Never happened before, and here we go again! A mess in Switzerland!
Three times our friend asked in Swiss German if there was a discount for the train up with a day pass. Three times he was told no.
I'm lucky. I can almost always just say screw it and disregard the expense. Especially when I'm traveling and want to chill out. Not everyone has it this sweet. And even for me, it's only been this way for the past five years. Before that, there was a lot I couldn't afford, and I spent my coins carefully.
But in this case, I calmly bought a ticket and headed up. There were four of us, and three of us were chugging whiskey straight from the bottle. I'm pretty chill about alcohol (in every sense). I do, however, envy the superhuman health of people who can get wasted and keep partying the next day. And here's another thing that pisses me off. My dad, who knows I practically don't drink, offers me some every single time he throws one back himself. As if something suddenly changed over the past month!
The train quickly entered a tunnel, and the rest of the journey went on in darkness. The floor of the train was tilted at an unbelievable angle. So much so that even standing on it required effort, let alone walking. We had no reason to walk, anyway: our carriage was empty, and the rest were basically empty too. If you remember, a couple of weeks ago, I described the funicular in Stoos. There, the floor was floating so that it would always remain horizontal. On a train, I guess, doing that wouldn't make economic sense.
On the way up, there was only one stop for five minutes. The conductors advised us to go to the window and take a look at the glacier. We hurriedly did just that. We're neurotics, what can I say — we didn't want to get left inside a rock in the freezing cold with no transport. The glacier wasn't really visible. The thick fog only let us figure out that there were snowy slopes all around, but not much else.
About half an hour later, the cogwheel train arrived at a gallery inside the Jungfraujoch mountain. There were so many Asians in the room that it felt like we were at a train station in Hong Kong. But in reality, this is the highest railway station in Europe — 3,454 m.
So what's there?