Chocolate Thursday

We were pretty excited to call Leve letting him know we wanted to take the room in the flat. However, he did mention that there were a few other people that were interested, so if we were the first ones to answer back, we would get it. Well, that left us with a different dilemma... How early can you call someone in Switzerland and not be rude? We waited until around noon. We wanted to make sure we called early so that we got the apartment, but not too early. The only down side is that check-out at the hostel is at 10:00am. So, in order to not have had to pay for Thursday night, we would have had to check-out. However, we didn't know if we for sure had anywhere else to go, so we didn't want to do that. We wanted to make sure we called Leve and had everything squared away before we did that.

We called Leve and he said it was all set. We could move in that day if we wanted! Yay! We could leave the hostel and finally move into a flat where we could cook and have a little quiet too! This was great. Finally, we found some place to move-in. It was a nice weight off our shoulders as $100 a night was getting rather stressful. Leve told us to meet him around 6:30pm. We weren't going to bring our stuff right away because we still had to stay in the hostel one more night, since we already paid for it. On to our next issue... Are we going to be able to get our money back for our already paid Friday night stay at the hostel?

Fortunately, the people who work at the hostel were great. They happily gave us money back for the Friday night. The name of the hostel was BackPackers Lucerne. There are BackPackers all over Switzerland and also Europe. If you need some place to stay when visiting Europe, and you don't want to have to pay an arm and a leg for a hotel, I would highly recommend BackPackers. They were very expensive in Switzerland, but that was because Switzerland is just very expensive. One night at an "okay" hotel was $200 a night, so we found a pretty good deal.

Well, again we have some time to kill until we need to meet with Leve at our new flat. We figured that some good Swiss chocolate should be involved to celebrate our flat find. We went back to the place that gave us those yummy free samples. This time, we actually bought a whole bar!

 

Eat your heart out! It was so good... Here are some pictures of me in chocolate heaven. For your enjoyment of course.

Clearly, while Brett was taking pictures of me, I was helping myself to more chocolate. Mmm...

Finger lickin' good! It was Milk Chocolate with Hazelnuts. Our favorite. And don't worry, I left some for Brett.

After our chocolate adventure, we decided to take the City Train around Luzern. It's a tourist thing, but we have seen it everywhere and wanted to give it a try. We had some time still before we had to meet Leve, so we went for it. It was a lot of fun!

 

Brett sporting the Brewers hat...

Okay, that was fun. Oh wait, I almost forgot. I love this picture....

This was taken from the City Train near the Lion of Luzern.

Okay, now on to our new flat. We got on the bus again. In about 20 minutes, we were there! Here is a view right near our bus stop...

And this is a brook that is mountain water run-off. It's so clean and pretty to look at. It runs right along our flat.

We get to our flat, call Leve and go upstairs. Oh yeah, we are on the 3rd floor, but really it's the 4th... remember ground level is 0 here. Don't worry, they have an elevator, or as called in Switzerland, a lift.

We explain to Leve that we have to stay at our hostel one more night. It's all good. He gives us a key anyways. Turns out, we don't have to sign a lease because the lease is in Leve's name. This is good because for whatever reason, in the case that we may have to leave, at least we are not in a binding contract. We explained this to Leve and he totally understands if we can't stay for a whole year. So, again, another huge weight off our shoulders.

Before we left, he offered us something to drink. He told us we had to drink the water. It's different than the Luzern city water. It was water from the mountain that is close by, Mount Palatus. It's so good that the Swiss call it Honey Water. I forgot how he said it in German. We each drank a glass. Best water ever. With water that tasted this good, there is no reason to really drink anything else!

Meet up with Leve, check. Drink mountain water, check. Set-up a time to move in, check. Chocolate heaven, check. Another good day of getting things done. We headed back to the hostel and packed up to be ready to check-out of the hostel by 10:00am the next day. Tomorrow we move into out new flat!