My Swiss Adventure: Fall Weekend

This past weekend was the Fall Weekend with Rotex. Rotex is an organization of exchange students from Switzerland that have now returned from their exchanges. They now organize weekends and fun activities for the current inbounds. So anyway, this weekend was the first of a few Rotex weekends we will have this year. This one took place in Alt Sankt Johann, not very far from where I live. After getting home from Italy on Friday, I had to unpack all my stuff and repack it right away to leave the next morning. I met up with Claire, Josh, and Lara (Lara is a member of Rotex) around 11:30 on Saturday morning on the train to Sargans. At Sargans we had to change to a different train headed for Buchs where we would then change to a bus to get to Alt Sankt Johann. Once we got off the bus we walked up to our hostel which was not far off the main road. There we met up with a bunch of other exchange students. It was so great to see so many of my friends again and it was also so great to meet so many new people. Once we were all at the hostel, we chose our rooms and our roommates and got settled in. We had a few minutes to change and socialize with everyone before we left for our hike. We got on a bus headed for Wildhaus where we then walked for a few minutes before taking off our shoes and continuing up the mountain. It was a very unique experience hiking with no shoes on, but it made it 10x as fun due to all the mud. When we eventually got to the top, we took a bunch of pictures and headed back down. This time we took a different route and got the chance to walk around in a knee-deep pool of mud. It was very dirty and gross but also one of my best moments in Switzerland so far. We walked a short way down the mountain and cleaned our feet from all the mud. We then headed back to our hostel for the evening where we had a little bit of free time before dinner. I took the time to catch up with my friends from Deutschkurs and meet a bunch of new people as well. For dinner we had pasta and salad. Typical easy meal. After that we got separated into groups to play a game. In my group I had Cam from Canada, and a bunch of people from spanish-speaking countries who didn't speak very good English. We could all communicate through German but the conversations aren't exactly thrilling. The first challenge was to dress up a member of your group in as many pieces of clothing as possible. Cam and I volunteered to do the challenge for our group. Cam would be the one putting on the cloths, I just had to help him. We only had three minutes to do that so as soon as the time started we raced to our room and pulled out every piece of clothing available, both his and mine, and put it on him. Unfortunately we didn't end up winning the challenge (Claire had over 20 pieces of clothing on) but we still had fun doing it. There were a few other tasks we had to do that night but those were handled by the other members in our group as Cam and I had already completed our task. After the games were finished, we had free time until midnight to socialize. We played some more games and just all got to know each other before heading off to bed. The next morning we were woken up at 8:00 by Rotex banging on pots and pans. We headed upstairs for a quick breakfast then cleaned out our rooms. After all the cleaning was done, we took a walk down the road to a waterfall which was so pretty!! After that we got on the bus to a small-ish town called Wattwil where we went on a scavenger hunt before saying our goodbyes and heading home. All in all, it was a great weekend with great people. I'm already excited for the next one! Until my next post, enjoy these pictures from the weekend. Tschüss!