Background

Remember how ages ago we went to Leukerbad and saw a former Miss Switzerland swanning about in her togs and being filmed by a camera crew? Well, it's an ad on telly now for Leukerbad! And sadly/happily, we're not visible at all.

Cool

Sunday mornings at our place are normally a pleasant non-frenzy of watching 3 solid hours of old episodes of Top Gear on BBC somethingorother, and of getting absolutely all the food out of our kitchen, eating half of it, and putting the rest of it back. This week, though, we pulled ourselves together surprisingly early (I am fed up with eating cheese and gherkins for breakfast, which are usually the Sunday-morning brekky staples. Remind me to rant about the Switzy idea of brunch later. And the second episode of Top Gear was one that was on last weekend) and we went and wandered around some gorge instead.

Summer seems to have appeared all of a sudden. I mean, as well as having officially appeared (it started yesterday or something. Possibly the day before. Or even the day after, I don't know any more. What's wrong with starting seasons on the first of the month, like in sensible countries, I say?), it also manifested itself by bringing some actual hot weather, a change from the relentless weeks of rain and temperatures in the teens that we've had lately, not necessarily in a good way. Anyway, we decided to go and do something cool (obviously I mean literally cool, as in with lower temperatures, not cool like "cool, man" because we're not really like that) and we ended up at the Aareschlucht, which is this gorge thing that the Aare (river. As in Aarau, as eagle-eyed readers might recognise as my former home or something) goes through, in the general vicinity of Meiringen, where the nerdier of you will know that Sherlock Holmes would have met his watery end had he not not really existed.

Anyway, it was super! And cool! It was a good 10 degrees* cooler in that gorge thingie than it was out of it. It basically involved walking along this walkway thing that had been built on the side of a rockface, and occasionally through rock, by the river. Which looked very cold. Sadly, nothing very interesting happened, so I'm just going to bung up a few photos and leave it at that.

* total guess

Murten

Yeterday was a lovely sunny day. I put on my non-wintery coat (for only the second time since being back in Switzy, the first time being on Friday) and off we went to Murten, where we wandered aroud the town (quaint and charming), then wandered down to the lake, had a picnic, toyed with the idea of going on a boat trip to somewhere, but then decided not to and lolled on our picnic blanket for ages instead, reading and chatting and drinking tea from a thermos (which is something that I suspect I have never done before, but I am now a thermos convert. It was super and not at all grandmotherly). Being me, I had taken a brolly and spent all my time under it, avoiding the sun.

And yet, in the evening when we got home, I saw that I was sort of sunburnt.

I hate weather.

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.

The Best Games Ever

I was off wasting some time in Lausanne the other day (actually enrolling in my french course which I am starting on Tuesday - aagh - and which was moronically difficult to do what with me spending ages not being able to find the place and then the three people I dealt with there not really being able to speak much english, and then them giving me a form in french to fill in but I didn't know what to write where and they were telling me what to write but they were telling me in french and then there were all the spelling issues and so on..) and as I had a bit of time up my sleeve before having to pick up my husband in Fribourg and take him home I thought I would pop down to the Olympic Museum and see what they had to say for themselves.

Rather than being at all controversial or decisive, though; rather than talking about the incongruence of the juxtaposing of all the red stuff festooned everywhere with information about the history of China and its many warm and embracey qualities, and the statue celebrating the Olympic ideal of non-violence (a gun with the barrel tied in a knot, and a plaque next to it talking about how the Olympics aim towards an "increasing effort to create peace and non-violence through sport"); rather than talking about whether or not I would throw things at people taking part in the torch relay (which incidentally I would not), I am going to instead talk about the wondrous event that was the Sydney Olympics.

A few of the walls inside the museum are dedicated to a small blurb about each of the modern Olympics and what was so great about them. As anyone who remembers what little Juaney Samaranch said during the closing ceremony will not be surprised to hear, what is written in the blurb about the Sydney Olympics is that they were "the best Games in history". Huh. Apparently that wasn't just the sort of hysterical hyperbole that they say during the closing ceremonies all the time, it was actually true enough to write on a wall in a museum (although of course we all knew that anyway. Or at least, it was certainly the best Olympics that I have ever been to, not that I attended any actual sporting events of course, since, let's face it, sport is boring. All the non-sporty bits were super, though).

Interestingly, the wall also said that the reason the Sydney Games were so super was because of the many volunteers (some of whom you still occasionally see out and about in their volunteer uniforms, weirdos), because of the Australian love and knowledge of sport (fair enough), and because of our "anglo-saxon capacity for fair play". Hmm. Are anglo saxons known for their capacity for fair play? Does that mean that everyone else is cheating? I thought the reason the Sydney Olympics were so super was because it was sunny and the trains weren't atrocious and because everyone was bizarrely happy all the time. Oh, and because we all really enjoyed that show that Roy and HG did (I can't believe I have forgotten what it was called and that I can't be bothered to google it. The Dream?).

Leukerbad Revisited

Because my first trip to Leukerbad was such fun, I decided, a week later, to mark the occasion by going there again. Actually, I went because I heard on the grapevine that an Australian person who lives there was leaving the country and that she wanted to give away her book collection. I emailed her and said "please may I have your books?" and she said "sure" and so I spent another long and arduous day sitting on a train.


This trip was quite different from the last one. For starters, there was no Reto there to chat with and to fall asleep on. There were no thermal pools, no Miss Switzerland and no fighter planes (there were still lots of those birds though). It was grim and grey and freezing and snowing (apparently most of the ski lifts there were on wind hold all day). Instead of lugging around wet towels and swimwear, I lugged around bags and bags of books (really, she gave me about 50 books. Mostly paperback, fortunately, but still extremely heavy). I hardly even gave the likelihood of the bus falling off the road and down the side of the mountain a second thought.


And was it worth it? Well, since it's my solemn duty now to travel as much as possible so as to get my money's worth on my train ticket*, and seeing as I got a giganto stack of books out of it, I'd say yes, of course. I had a really nice time chatting to the woman who gave me the books, and I always like a nice trip to the mountains. I'm not sure that a lot of the books are things I would necessarily choose to read myself (a lot of romance stuff. There's even one with a picture on the cover of a man with a sword and a ponytail, wearing a billowy white open-to-the-navel pirate shirt and gesturing heroically) but that doesn't mean I won't. I carried the damn things half way across the country, after all, and I will certainly get my effort's worth out of them.





* and I am doing very well indeed on this front. I seem to have done about $400 worth of travel in the past week and a bit

Dolder Whatever

Today Reto and I went to see the newly renovated Dolder Grand (a big fancy schmancy hotel on a hill overlooking Zurich). Apparently they have been spending a fortune over the last 4 years to shiny the place up, and yesterday, today and tomorrow there are open days where for the mere price of queueing quite a bit you can have a gander around all over the place.

We arrived at the Dolderbahn (the wee train that takes you up the hill to the hotel) at about 2.30pm and the queueing began. The train, which comes by every 10 minutes or so, was just at the end of being packed completely full of people (average age - about 65, I think. Which is fair enough given that it was a workday, and who but retired people and the odd slacker layabout has time to spare to gawk at hotels on a weekday?) so we waited for the next one with an ever-increasing throng of people. We got in the next train (packed in like sardines. If you'd collapsed you wouldn't have actually fallen over we were that tightly wedged in) and moments later came across the next throng of people that we had to queue amongst.

They were letting groups of people into the hotel every 10 minutes or so, so there was quite the crowd waiting outside to get in. Fortunately it was a nice day, and what with the apparent Swiss inability to queue in an orderly or organised fashion, we only ended up waiting outside for about half an hour (in which time I suspect I may have got a little bit sunburnt, which is completely ridiculous). In we went, and around we wandered.

It was a bit ordinary. Well, obviously it was actually really lavish and fancy and there were all sorts of cool designerish chandeliers and interesting wall-substitutes (by which I actually mean these hanging metallic beady things, the poor cousin of which you would see in studenty flats, but here they were in the bars and they were quite shiny and flash) and things made of marble and so on. There were also pools and gyms and "wellness" areas and of course fancy rooms and suites and luxury grand suites and so on, but really ... it all seemed a bit desperately overdone, and there was far too weird and non-cohesive a mix of old stuff (gargoyles and hideous colour schemes and olden days wallpaper) and new stuff (the hangy beady walls and newfangled lighting). And then later I read somewhere that apparently the cheapest room is something like 560 chf a night, and the most expensive is 14 000 chf a night. Which is obviously insane. Why would you want to spend that much money to stay somewhere that is jarringly decorated and inconveniently located? Of course it did have a rather lovely view over the city, and if you were inclined to spend all your time spending all your money, playing golf, being massaged and feeling confused it might be super. If not, perhaps not so much.

Leukerbad

To celebrate the first day of our shiny new GAs, Reto and I got up at the crack of dawn and went on a giganto train trip across the country and around a bit. I had been meaning to go to an outdoor thermal pool back in December, while it was wintery but before we left for the sunny shores of Australia. Somehow we never got around to it, so today (with all the snow that has been falling lately) seemed like an ideal day.

Generic snow pic at 7.30am (aka "crack of dawn")

We got up, as I said, at the crack of dawn. We stood in the snow and waited for the bus. The bus arrived but for some reason drove very very slowly, so we got to the train station late so we missed our train, so then we missed the next train as well and had to wait in Zurich until the next decent connection which wasn't for an hour. This was actually not so bad as it gave us time to have a nice coffee and complain a bit before we got down to the really arduous "sitting on a train" stuff.

Then we sat on a train for hours and hours. We went from Zurich to Bern to Thun to Spiez to Visp, then we got off that train, and on to another one that took us to Leuk, and then we sat around in the freezing and waited for the bus that would take us up the big big hill to Leukerbad. The roads up to Leukerbad were some winding and treacherous roads, reminiscent in my opinion of those horrible winding roads that take you up to the ski resorts in the Queenstown area of New Zealand. Admittedly I have only been there (the ski resorts of the Queenstown area of NZ) once and it was about 10 years ago, so if the roads there are less winding, less unpaved (although that might just be a figment of my imagination), wider, and have more guard rails to stop you from plunging to your inevitable death off the side of the road and the mountain every time you turn a corner or come across another vehicle going in the opposite direction, I apologise unreservedly to whatever authority is in charge of roads to the ski resorts in the Queenstown area of NZ. But assuming nothing has changed, you NZers would feel right at home on the roads to Leukerbad (although at least these ones are coated in bitumen, as roads really should be). It was all blind corners and overhanging rock faces with enormous icicles dripping off them (and looking like they wanted to fall and stab you through the heart) and slumping snow (threatening to turn into an avalanche and sweep you to your death if nothing else has already) and life flashing before your eyes at every turn. Or something like that.

Anyway, we got to Leukerbad and we had lunch (nothing better than swimming on a full stomach. Although frankly I think that whole "no swimming for an hour/two hours after lunch, kiddies" thing is a load of hogwash) and we went to one of the various thermal pools there and it was super.

Leukerbad with imposing mountains

Interestingly enough, the pool itself was kinda dull. I've been to a few thermal pools in Switzerland, and most of the ones I have been to have had at least some pretence of a therapeutic thing going on, with jets of water that are supposed to soothe your sore bits or hideous fountains of undrinkably sulphurous water that is supposed to be the elixir of youth or whatever. This place that we went to had about 4 different pools, only one of which was outdoors, no novelty jets of water (well, not many and none that could be classified as therapeutic) and offered nothing disgusting to drink. There was also another pool area upstairs, the "roman-irish bath" which was vastly more expensive than the rest and seemed to involve lots of nudity and some sort of mysterious massage.

We spent most of our time in the only outdoor pool, floating around, admiring the ridiculously impressive view (mountains galore) and wishing we had brought our sunglasses (what with all the water and all the snow it was very glary). The entertainment that was kindly and accidentally laid on by the establishment involved not only the mountains, but also this really interesting and large flock of birds (jackdaws, Reto says, but now that I have looked at Wikipedia I see that he is wrong, because our birds had white or possibly yellow beaks. Reto has now updated his answer to include some grumbling about not being able to translate the names of birds into english, he's not an ornithologist, and that they were alpendohles.) which spent ages floating and swooping around above us. Then came the planes, which Reto (who spent the day being very knowledgeable. I have more faith in him on the topic of planes than I do on birds, though, because apparently this is all Top Secret Stuff He Learnt In The Army (or something)) told me at length was all about the Swiss army playing practice plane games (since, let's face it, they are never really likely to play real plane games). There were 3 planes (FA-18 Hornets, for the nerds out there, or the people who want to suggest that Reto doesn't know what he's talking about. Unless I just don't remember properly, of course, because let's face it, I don't care) and they were zipping very noisily about in the sky above us, chasing each other and twirling about all over the place and occasionally shooting mysterious flare things in the general direction of each other. Very entertaining.

Entertainment Number 4 came in the form of a former Miss Switzerland (or here if you are after a less wordy overview) turning up to be involved in the filming of an ad or something. Ever more people turned up and sat in the outdoor pool and waited and waited and watched and watched (while very little happened) and didn't leave in spite of their skin turning all wrinkly and their retinas being burned irreparably from all the glare. Eventually, after much faffing by the crew, (former) Miss Switzerland turned up skulked about in a bathrobe for a while, then spent ages standing in the freezing air in a bikini and eventually was allowed to get in the pool while the rest of us stood around trying not to look like we were gawking. Which of course we were. It was actually extremely uninteresting.

And then we came home again, another 4 hours or so in the train (and the bus and the other train and the other train and the other bus).

A non-treacherous icicle. We didn't get any pics of the good ones.

It was a super day. I would thoroughly recommend a mountainous outdoor thermal pool experience to anyone, even better if you can get assorted birds and some fighter pilots along too.

Money not spent: (train ticket cost assuming I had a halfy card, which until yesterday I did: 101.80 CHF)