Kim Young Woo 201203937/ 4th Essay 2nd Draft / Narrative composition Tuesday

Meeting Nature

"Everyone look out the window, we have arrived at our next destination," the guide said over the mike right when I was thinking that we were never going to reach our destination. This was the moment, when the song "Sweet Disposition" by the Temper Traps was playing on the Ipod. I will never be able to forget the moment when I heard this song for the first time. The peaceful melody and the calming voice of the singer added onto the trance like effect the new destination had on me. The images I saw out the window were exactly the same as the screensavers you can find on google images of nature. I had arrived to my second destination of my Europe trip, the Swiss Alps.

The first place I visited, Paris, wasn't what I had expected and had left me feeling disappointed. Paris wasn't anything new for me. Other than the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, everything was very familiar from what I had grown up with in California. My Europe trip had not start out very well. Getting lost under horrible weather, I was very bummed out that the place where I had romanticised when I was young turned out to be such a let down.

During the bus ride to the Switzerland, I was able to move past my let down when the guide requested each member of the group to play their three favorite songs. However, from all the various taste in music that was played, the song "Sweet Disposition," is the only one song that I still remember four years later. As I pulled up the curtain rack, I saw rows of mountains blanketed in white and so tall that our bus was like an ant finding its way in a child's playground. The mountains were steep, rocky, jagged, and it stretched down for miles. The view was so striking that I couldn't believe my eyes. It reminded me of how tiny I was in such a huge planet. I realized how big the Earth was and how little I knew of anything. This place had a strange effect on me. Surrounding me with its majestic presence, I was in awe and remember tears forming in my eyes.

When we stepped out the bus in our camp, I took a deep breath and felt the crisp air fill in my lungs. When I looked around, I thought I was in a set of the Lord of the Rings where Froto and the other hobbits inhabited. With huge mountains encircling our whole camp, I couldn't believe what I would wake up to for the next couple days. Numerous waterfalls were falling on the shelf of the peaks all around us, sheeps and cows were grazing on the hills 20 feet away from us, and the houses were all very neat and had identical triangular roofs. Even the smell of the place was different, the smell of Mother Earth in its untainted state. With the background noise of the city hundreds of miles away, the only noise I was able to hear were the birds chirping, the sound of the animals, and the fall of the water over the mountains. Never in my life had I felt so much respect for nature. The magnificent scale of the place is unlike anything I have ever seen in my life. This is why from the 11 countries I had visited in Europe, Switzerland is the most memorable.