Switzerland Day

Reto and I went to his sister and brother-in-law's new (and I mean brand new; they picked up the keys that day) house for a Switzerland Day barbeque, which was great. The house, in proper Swiss style, has a bunker to save them all (and 2 of the neighbours, apparently) when the revolution comes (although recent slackening of the rules re having to keep a year's supply of tinned peaches and cervelat (seemingly indestructible sausages) or whatever in your bunker means, I suppose, that if the revolution does come they will all have to survive on vast quantites of wine (because everyone uses their bunker as a cellar) and then they will have to resort to cannibalism. Which I guess would be less confronting if you were drunk, but still. They really should make sure they have a little camping stove or something, because I'm sure it would be much nicer to eat a cooked person than a raw one. Maybe some herbs and spices would be good, too).

Anyway, the party was super. The garden of the new house is full of fruit trees, so I spent a lot of time picking and scoffing blackberries and raspberries, wondering about making wine out of all the grapes, trying to talk the new owners out of chopping down the plum and cherry trees, and wondering what "holunderbeere" is in english (elderberry, apparently, but since I have no idea what they look or taste like, I couldn't tell at the time). As it turns out, though, no one else is as interested in the edible parts of the garden, so I left with vast quantites of blackberries and raspberries that were too ripe to leave on the bushes (yay!).

The other highlight of the night (apart from the fruit) was the fireworks. As I have mentioned, people buy their own fireworks and let them off whenever they want to, but there are also organised firework events in the towns. From where we were we had a huge view over lots of different towns, and so from about 9pm onwards (when it was sort of dark-ish, or at least enough so that people were starting to set off their firecrackers in earnest, and to light their insanely ginormous bonfires) we had a 180 degree view of pyromania at its prettiest. The best aspects of which, in my opinion, were the massive bonfire in a field nearby (too far away to really appreciate, but it definitely brought back the memories of last year on Switzerland Day, when I had just arrived here for a holiday and I was taken, all jet-lagged and bedraggled, to see this HUGE fire that the town was putting on, that was ENORMOUS and HOT and only about 10m away from where a bunch of cars were parked. No one else, apart from the other token foreigner, seemed to think this was strange), the official fireworks display of the closest town (which was pretty and organised and much grander than all the individual efforts), the huge fires that were burning on big mountains in the distance (because of all the smoky haze you couldn't actually see the mountains any more, so it looked as though there were fires suspended in the sky), and the fireworks that someone had brought to the party, that were let off in the backyard (especially the last one which seemed to be sort of broken and kept flaring a bit then sputtering and half dying before flaring a bit again, and ended up as a few pathetic (but still kind of enormous) tongues of flame shooting up a metre or so then sort of collapsing on the lawn. Fortunately nothing got set on fire that shouldn't have).