The Whole House...

So this is what our house looked after Brian and I cleaned it the first time. With between 6-8 people staying in our house, mainly guys that have never cleaned before in their lives it was just a disaster no matter what. But now that it is only us and Darren it's getting a lot better. Brian and I spent all last weekend doing another good, solid clean to make our house as good as new again. It looks great and is so much more organized...I even made cleaning schedules that Brian and Darren now have to stick to and clean a little each week, we'lll see how that goes! Anyways we are now going to introduce you to our new and improved house step by step. We will leave out our room though since it hasn't changed much.

We are on the top (3rd) floor

so we have to climb these

stairs everyday.

Here is our
door and the
entrance
to our house;
looks good hey!






The first door on the left when you walk into our house is the
bathroom. Have you ever seen such a clean washroom!

Then when
you walk
furtherdown
the hallway,
yournext left
is the kitchen.

On the right side of the hallway is our room,
opposite the kitchen and at the very end of
the hall is the living room/tv area.

Beside this beautiful chest

(that was left in our hallway
for us one day when we got
home from work) is the door
for Darren's room, we decided
not to photograph his room

and post them on our blog

though. He wasn't home
when we were cleaning or
taking pictures of our whole
house so he might not have
appreciated us documenting
his room without him.

Lucerne Boat Ride

On Sunday Brian and I decided to do a day trip in Switzerland, so we went to this beautiful city called Luzern (Lucerne in English). In the later morning we took the train from Baden and arrived right before lunch.

Unfortunately we forgot that everywhere Switzerland NOTHING is open on Sundays! So we started off on our journey with only ham for sandwiches that we brought as well as a bag of cookies. We decided that it would be fun to take a boat ride on Lake Lucerne, especially because our Swiss travel passes we bought cover most boats for free now. We then found an information and ticket booth finding out that all the boats that go on Lake Lucerne are free for us, we can just hop on them at any point in time! So that's what we did. We got on the nearest boat and it took off. Unfortunately and fortunately the boat rided lasted for about 5 hours; it was really cool and relaxing but we were getting pretty hungry by the end.


So......eventually after we got off the boat we tried to find a grocery store that was open, but were pretty much out of luck and had to buy more expensive food from a small take-away grocery store. These are typically not open many hours on Sundays, but are at least open so we could eat!




For the rest of the day we toured around the city of Lucerne. Other than seeing the old part of the city with the cool buildings we mainly just looked into all the Swatch store windows we could find to scope out different Swatches and watches. Of coarse that was a lot of fun! Here are some of our favorite pictures from our trip to Lucerne:

Another Day With Jazz...

Last weekend Brian and I went to the Montreux Jazz Festival again on the Saturday. This time we went with our friends Brian Cox and Jean Matthew (a German Practikant; but he's French) and once again it was a fantastic day!

We listened to and watched another great high school band, this time from California with an amazing singer. She had the perfect voice for jazz music and Brian and I thought she was just incredible. Here are some pictures of their band:

While we were at the festival we met up with our friends Mike and Dan (a British Practikant) who hitch-hiked to get there! HAHA

Montreux is a really nice city, definitely worth seeing and the Jazz music was great; even Louise was starting to get hooked on it! There is really not much more to say about this day but we have a lot of great pictures from this experience so here they are, hope you enjoy!

Ja-Ja-Ja-Jazzzzzz Festival

So this past weekend (June 8th) we went to this city called Montreux which is home of the greatest and largest Jazz/music festival of the world. We are talking some big names in music, this year they hosted artists such as B.B. King, Taj Mahal, Kid Rock, Santana, Sigur Ros, Dianna Krall, The Black Eyed Peas, Q-bert......the list goes on and on and on. So this past weekend (June 8th) we went to this city called Montreux which is home of the greatest and largest Jazz/music festival of the world. We are talking some big names in music, this year they hosted artists such as B.B. King, Taj Mahal, Kid Rock, Santana, Sigur Ros, Dianna Krall, The Black Eyed Peas,The festival actually lasts three whole weeks, so you can imagine it is one big party. We checked it out for a day with our friends and fellow praktikants Patrick,
Taryn, and Jan. Basically all we did was walk around by a
beautiful lake, enjoying the hype of a music festival and enjoying the free shows they hosted outdoors. The shows were actually really sweet, even though most of them where high school jazz bands, they were still going nuts. One girl played the flute so hard she almost died, I swear. I thought she was gonna pass out. Don't worry though, she never. Anyways, thats what we did last weekend, not much else to say, so here is some pictures.

Another Montreux fact, the famous
song by Deep Purple called
"Smoke on the Water" was based
on an event that happened in
Montreux. When Deep Purple were
playing at the festival, one of the
nights the casino in town burnt

along Lake Geneva, they saw thedown, and as the band looked out smokey haze from the fire and wrote

their most famous song about it.

Learn something new every day.

So it was a fun day!

Its Rad at the Schad

Ok, so we have been here for almost 2 months now, enjoying life in Europe, but we still haven't told Y'all what its like in our household.

Our place is nicknamed the Schadenmuhle, which may be the coolest house name, ever. We have been here the whole time, sharing it with the old praktikants. They finally moved out (well, almost) and we are slowly making it our own. It was left in somewhat of a state of devestation by the previous praks, but we are slowly cleaning it up, throwing away condiments that expired in 2003, that sorta thing. Needless to say, we are gonna make it this place look sweet. We did finally get to move into our new room at the beginning of July, below are some pictures of our room.

























As nice it would be to have a place all to our own, well we don't get paid THAT much, so we share the place, with another canadian. Everyone, meet Darren.

OK so that isn't exactly Darren, but he sorta looks like that, except no mohawk, he's white, and doesnt have a beard. Ok so he doesn't look anything like that, but he isn't here right now so I can't take a picture. Darren is also from the UofC, but electrical engineering, or something. Basically, he deals with computers or something so he provides the tech support here in the schad. He likes to chill, so thats cool. He's a great flatmate, except he likes techno..... I guess we can't complain, our musical taste isn't appreciated by everyone either.

So there you have it, you've seen our room, seen our roomate, and as soon as the old prak's move their junk out, we will show you the rest of the place. Interested in hearing what we do to kill time here in Baden, let us know and we will post on that next.