: 1
Bus: 2
Other Guy: 1
Vatican: 2