I can't believe that it has only been 4 days and so much as happened. It took a total of 40 hours to get to my friends place in London and I didn't really got alot of sleep on the plane, the best thing that I did was have a shower at the transit lounge although you don't have any toiletries on you.
i did think that it may feel a little depressing jumping on the tube again, but instead it brought back alot of good memories of the time spent in London. I stayed up till about 10pm and hadquite a good night sleep and was wide awake at 6am which was a good thing as I was meeting Viv at 9.30am.
After a day of shopping 6 of us went out for dinner in Soho. There was Gareth & Alisha (who I was staying with( and I meet them a few years ago when they were in New Zealand for a year, Oliver who is married to a friend of mine Jackie and they were moving to London as I was leaving and have moved back to NZ in the last couple of months but Oliver still has some work in London to do so has been going back and forth and then there was my brother and his girlfriend Ang. The food was delicious and of course the company and after dinner we went to a quaint Italian coffee shop and had a coffee standing outside taking in the going on's in Soho late at night.
Getting into Geneva was quite stressfull as when I arrived to check in there were hundreds of people for flights going all sorts of places queued up. And the as check in got close to closeing they would call you up the front. But I was still to be checked in after the close off even though I had been waiting for an hour and a half. I think we were an hour and a half late into Geneva and at the airport they had been very unhelpfull for Nat and she had left the airport and went home wondering where I was and what she should do. I called her as I was making a claim on my lost bags and she gave me instructions to get the bus and get off as soon as I saw the lake, which is what I did but nat wasn't there so I waited 5 mins before I thought I must have got off to early, so got back on the next bus to keep going only to find myself heading back out of town. Got off the bus and found a couple who spoke english who ended up giving me a ride back to close where I had started, and luckily eventually found Nat was at the same bus stop I started at. And on top of all of that I just about had no voice left.
So here I am at Nat's apartment, which is a huge 2 bedroom overlooking the lake close to town and have just had a call from the airline so my bags should be here soon. But it has meant that we haven't been able to go out yet while we waited for the call.
can't put any pic's on yet as the cable to to that iwth is in my pack along with everything else.
But aside's losing my bags and getting close to losing my voice I am have a fantastic time.
The castle of Chillon.......spectacular!! It is just out of Montreux and the town of Montreux itself is quite fascinating with alot of wealthy people. The 45 minute walk to the castle from the town is really nice with the lake on one side and very nice houses on the other side. When you first spot the castle you think it doesn't look that great but the closer you get the better the impression. It was first occupied by men of the bronze age and later by the romans. Now I have no idea how they would build something like that without a concrete mixer at least. It is massive once you get inside and would be easy to get lost. It is 3 levels (not including the watch towers or the dungeons of course) . There is even a couple of "latrines" which a just big long drops into the lake below, the strange thing is they even had a faint smell of a longdrop even though they haven't been used since the 13th century. One of the prisons was a narrow drop accessed by dropping ladders down. The other prisons were dungeon with big pillars that they would chain the prisoners to.
