The Great European Adventure: Christmas of Ought Nine and New Year's 2010 (Part 2)

These photos are all from Lauterbrunnen and on, I think. The one at the left is just after arrival on Lauterbrunnen on the 26th...Not the best photo ever, what with the light having been terrible, but I think it sort of portrays our feelings about the travelling and many aspects of Switzerland that turned out to be frustrating.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We slept in on Christmas day. I think we might have awakened and walked down for free breakfast at the hostel, and then returned to bed for another few hours.

I think the afternoon was mostly uneventful. We walked around Geneva looking for cool things to do. I was still nursing a pretty terrible head cold and the beginnings of a frightful cough, so Rachel suggested we look for something spicy to eat for dinner. Spicy of course, is relative in Europe, though Switzerland turned out to offer more in the way of flavor than the UK, for sure. We found an Indian restaurant that we decided to return to later. Somewhere during the walk I talked briefly to my parents, who were on my way to my brother's place to cook a goose. I kept thinking of all the ways to use "to cook one's goose".

I really thought I'd be more homesick on Christmas than I was. Honestly, it didn't feel much like Christmas at all, for all that there were lights and signs about happy holidays and all of that. I'm sure there's some kind of greeting card sentiment you could use to express this, like maybe family is what makes holidays or something. But really, I think it falls to being a creature of habit. I'm much like a cat in that I let my routine define my being.

We spent a lot of time this trip writing post cards and journal entries, which was fun. Here's a photo Rachel took at one of our hostels that might give you an idea of what that was like. Postage in Switzerland is, for the record, expensive. Like just about everything else in the whole country.

Anyway, Christmas Day. We hopped on a random tram and hopped off again at the next thing that seemed interesting, which turned out to be a carnival. The carnival was the only place in town we'd seen any people at all, really, and it was packed. We walked around and looked at the lights and the games. Ate crepes with lemon and powdered sugar, with these comical utensils that were a fork with a plastic knife edge on one side. I wondered why I'd never seen such a device, but then Rachel pointed out it was probably because if the knife had any edge to speak of, you would cut the hell out of your mouth trying to use it. Luckily for us, this was not the case (or perhaps unluckily, because the knives were so dull they were actually completely useless). Regardless, my cheeks stayed intact, so maybe I should be grateful.

The bumper cars in Switzerland have the flags of actual countries waving behind them, which I thought was interesting. I envisioned having bumper car reenactments of major wars, and things of that nature, but who knows if anyone else was thinking it.

We wandered back to the Indian restaurant. Sometimes, Rachel asks people to describe their mind as if it were a place. If it were a day of the year, the Indian restaurant would have been Valentine's Day. It was remarkably pink and the upholstery was all velvety. Kind of alarming really.

We got something mildly spicy, and I had a glass of pinot noir that was purportedly made in Geneva. We were one of two tables in the restaurant, and the waiter kept checking and re-checking with us to see if "everything was ok", and insisted on refilling my a couple times, though I only wanted the one glass. They gave us some kind of rose (perfume) flavored drink, and he and his friends stared awkwardly on in a way that made us fear drugging and kidnap, and then we were on our way.

I think what followed was a comic attempt at washing our clothes in the basement of the hostel there. Their washing machines and dryers were so comically complicated that we failed a lot of times. There were innumerable buttons with only photos to explain their purpose. One supposes this is to facilitate their use by a wide variety of nationalities? But really it was just supremely frustrating.

I think we went to bed relatively early. On Boxing Day we traveled to Lauterbrunnen. It amuses me to call it Boxing Day because I only learned in England, among Tom's family and friends, that it was even called Boxing Day. I amused them by telling them that I usually just call it "the day after Christmas", which seems to suffice. And it was only on the way to Lauterbrunnen that Rachel told me why it was called Boxing Day.

Anyway, Lauterbrunnen was an interesting experience. It was really pretty, down in an Alpine valley that was, supposedly, the inspiration for the elf city Rivendell in Tokien's Lord of the Rings. There was this crazy waterfall right across from our hostel that was sort of spewing freezing water down the side of a mountain in such a way that it turned to a fine mist of rain and then froze, mid-air, into snow before hitting the ground. It's there on the right, but it's not really easy to see the water/snow falling, except as evidenced by the ice and snow where it was blown back against the mountain by the wind.

We tried to check into our hostel, but found that the office was only open 8 to 10 a.m. and 4 to 7 p.m., for some crazy reason. We waited til it opened, and then checked into a giant dormitory of 32 beds. Then we tried to go to the grocery store, which decided without notice that it was going to close an hour and a half early, so that as soon as we walked in, someone barked that we had exactly one minute, and that the store was going to be closed. Then they turned off the lights.

We grabbed a few avocados and some Swiss power adapters, because, for some reason, they use different plugs there than in the rest of Europe, even though the voltage was the same. And then we had to check out.

This put a halt to our plans of making Mexican food for dinner, and we were both pretty bummed. We spent the evening in our dorm and downstairs at the pub, writing post cards and mingling with the gaggle of Australians that were there. We tried to go to bed early, only to discover that we were supposed to have brought out own bedding, and that they had run out of bedding to rent. We stole a bunch of wool blankets off of the other beds, and ended up sleeping under about 20 pounds of blankets in our freezing room. The least amusing thing about this room on the first night (aside from its temperature) was that the bathrooms were downstairs and outside. That was cold and inconvenient. The most amusing thing about this room was that it had a machine to emit a noise to repel bats plugged in at the foot of my bed. This was sort of alarming. We both hoped and feared that, on unplugging it to charge our various phones and cameras and computers, we would wake up to find a bunch of bats hanging from our ceiling. This did not come to pass, and we were both disappointed and glad.

We took a day trip into Interlocken on a search for Mexican food ingredients, and were rewarded with a tiny market that turned out to be suitable. After wandering about on various buses, we took the train back to Lauterbrunnen and undertook a cooking adventure.

Like most things in Switzerland (like, most notably, the Internet and the showers), the hot plates in the kitchen at the hostel were coin-operated. This was a pain in the ass, really, as we were sharing the kitchen with a lot of people who took up most of the cooking surfaces and left us only with the smallest table and the broken hot plate, only one of whose two burners worked, which meant we were effectively paying twice as much to use a burner as everyone else. We perservered though, and I tried to be helpful as Rachel orchestrated the making of homemade tortillas...the Mexican food was really awesome because I'd been craving it for these last few months in France, where it seems not to exist?

The second night was a lot more stressful. Conscious of our need to get up early the next morning, we tried to go to bed early, but were kept from doing so by the 9 Swiss kids on the other end of the dormitory who decided to "make a discotech" (their words) on their room. There was a lot of shouting, and some swordfighting with the metal ladders of bunk beds. Some mostly-naked moonwalking, and a lot of drinking, as far as we could tell. It was a little exasperating. I think we finally fell asleep around 4, probably only from sheer exhaustion.

We left Lauterbrunnen on the 28th, excited to get to Zurich, where our hostel was going to be less rustic and eccentric. For examples of eccentricity, see the sign by a tiny creek -- only store-bought drinks? Bought from any store? Does that mean I can't cool my moonshine in the creek? And really, with all this snow around, why would I need to cool a drink in a creek?

I think Rachel's feeling about leaving Lauterbrunnen was, largely, "good riddance." I was excited for the train ride, because I think the best part of Switzerland is driving through it. It's a lot prettier when you don't have to think about how cold it is. Or expensive.

The woods and the mountains on the way out were really gorgeous...lots of frozen waterfalls and springs. We sat next to an eccentric British man who was on his way to a hospital to get his broken arm and dislocated shoulder checked out after a skiing accident. He seemed in a pretty great mood for having destroyed his arm on the slopes. He was talking about deciduous pine trees, which I have been meaning to check out, but haven't got around to it yet. He was living in Italy to teach English, and was really enthusiastic about talking about the underlying social issues in Italy. Not exactly the lesson I expected, on a Swiss train, but not unpleasant.

Zurich turned out to be a lot better, hostel-wise. The showers were free, for instance. Breakfast was included, and sheets. We had lockers to put our stuff in. I was altogether impressed. We had opportunity to test out a lot of hostels on this trip, and I have to say that the Zurich one was the best of the trip.

I was amused by the different culture in the German-speaking region, compared to that of the French-speaking one. We were in a small town in Lauterbrunnen, so it didn't make a good comparison with Geneva, but Zurich definitely had a lot of food-related differences that I liked. For instance, lots of sausages, and this strange mint and rhubarb soft drink.

We wandered about the city on the tram, taking note of things. One of the most noticeable things about Zurich was how many train stations it had. Every tram stop was "bahn" something or other, and I wondered how many train stations a city the size of Zurich could possibly need. The Internet, Knower of Things, tells me that its population is just under 400,000? Considering how many train stations Tulsa has, I'm pretty sure Zurich has a few to spare.

Anyway, we also went to the Swiss national history museum. In the court yard, they had set up a skating rink. Rachel and I were really hoping it would shed some light on some things, like why there were statues of giraffes everywhere we went (I think my mom would have liked this), and how one develops a political identity if one grows up in a neutral political environment. Or how one elects a leader for a neutral government -- do you simply vote for the person with the fewest opinions? How does that work? Also, wikipedia says that the Swiss are united by their ideals, including direct democracy and Alpine symbolism. What the hell is Alphine symbolism, and how is it an ideal? And how does a country so small maintain any sense of cohesive identity when they speak so many different languages?

We were full of questions. Unfortunately, the museum really didn't answer very many of them, if any. We were left with even more questions, like how is it not possible to exit the museum without traveling all the way through it the way you came? and how does Switzerland claim to be neutral since some time way before WWII, when they clearly were taking money from the German government?

Needless to say, Switzerland remains kind of an enigma. An expensive, beautiful nation of confusing, confusing things, like coin-operated showers and impossible-to-operate washing machines.

Stay tuned for the next installment!