It's Friday! (YES we've annoyingly been singing Rebecca Black all day...)

HELLO! I have rejoined the world after a three day-two night excursion to the St. Bernard Monastery in the Alps. I got up at 4:30 AM (here…. In Utah that would be 8:30 PM) on Wednesday morning showered, ate breakfast and proceeded to take a 10 minute hike up the mountain, three train rides,

two bus rides to the base of the Alps where we strapped on snowshoes during a surprise blizzard and began our ascent.

It was so snowy that the border patrol didn’t want us to go up, but our amazing host, Dominique, convinced them that we would try to be safe and not cause any Avalanches and so we began our trek! It was so cold and snowy and we actually didn’t end up having to snowshoe that far because a giant plow came over and cleared the road pretty well, but after three miles the monastery was a VERY welcome sight J.

Our host there, Father Jose was such a sweetheart. We ate soup, soup, and more soup there, with plenty of accompanying MSG, pasta, and CHOCOLATE!!! Woooo! Guys, the chocolate here is amazing. I am eating so much, but thankfully I am also walking a BUNCH so it’s all good. At the monastery we got to go to Catholic Mass, which was a first time experience for me. It was quite intriguing in French first of all, but Father Jose and Bob helped translate. The rituals however, I was completely lost on. Luckily our friend Ryan is Catholic so we just watched him and copied him. On Wednesday morning, it was a catholic holiday, the day of Ascension, so we got to go into the chapel for a bigger mass in which one of the girls in our group, Amore (said Ahh-more-ee) sang “Abide with me” and “How Great Thou Art”…she was on American Idol the same season as Carrie Underwood hence it was amazing, and also the acoustics were wonderful. (The night before we had mass in the little chapel downstairs seen here).

Later that day we got to clean the chapel…SO COOL! Guys, catholic chapels are scary. There are so many priests and figures stepping on demon babies with chains around their necks…we got to clean them! Beautiful woodwork, relief carvings, statues, ancient crypts…everything in there was handmade during the 17^th century. I really can’t believe we got to be so hands on. Stay tuned for pictures on that, my friends Jen and Mark had the camera duty that day so I’ll need to rip them off before you can see. But here is a picture of the chapel in general, ooh la la right??

So I’m gonna back it up for a sec here. On Tuesday we traveled to a place called Ouchy (pronounced oo-shee) where we saw this wonderful little establishment (this is for you Liz J)

We went to the Olympic Museum because the Olympic headquarters is in the bigger city Leysaunne, which was WAY cool! Super old Olympic…artifacts I guess you could say? We got to see all the torches from every Olympic games since like 1934 I think was the first ‘official’ modern-day Olympics. That was way cool! But we couldn’t take pictures in there so sorry. Then we went to the Chateau Chillon castle, the place that inspired Lord Byron’s poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon”…and got to see where he actually carved his name into one of the pillars that prisoners were chained to. The castle was beautiful, we climbed to the top of the tower and the view was great!

Outside the castle...awesome!

Karlie and I on an ancient Potty. It's a hole in this board that goes directly to the river. YUMMY!

A lovely view of Swiss-Land from the Train. SO PRETTY!

Anyways, love you all, and wishing you all could be here to see all this amazing stuff!

Ali