Switzerland, here we come

So I took my first trip to the the mainland of Europe last week with Jessica. Of course we had to mix in a DMB concert along the way, but hey, we did plenty of sight seeing as well!

We took a red eye out there out of JFK direct to Zurich. I watched "He's Just Not That Into You" - possibly one of the worst movies I have seen in a few years. I was a big Justin Long fan, but now I lost a little faith in the man.

So we land and go to get our pimp rental car, an Opel Zafira. I am not sure if this was a mini van, cross over vehicle or what have you. Either way, Jessica and I spent 5 minutes trying to take off the emergency brake with no success. The attendant comes out, with one shot removes the brake, then puts it back on and in a rude way asks if we can put a car in drive, reverse, etc. She snickers and walks away, then it is our turn to take off the break and we have trouble again removing the emergency break. Jessica finally got the brake off, and we never put it on again through the trip.

The ride from Zurich to Montreux was very nice, the highways are clearly marked in Switzerland so no major problems with the 2 hour drive.

We finally got to Montreux around 5pm. Montreux is known as the Swiss Riveria. The scenery was gorgeous, huge ice-capped mountains and Lake Geneva set the backdrop for this small vacation town. We stayed at the Hotel Eden Palace au Lac. The hotel was fantastic, right on the Lake, a huge balcony with tables and chairs overlooking the lake and the mountains, what a view from our room! The big bonus, air conditioning in the rooms - why don't more Europeans believe in A/C?

We walked around town our first evening, it was the first night of the 43rd Annual Montreux Jazz Festival. The festival brings 100,000's of people from all over the world to Montreux for 15 days every July. They set up festival-like booths all along the water. It is the usual stuff you would see at any festival, vendors selling shirts, scarfs, odd rock creations, music, cartoon drawings, etc. They also had street cart vendors selling all kinds of ethnic foods from around the world. We figured for our first night we would go to a nice French restaurant called La Rouvenaz and we picked a nice local Swiss wines along with our meals and we enjoyed.

After dinner we took a quick trip to the Montreux Casino. This was the quietest casino I have ever seen in my life! The slot machines were on mute, people at the table games were not making any noise either. We got a drink and figured we'd walk around and survey the area, we saw how sad and pathetic it was so we left. There was $5 roulette and I did not play, that just goes to show you how desolate this place seemed to us!