After our day at Verdon Gorge, we left our cute little airbnb (with a pool I might add!!) in France and hopped over to Switzerland for a few performances with the Caroga Lake Music Festival's Swiss Tour!
Our home base for the week was a beautifully charming little town called Begnins.
Look how gorgeous this little town is!
Every morning, we would wake up, hurriedly get dressed, and walk down the hill to a local bakery to get a baguette (and a few pastries) to start our day. The view never gets old, let me tell you...
The more I travel, the more I am reminded of how small this world really is. For example, who would have guessed that we would meet up with my mom's childhood friend from Korea in Switzerland of all places! They were really good friends growing up, but then of course, my mom moved to the U.S. when I was about 11 years old, and her friend moved to Switzerland with her husband shortly before that, and they have not seen each other since!
Somehow, they got to talking and when Ee-mo (what we call aunts in Korean) realized that I was in Switzerland, she came to whisk us away during our day off for a grand Swiss adventure filled with museums, chocolates, castles, and homemade Korean food ;) By this point, we had not seen Asian food for about a week (and she makes incredible Korean food), so we happily stuffed ourselves full of Korean food at their beautiful home before heading out to sightsee!
The first place we visited was this castle.
Guys, there are castles everywhere in Switzerland. Quite literally. So many castles, and all of them are so beautiful!
Apparently Mozart visited this place too, so of course, we had to take an obligatory music nerds photo in front of it ;)
But the real reason we visited this place was for the Hepburn/Givenchy exhibit at the museum!
I am a huge fan of the lady (I even have a big portrait of her that I hang in my room. It's been with me since 2012 through 4 different moves!) so I was definitely fan-girling hard.
This small castle was pretty charming itself, so we made sure to explore the building a little bit as well.
The next castle on the itinerary was one of the most picturesque castles I've ever seen!
Chateau de Chillon is nestled right on the edge of the lake, and with the swans playing around the base of it, it looked like it came right out of a fairytale.
So much history, and it is impeccably maintained!
You can take a stroll through the ground with a popsicle in hand, and when you've finished your popsicle, you can take a look inside as well.
When we crossed the border to Switzerland, it struck us that no one was there to check our passports. Later, we were told that between Switzerland and France, there are not many checkpoints and people are free to come and go as they wish. What a concept, right? Mmhmm. (insert appropriate facial expression here)
What was really interesting to me though, was that even though the small border towns between France and Switzerland are so close together, when we crossed over to Switzerland, we were unmistakably in Switzerland. The buildings, the roads, the farm lands, and just the feel of the whole place felt very different than in France. It's difficult to explain in words, but we felt the difference much more clearly than when we cross over to Canada, for example, even without the border checkpoints. So distinctly different, yet both so beautiful.
We didn't do as much sight-seeing in Switzerland as we did in France because we were rehearsing and performing for the majority of our time here, but we have one more post full of incredible Swiss chocolates for you, so stay tuned! ;)
Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful week!
--Janny
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