Last Sunday, we suddenly heard an odd sound coming through the windows. We were curious to find out what it was, so went outside to check it out.

Sure enough, there were a couple of men playing alphorns right outside of our window on the courtyard! The alphorn is a traditional Swiss instrument that looks like a very large trumpet, made from wood.

I had the chance to try to play one of those instruments a while back in a team building exercise at work and, like most people at the event, found it very difficult to even get a note out of the instrument, let alone actually playing a tune on it!

You can hear a short recording of what we heard in the player below. If you listen carefully, you will also hear cowbells in the recording. This is another typical Swiss tradition, where all the cows have large bells hanging around the neck and you can hear them from far away! We have five of those cows on a nearby field and constantly hear the cowbells ringing.

Here are a few pictures of the two men playing the alphorns: