Die Insel

Well, what a hectic week of not going to french this has been. As well as all the sleeping in and loafing around, there was also the fete de la musique last weekend, which involved lots of wandering around the town and listening to marching-type bands and this floaty sub-aquatic sounding rock, and all the jazz that came from the stage about 2 doors up from our place. Then there was the Aareschlucht and the strange meeting of Inverell and Switzerland, and then a rendezvous with my Switzerland-Australia exchange partners (by which I mean our Switzy friends who moved to Australia at approximately the same time as I moved here). And then yesterday, Reto and I spent half the afternoon sitting on a piece of artwork that's here as part of the Belluard Bollwerk International festival.

The artwork in question was this, an island that they've built near the main train station here (ie. smack dab in the middle of stuff), made of scaffolding and with a solid and grassy top, and you rent it for a few hours (for free!) and you climb up, pull the ladder up behind you and then loaf on the lawn and do whatever you like. As it turned out, what we liked was sitting around, doing some reading and some chatting and some lolling, having a bit of a cocktail hour (a thermos full of gin and tonic and various snacky items) and being stared at by passers by.


It was super. We really were an island. As it turns out, swanning about with a parasol on top of a grassy scaffolding island in the middle of town on a Friday afternoon makes you something of a target for starers and hecklers and lunatics, but it also lets you not care at all. We sat there in the normally-non-loitering-friendly centre of town (where it's all roads and train tracks and concrete and gaggles of congregating schoolkiddies) and we read our books and we drank our gin and we looked at stuff going by and felt totally disconnected from it all, and it was great. There was so much hustle and bustle all around us, and we loafed with our shoes off. I can't recommend it highly enough. And the best (/worst) part is that it doesn't seem to be very popular at all. Since we left the island last night, I haven't seen anyone else up there at all, in spite of the fact that it's available around the clock for all your loitering needs. I may well take advantage of its unpopularity to do some more top quality public loafing some time next week.