Rugby Game

April 17, 2010

I woke up to Renzo walking into the living room saying "bad news girls..." Turns out the volcano that exploded in Iceland was affecting travelers all throughout Europe. Almost the entire continent plus some has shut down their airports as the ash spreads south and east of Iceland. Everyone is afraid the ash will cause airplanes to malfunction and crash - not good. Because of this, the train stations were filling up quickly with people needed to get from one country to the next. With the Eurail passes and Hilary and I have we don't have reserved seats unless we want to pay extra for them. This means we pretty much just get on a train and hope that there are open seats. So far we've only had one problem with this and that was only for an hour or two on our way from Amsterdam to Switzerland. But with everyone having to take trains we started to worry that there wouldn't be any open trains for a few days.

We got ready faster than usual and headed to the train station to figure out the first train out we could get. After waiting in line for about a half hour we were actually easily able to reserve seats for the noon train on Sunday for only 5 franks each. Franks around almost equivalent to dollars so that was actually a lot easier than expected. It was a really good thing we did it though. I'm currently sitting on that train and it is easily going to be packed with people. There are a couple random seats open here and there but for the most part everything is reserved.

After we got our seats Renzo took us on a walking tour of the city. Lucerne has an old and new city and the old city is the main tourist attraction. It is pretty small and we were able to easily walk it in a couple hours. There are some cool older bridges and one cool garden area but other than that Lucerne wasn't anything wildly spectacular. Lucerne is supposed to be the tourist capital but I don't quite understand why. Bern and Interlaken were a lot pretty I thought. No problem though. We were off to a rugby game which I was really excited for.

Renzo is hurt so he can't currently play but he still goes and supports his team of course. I know little to nothing about rugby so I was hoping he would be able to sit with us and explain it but his couch asked him to be line ref so we were left along to figure out the sport. It was pretty fun being able to sit on the edge of the field right at eye level watching the game and drinking beer along with all the other fans. The game was pretty stop and go and there were times when I asked some random guys what was going on but I think I followed it for the most part. Renzo's team lost sadly but the beauty of rugby is that there is always lots of beer no matter what the outcome of the game. The opposing team actually brought their own crates full of bottled beer and passed them out as soon as the game was over, haha. Everyone likes to describe this as 'their drinking team has a rugby problem.'

Everyone headed back to Gracie Kelly for some sand whiches and beer. We were there for a few minutes when the entire opposing team walked in. I was told that rugby is a gentleman's sport and the home team almost always invites the other team out for food and drinks afterwards. I thought that was really cool. All the guys were big and exactly what you would think rugby players would look like but they were also really nice. Renzo said you can always trust a rugby player. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I can see why he'd say that.

It was our last night in Switzerland so Renzo made us raclette again and invited a couple CS friends and his rugby friend David over for dinner after the bar. I love that we went to a bar and the had dinner. It was a lot of fun. We danced, ate and drank. David was still pulling moves, only this time they were on me instead of Hilary. I guess he found out she had a boyfriend and moved on. I don't know what he thought was going to happen after I'd watched him hit on my friend two nights before, but it was entertaining nonetheless and he was a fun guy to talk and dance with so no real harm done.

We were all hanging out after diner when one of the CS guys, Toby, said there was a private party of sorts going on at a place he used to co-own. We headed there and it ended up being a really cool, really big flat almost which was full of games, TVs, poker tables, a bar and lots of really nice people. It is a private club that some guy decided he wanted to start. No real profit is made from it I guess, but it is just a sweet place for a bunch of friends to hang out. The idea is actually really cool. We spent the night talking, playing Wii and drinking way to much. We found this alligator game where you have to push the teeth down one by one and every time the alligator bit you, you had to take a drink. Let's just say the alligator didn't like me so much and the jager liked me even less. All in all it was a lot of fun and we have the pictures and video to prove it. It was a great goodbye to Switzerland.