Kim Young Woo 201203937 / Place First Draft / Narrative Composition Tuesday

"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. While this song was playing over the bus speakers, everyone looked out the window. The images I saw were exactly the same as the screensavers you could find on google images of nature.

Our tour group was headed to the second destination of the trip. 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 didn't start out too well. Getting lost under horrible weather, I was very bummed out that the place where I had romanticised while I was young turned out to be a let down.

During the bus ride to the next location, I was able to forget about my let down when our guide requested each member of the group to play their three favorite songs. However, from all the various taste in music that played over the speakers, the song "Sweet Disposition," is the only one song that I could 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. Surrounding me with its majestic presence, I was in awe and remember tears forming in my eyes. We had arrived in the Swiss Alps.

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. With huge mountains encircling our 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 at 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 thus is the reason why from my whole Europe trip, Switzerland is the most memorable.