Cheese And Smut

Reto and I went on a wee trip on Sunday (during the only break in the relentless grey/rainy/snowy/haily skies there has been since we moved here) to Gruyeres (yes, as in the cheese). I had no idea what it was going to be like, but Reto said it was supposed to be relentlessly touristy and cutesy, and I thought there might be a good chance of getting some cheese-eating done, so off we went.

Gruyeres is relentlessly touristy and cutesy. If you intend but fail to get some cheese eating done, you have no one to blame but yourself. There is also a lot of double cream in the region, and apparently meringue with double cream is quite the local specialty. Which strikes me as the poor man's version of pavlova (what, no fruit? No squishy centre? And double cream? Blergh! We went to some cafe for a coffee in the afternoon and instead of giving us the normal milk/cream stuff that you get with your coffee here, they gave us wee chocolate pots filled with double cream, which looked all adorable and decadent but tasted a bit blah and ended up leaving a layer of oily blobs over the top of the coffee. Like I said, blergh). Unlike every single other person there that day, Reto and I didn't have raclette or fondue for lunch, but in spite of our avoidance of the traditional cheese-heavy dishes, we still managed to clog our arteries a bit (as I said, it would have been hard not to).

We went for a wander through the lovely castle on the hill (saving 10chf or something like it with our Swiss Museum Passes, hurrah) and we goggled appropriately at all the adorable old cobbles and low doorways and twirly staircases and snow-covered peaks.

We also wondered why it was that there were so many goth-looking guys (for they were mainly guys) in serious, long black leather coats. We discovered the answer to this question when we went to the HR Giger museum. HR Giger was (is?) some Swiss chap who designed the aliens for the Alien movies (and also for various other spacey movies that I haven't necessarily heard of) and then he bought this house in the otherwise-charming town of Gruyeres and devoted it to his life's work. We went in (saving another 8 chf or so, that good ol' museum pass) and looked at squillions of drawings and paintings and sculptures and models of Alien aliens, and personally I was kinda shocked by the extremely pornographic nature of it all. Not because I am prudish or anything when it comes to imaginative sex among consenting aliens, but because it really wasn't what I was expecting to see there in what is probably one of the cutesy-touristiest bits of Switzerland, and because the pictures in the adults-only rooms were hardly more graphic than the pictures in the "fun for all ages" rooms, and because the sexual themes were everywhere, in every picture in the place. I don't remember the movies being quite so sexually charged. It was surprising. It was weird. It was a huuuuge contrast to all the cheese and twee-ness outside. It gave the whole day a strange feel, and if someone asked me now what my day in Gruyeres was like, I would have to think for a moment in order to come up with an answer that was appropriate for all ages.