Easter Weekend

For Easter, Shaun and I went to Switzerland to go skiing. We had Good Friday off, and the Monday after, so it seemed like a good time to take an extended trip.
We left Friday night, taking the overnight (cheaper) train to Brig, Switzerland. This was definitely the worst part of the trip. We took about 7 different trains to get there, and I don't think we were ever on a train for more than an hour and a half. For overnight night trips, this is not good because we hardly slept. What made it even worse was that we were Bern, Switzerland for 4 hours. 4 hour layovers don't sound too bad, but that is because airports are covered, and warm. Most train stations are not. There was a warm area in the train station, but it was closed between 12:30 AM and 6:00. We were there between 2 and 6. So, we wandered around for about 2 hours, and eventually found a stairwell that was sort of warm. However, after an hour security came and kicked us out. It was altogether bad planning. We did manage to sleep some though, me 3 hours and Shaun about 2.So, after our super long, sleepless trip to Switzerland, we skiied most of the day. The resort (?) we skiied at was called Saastal. Specifically, we were at Saas Fee, which is a little town at around 1800 meters (just over 5900 feet). There are no cars in the town, so we had to take a bus to get there. It is an amazingly beautiful town. There are mountains on all sides, and the town is a classic Swiss town. It seemed to be geared completely toward skiing all day, and partying all night.
Anyway, the mountain we skiied on was huge. There were two stations from which you could start skiing on the lower half of the mountain, and from the higher one, you could take this crazy mountain train to the top of the ski area, at around 3500 meters (11500 feet). From there you could take a T-bar up another 100 meters. Of course the first thing we did was go up to the highest skiing point. It was beautiful. We were above the clouds and we could see mountains in the distance. The top of the mountain was a glacier. We saw some people climbing to the top of the mountain, which looked like an insane climb.
Back to the skiing. We were at the very top of the mountain, and decided we would ski to the very bottom. It took us a half hour! It was the longest straight skiing session of my life! Such a big mountain. The skiing the first day was nothing special, other than the fact we were on a mountain, and also a glacier. One thing to note, is that they don't have night skiing on mountains, so the lifts close pretty early.
We left before the lifts closed because we were so exhausted, and went to our hotel in Saas Almagell. We had a nice little hotel in the middle of the town. The best part of it was the hot tub and sauna in this weird basement thing. We had to go outside to get to it though. That was a good way to end an day full of skiing.
The next day we ate breakfast at the hotel. They have really good 'continental' breakfasts here, with fresh breads, cold cuts, yogurt, granola, juices and other delicious things. Then we spent most of the day on the mountain skiing. This day there was harsh weather on the mountain. We pretty much skiied in a blizzard. We couldn't see more than 100 feet in front of us, there was that much snow. Probably not the safest to ski in, but it was exciting and we went slower. The weird part of this was that it wasn't even snowing on the lower half of the mountain. Changing elevation does some crazy things. It all amounted to another great day of skiing.
The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We left Monday morning to go back to Stuttgart. We were in Brig, Switzerland for a while and wondered around for a while. Another beautiful city of Switzerland. Mountains everywhere. The train ride back to Stuttgart was much shorter and easier than the one we took to get there.This is a mountain by Brig. It is also now the desktop background for my computer.All in all, a great weekend of skiing.