Visitors, Street Parade, and Caonyoning....Oh my!

Hi all,

Hope everything is going well with everyone. I've had a pretty cool weekend. David came to visit on Thursday, and my brother and his girlfriend came on friday so it was quite eventful.

On Friday we just did the usual city tour and all that, nothing to special.

On Saturday, we went to Zurich for the annual Zurich Street Parade. It's the biggest street parade in Europe (since the Berlin Love Parade closed), and is pretty much a massive dance/rave. The whole city has DJ's spinning tracks everywhere, people dressed up in funky/weird costumes, and all these "floats". The floats are pretty much a flatbed semi with people dancing, each with their own DJ and tons of stereo equipment (very loud). It was pretty neat, but since i'm not a raver/clubber and can't dance, wasn't super exciting. There was a lot of people there, so that was a neat little thing to experience.

On Sunday we went canyoning in Locarno. Canyoning is pretty much like extreme hiking. We took a cable car up and mountain and hiked down, but went down waterfalls and stuff. The 3 basic ways to get down a waterfall was sliding down, rapel down and just jump. Connie was pretty scared since she didn't like heights or water, but she toughed it out and got throught it, so that was cool. I just wished that we had a camera to take pictures as the canyon was so pretty. But cameras and water don't really mix, so too bad. The largest rapel we did was 45 meters i think, that one was pretty tricky as we had to go to an intermediate platform then go over the edge blind. Didn't really know where we had to stop and disconnect from the rope. Keegan stopped halfway and disconnected himself, so that was sorta funny. The highest jump was about 13 meters, not too high, but enough. We had lunch in the canyon so that was pretty cool. Definately highly recommend. For the canyoning we got a 3 piece wetsuit, so it was actually pretty warm in the water, very fun. The crappy thing about having contacts was everytime u jumped in the water they would migrate to the top of your eyes and you would think u lost them, but after rubbing your eyes alittle they'd return to the normal position and you could see again. I was suprised i didn't loose them, sweet :D In our group was 2 guys from Litchenstein (that small country beside switzerland). they were pretty crazy doing all these flips and stuff but it was cool. After lunch we joined up with the boss of the canyonning company, his wife and their friends from India and Australia. Was pretty cool, a nicely sized group, unfortuately the latter half of the trip has less jumps and slides, but they did let us do self-repels and the big 45 meter one. Still liked the jumps the most, o well. After the canyoning we went for a beer with our guides, then went to the beach with them. It was pretty cool. The place were we got beer was pretty nice. The roof of the patio was covered with grape vines and you could just pull them out and eat them. Also found a walnut tree (never need young walnut before, would never guess they came from there) as well as chestnut trees).

David left on monday morning and Leslie and Connie left on tuesday, so things are back to normal now.

The only crappy part of the weekend was I had to either sleep on the floor or in a chair (not very comfortable) and I caught a cold (i guess spending a day submerged in mountain water does that) but all good.

I'll posts of pictures later, too lazy to upload right now.

This weekend i'm off to Madrid for a couple days, so that'll be fun. Talk to you guys later.