Bellinzona and Lugano

What a week!  I'll try to spare you the details to make this not as long as it definitely could be!  :)

Thankfully, I only worked 3 days last week.  Very much needed and I am very thankful for Swiss holidays.  Paul planned a short trip for our 2 year anniversary.  The italian side of Switzerland is spoken very highly of so we decided to check it out.  Lugano, our destination, is about a 3 hour train ride from Zurich.  So Thursday we gave our apartment a very good cleaning and did the laundry and packed up.  Friday morning we left around 7:30 and hopped on a train towards Lugano.  But before we arrived we stopped in Bellinzona for some castle site-seeing.  3 castles total with our packs and walking mountains before we even arrived in Lugano around 5 made for a very long day.  But I did it and Paul was proud and surprised!  Few pics of Bellinzona:

We decided to try out a hostel in Lugano for a couple nights since it was cheap and it looked pretty nice.  Everything was great until 3am when 4 of our fellow hostel mates decided to come back drunk and yell inside the room for an hour.  They finally saw me staring directly at them and the less drunk girl came over and quickly realized I didnt speak Swiss German but she didnt speak much English.  So she told the one girl to quiet down which did nothing except make her more insane and then look me in the face to realize YES I was awake!  Ridiculous especially since one of the hostel manager guys came and told them to be quiet since they have hotel guests too and that did nothing.  We were debating staying another night (even though we paid for it) and when we realized they were staying we packed up our bags.  The people still gave us half the nights payment back and Im sure they went back and talked to them because they had just been in the room and saw that they were taking up the extra beds which were trying to be shown to the newcomers... Anyways, Lugano was beautiful.

Since it is the italian part, everyone speaks Italian and the stores are all in Italian unlike Zurich where everything is German.  Pretty weird but we got by with English.  We got a few snacks, ate at a pizzeria Friday night and sat by the huge lake but it had been rainy all day and we were very tired so we went to bed early.  Sat morning we made our way over to the lake to the tourist office and decided to take a funiculor up Mt. Bre, hike down to Gandria, eat lunch, and take a boat back to Lugano.  It was so beautiful and we enjoyed it so much.  We ate lunch at a small restaraunt off an alley and had a table outside surrounded by the lake and mountains.  Gorgeous.  We decided that if we come again, we will definitely stay in a hotel around there.  By the time we got back we had enough time to ride the bus around, see a couple more things and eat a huge gelato before we decided to pack up our stuff and go home.  We had seen everything that we had wanted to anyway.  So running low on time, we just had to eat dinner at McDonalds... ha.  I didnt enjoy my Big Mac as much as I had anticipated but the chicken nuggets definitely tasted more like real chicken.  Needless to say I passed out on the train home and we got in around midnight and slept like babies.  Here are some pics of Lugano:

I uploaded more pictures and if you'd like, you can take a look here- scroll down past the Boog pics for pics of this trip.  Coming back to Zurich being on the other side of the Alps was not pretty.  Back to the rain.  :(