Switzerland, The Long Slow Version

Switzerland! Oh, my

Taken by your intense peaks

Your beauty fills us

A little haiku for your traveling sensibilities.

We know we are moving along and have dates to keep with other beauties but we could have stayed in the grip of the Swiss Alps. I offer some visual aids, cultivated to convey the spirit of it all, but they will be inadequate.

First, a confession. We are humbled, probably better to say ashamed, to be single-languaged, mono-lingual, lame (also known as American). This has been true throughout our journey but especially here in Switzerland.

Our travel day from the sweet little town of Garmisch, in southern Germany, to Interlaken was jarring. It was long, first of all, but we have stamina for that. It was hot, less stamina and less tolerance  but still we accept it’s just the weather. What so jarred us was the nature of the travel day. More specifically it wasn’t the traveling or the 5 trains and 1 huge double decker bus (coolest thing ever!), it was the impossible connection times between each of them, in stations we had never been. We had a talk the night before, Taylor and I, to just calibrate our solidarity. Not the end of the world if we missed one of these connections so we’d go for it and see how it all went.

It was like a cruel obstacle course for a dumb sorority challenge. Ok, teams, the alphabetabeta yells from the bullhorn. You can’t loose your backpacks. You must all cross the finish line together. 15, 11, 6 minute connections, that’ll be exciting. And you won’t know where the buses come and go in the train stations or what tracks your trains are coming and going from, part of the mystery, right? This is so exciting! Have fun, GO!

We started the day on the wrong train. Right track, right time… why are there TWO TRAINS ON THE SAME TRACK?! Just to mess with us. Our gear had been stowed, kids in seats starting to play, when the discovery was made. OFFFOFFFOFFFOFFFQUICKQUICKQUICK!

The kids dutifully sprinted. Graham, feeling there were too many bags left for Taylor and I, jumped back on to the burning train to help. Taylor and I will never forget first his shocking appearance back on the train and second the straining-to-save -his-life trying lift my unbudging pack. (After this Ian named my pack Thor’s Hammer, unliftable by all but Thor, which I secretly love.)

It was 90 degrees that day. We were running through stations, drawing stares on the civilized Swiss trains, trying desperately to not raise our voices. Not one of the spectators was drenched in sweat. How are these people not sweating? Once we didn’t know that we had lost Graham for about twenty seconds between trains. He miraculously found us through a crowd before we  noticed (the asshole sorority travel challenge supervisor would have DQ’d us for sure) and boy was he angry. So angry in fact, that it took him a couple trains to get over it. That and he had serious doubts about our competence. He was quite unforgiving for the rest of the day. Poor guy. Poor us; he can be a tough customer.

We survived the day, drained and dehydrated; more savvy for the next (we had a shitshow of a time getting our rental car in rural Italy, which involved the kindness of a Moroccan immigrant, a drug lord and hitchhiking before finally securing the damn thing which makes the Swiss train fiasco, as we’ve come to know it, easy).

We expected certain things of Switzerland. The alps, clean trains, punctuality, a fluidity of languages, fondue and altitude, all accounted for. Unexpected things were the heat and mugginess, the off-the-charts fondue (with so few ingredients how could it be much better than it is everywhere? Oh, it’s WAY better, and no cheese hangover). We also expected the inflated prices, mediocre beer, and taylor notes the shocking lack of Swiss cheese. The streets were clean. The people were more of a melting pot mix and looked less like a Ricola coughdrop yodeling marketing campaign. (We were however in the area during the summer yodeling, umm, symposium? Still no Heidi.)

The cows really do wear, at the minimum, door-knocker sized cowbells around their necks. I should say castle-door-knocker size. Long before you approach them in the mountains you hear them. It sounds like a short-bus band practice; no one on the same beat and all bell ringers swinging away to save their lives. That’s what it sounds like. But when you actually see them it’s a surprise. All that racket coming from seemingly perfectly still beasts, lots of them laying down. They chew with a rhythm apparently; all kinds of different rhythms. I adore this. The kids think I’m weird.

Another unexpected thing, these cows dominate the summertime ski runs, the high mountain meadows are theirs. We were told that Swiss chocolate is unparalleled because of their cows’ diet. Edelweiss, the chief sweetener, and wildflowers of every color blanket the meadows. Wonder how happy Reichels would be, meadows full of every chocolate? I’d swing that bell.

The landscape is intense, no denying it. Sheer cliffs, chiseled peaks, wild wooded landscapes between velvet patches of ag lands, bucolic rivers and charming architecture – if this does not affect you then you must be dead inside (or 14, which is not the same thing).

We see that Switzerland is complicated and hard to truly know. We’d love to understand more; like what’s really with all this neutrality? What’s the real story? They certainly are asking that about the US. Nice to leave conversations to return to.

We took care of some random business while in Interlaken.

Taking in Interlaken for 24 hours; we are using her but she is using us as well. It’s a town that has evolved to shake your money tree. We strolled the main drag from the train station after dropping our bags. Then after cheese and bread (aka dinner) in our room we went back out. Looking back, we couldn’t quite get past the souvenir shop feeling in Interlaken. We tried to find her natural self.  Curious if any of you have spent much time here?

We decided to linger the next morning and so with the beauty of Harder Kulm and a curious chocolate school we saw a bit deeper into Interlaken. We would have loved to stay longer, off the beaten path, for a different perspective.

1. 

 

Wengen

From Interlaken it’s a short jaunt to Lauterbrunnen, which feels far enough into the alps to be surreal, but we’ve got a bed in the next village up, so on we go. A cog train takes you further into the mountains to Wengen. The ride there and around to the various neighbor villages for hikes and adventures was the prettiest by far.

Thank you, Switzerland.