Well there WAS Internet out there at two kilometers above sea level, but I couldn't eke out the time to blog.

The keyboard out there was arranged pretty strangely, with no apostrophe key. The browser (Internet Explorer thankfully) was in German, so I was at a loss as to most of the functions on it - as well as half the buttons on the keyboard (what on earth were the weird öäüéàè keys used for?). Not to mention that the Y and Z keys have been switched around, and that applies for everz kezboard in Swityerland and Europe.

On to the trip itself. The main highlight of Switzerland is its scenery and natural formations, so my family and I visited the Swiss Alps, their various lakes and seas (they call them sees, see?), and also popped by the capital city of Bern.

A little background on Switzerland might be appropriate here. Switzerland isn't a very big country with just over 40k square kilometers of land, as compared to countries like Sri Lanka (65k). You can drive from one end to the other in about five hours. In terms of population, its also very small - it has 7.5 million people spread out across the country; look at Singapore, a country which has over 4.5 million cramped into 0.7k square kilometers.

Because it's bordered by Germany, France, and Italy (Austria too), its three main languages are Germany, French, and Italian. It's mainly German, though, at least in the north-central parts where I was. And as most Western languages are based on Latin, German can be roughly deciphered into English, so the language barrier wasn't too high.

Pictures coming up. Thanks to the nice 7.2 megapixel camera we brought along on the trip, each photo is like 2.5 megabytes plus, so I definitely can't upload all of them here. Here's 28 of the nicer photos:

I just told my parents that I needed to change some SGD into Japanese yen for the Japan trip, and it turns out that they have a whole store stashed away (more than enough for me!) so I don't even need to visit a money changer. They also had, in varying quantities: US, Australian, Canadian, New Taiwan and HK dollars, as well as euros, Swiss francs, Hungarian forints, New Turkish liras, Indian rupees, Vietnamese dong, Egyptian pounds, Indonesian rupiah, Korean won, Swedish kronas. Apparently, they collected all these currencies when overseas on business.

WOW my parents are really well travelled.

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