So let me tell you all about my magical trip to Gruyère.
For those of you tuning in at home, Gruyère is a well-known brand of cheese. It is SO good. As a result of this, as well as seeing some other program friends' pictures from there back in October, I knew I had to go. My friend and I both, actually, and we felt that another intra-Switzerland trip would be good because none of us had gone on many of those. So the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we got up, got ourselves to the train station and headed up.
Gruyère is apparently in a mountain. It's a small town. Are you beginning to picture this already? We needed to take a train to Montreux and then transfer onto what was called the "Golden Pass" but will hereon out be referred to as "the Polar Express". It's this little rickety train that literally takes you up the mountain, through nothing but snow and trees. No towns, no houses. Just snow-covered "fairy trees" as we like to call them. It was absolutely magical. There was SO much snow and it was all completely untouched, with the occasional brook running through the forrest. Magical pine tree snow fairies.
Anyway, the Polar Express took us up this mountain and through a number of adorable completely rural archetypical Swiss train stations. I kid you not they looked like a comination of a gingerbread house and a ski lodge. And these train stations just magically popped up with a little town randomely in the middle of the untouched snow. Once we got to a town called Montbovon, we switched from one Polar Express to another, (noticing that a third one had fondue on it.....why did we not choose that one......), and headed the rest of the way to Gruyère. Where we got off was perfect. It was just the station. The town and everything was behind it. The tracks were covered in snow with the little stop light and then there were fields and the mountains. It was beautiful.
As if that wasn't good enough, the cheese factory was literally 13 steps away from the train station. INside was adorable and decorated for Christmas. We'd gotten up at 7 and arrived at around 12:30, we opted for lunch first, in the cheese factory, and obviously needed to eat something cheesy. My friend got something that looked like really intense Texas toast and I got like, breaded cheese balls or something. Don't know. Don't care. It was delicious. After this, we received free cheese for signing up for the tour (aged 6, 8, and 10 months) and we went on the tour, where we were guided around by an automated cow talking into our ears. Don't ask me for the process I listened to it in french so basically got 1/4 of what was going on. Naturally we hit up the gift shop. We both bought gigantic slices of cheese. SHOo0oO0CKING :0
From there, we got on the Polar Express again, after waiting an hour because we completely sucked at doing anything out in advance and didn't realize the trains came once every hour. It was Sunday, and we needed to go back and do homework. Whoops. Oh well, this was better. So we waited, snapped some pics, and headed on the train toward Broc-Fabrique. Aka another beautiful mountain village with gigantic openness and fantastic views. Aaka where the Cailler chocolate factory is. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the tour through this factory was like Willie Wonka's chocolate factory with moving floors and self-opening doors and colored rooms and themes that told stories, and automated bike-pedaling legs and automatic conveyor belts, rooms of queens and mountains of Switzerland. It was so cool. THere was also free chocolate testing.......so. Yeah. Some of the oldest chocolate in Switzerland, and therefore some of the best. I naturally bought a ton at the gift shop. One type that I bought has three types of wine from the Canton of Valais. Attempting to hold out so that I can bring it home. By the skin of our teeth we made it on the train that was heading back toward the town of Bulle, which is the bigger town in that area. WHy were we going there, you ask? Ah. Well. There was a Christmas Market. So obviously, we needed to go and drink hot wine and revel in Christmas-ness. It was really really wonderful. Small, but wonderful. I think it was so great because Bulle isn't a touristy place, and so those who turned out were from the community or the surrounding communities and it was very local and small with streets closed off at the base of teh Chateau and families around everywhere, with small stands of people selling baked goods and then all of the Christmas Market huts. We had hot wine that was made from white wine, which was super good, and we had these things called Piadinas. They're italian and somewhere between a crepe and a pancake and a tortilla. So weird, but SO good. I bought a pack of them. There was Christmas music playing, and lights on the trees. What was especially awesome, though, was that the evening we were there was the opening evening of the Markets. So outside the chateau, there was a choir singing carols and père (?) noel and a narration of CHristmas. It was so special. If there is something that I truly want to do again, it is go back go Gruyère for opening night of their market. After that, we took the Polar Express back down mortality. No snow, no magic, no incredulity.
Gruyère was so incredible in so many ways. THat is the type of place you imagine when you imagine Switzerland, The Sound of Music, Heidi. It was really and truly perfect.