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Swiss Chesa -- adventures in Engadin
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28 April 2005
After a few nights in Bellinzona I took the Glacier Express the rest of the way to St. Moritz. Most people go to St. Moritz to ski, but I was particularly interested in it because it's in the Engadin region of canton Graubünden, which is where Switzerland's least-common official language, Romansh, is spoken. Not everyone speaks it, though, and most speak Swiss German at least as a second language, which I suppose means they speak (or at least write) High German as a third language. St. Moritz in particular has been so ravaged by tourism that hardly any Romansh is spoken. I heard some people speaking a weird language on the bus, but it could have been Swiss German. What was unmistakably not Swiss German, however, was that the streets were all called 'via' this, 'via' that. I happened to know from my brother's high school Latin that 'via' is Latin for street, and Romansh, being a Romance language, most likely uses Latin-like words. So there was a promising candidate for a Romansh word if ever I saw one. Also, most of the houses were named Chesa something, so I figured that meant house and was a cognate with the Italian Casa, of Casablanca fame.
The next thing I noticed there was what looked kind of like a frozen lake. I wasn't sure it was a frozen lake at first, because I've never seen a frozen lake before, so suddenly coming across one in a place where it wasn't especially cold would be too awesome. I tried to convince myself it was a big carpark with a bit of ice on it.
When I got to my hotel, the guy running the place was rather apologetic that the skiing season is almost over, everything's basically closed, there's nothing to do here, and even the lake... "It's frozen, isn't it?" I asked, excitedly. He said that a few weeks ago you could skate and sled on it and all sorts of other exciting things, but now the ice is very thin and not good for anything. Well, maybe a Canadian would be disappointed, but I was pretty excited to have confirmation that the lake was indeed at least partially frozen, so I went to see it the next morning. There was a thin broken up crust of ice over most of the lake, and I filmed some ducks alternately swimming and walking on it. It was pretty cute.
After a while of being fascinated by mere H2O, I wandered around town and bought a few things. I discovered that indeed, most of the museums are closed. I could still have gone up the mountain for the view, but it was too cloudy to be worth it. Nonetheless it was a pleasant day, and one of my assumptions about Swiss life was shattered. I'd just about figured out that no matter the differences in language, culture, etc, there would always be a welcoming big orange M somewhere -- not McDonald's, but the Migros supermarket chain which sells everything including kitchen sinks. Alas, St. Moritz has no Migros, but it has two Coops (the other common supermarket chain, which mostly just sells the sort of things you'd expect to find in a supermarket. Coop as in co-operative, not chicken coop.) Outside one of the Coops is an advert showing the head of Migros shaking hands with his Coop counterpart. I don't understand exactly what the advert says in German but I assume that Coop is really Migros's secret identity. The mild-mannered retailer is really Supermarket, or something.
The next day it was raining, and there wasn't enough I hadn't seen in St. Moritz for me to feel like walking around in the rain. Luckily, if I sit on the stairs near the reception of this hotel, I have wireless internet access, so I figured out from the web that Zuoz might be an interesting place to go, with a genuine old-style village. I talked to Hotel Guy over breakfast and he suggested I go further along to Zernez, Scuol (where there are some hot pools), or anywhere else that looked interesting. Basically the further I got from the tourist town of St. Moritz, the more Romansh I should hear.
So I started out by going to Zuoz. Nothing particularly struck me as old about the place, until I noticed that the dates on the houses were not within the last century, as they tended to be elsewhere in Switzerland, but sometimes around 500 years ago. I should mention that it's very common for houses in Switzerland to have names, dates, and slogans on them. I've always wondered when people put dates on buildings. I can't imagine somebody putting up a building and writing '2006' on it... the point seems to be to show how old and wise the building is, rather than (as with software) to make it seem modern now and ready for replacement in a few years. So do they wait fifty years and then put the date on retrospectively?
Anyway, Zuoz in the rain wasn't especially exciting, so I hopped back on the train and went to Zernez. I got there at about 12:40, so everything was closed for lunch. A lot of things close for lunch in Switzerland, except for restaurants which close for not-lunch. I wandered around in the rain impatiently until 1:30, when a shop selling Zernezertorte reopened. I bought an entire Zernezertorte because I didn't know how to ask for just one slice in German. Then I wandered around some more until everything else reopened at 2:00. In that wandering I found that the Swiss National Park information centre is closed until May 22. I also noticed that houses there are chasas rather than chesas, I suppose it's a different dialect.
I often buy keyrings (known in American English as keychains) from the towns I visit, as it gives some direction to my random wandering. So shortly after 2:00 I went into a Kiosk (another shop I can find almost everywhere... it's actually the name of the chain) and bought a Zernez key ring. The shop mostly had generic Switzerland keyrings (for anybody needing Swiss souvenirs whose sole stop in Switzerland happens to be Zernez) so I had to ask whether there were any Zernez-specific ones. Susprisingly, I managed to get my point across in German, and the shopkeeper found the Zernez variation on the standard Swiss cowbell souvenir keyring.
Next I went to the Romansh bookshop, in the hope of finding a dictionary or something to add to my collection of dictionaries of obscure regional languages I'll never get around to learning. I was delighted to find that the guy in the shop spoke a bit of French but no English, I had thought that might turn out to be the case somewhere in Engadin, since French would be easier to learn for a Romansh speaker. Unfortunately, he said he didn't have anything in other languages, but there was a library just down the road. As I was walking away from the shop, I decided that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get a book in an obscure regional language I'll never get around to learning, so I went back and asked if he had any really easy books, for kids or something. Once he got the idea that I was interested in learning a bit of Romansh, he told me that he had a Romansh Ladin<->French dictionary, so I bought that. He didn't have any Romansh<->English dictionaries, which was a little bit weird considering the Romansh<->French dictionary turned out to be written by an American living in Canada. What on Earth possesses a native English speaker living in Canada to write a dictionary translating between French and a language spoken by 50 000-70 000 people in Switzerland? I want to be that guy!
According to the book, chasa is the Romansh Ladin Vallader variant, at least. Also, schlambardunar means wander, or pound the pavement. What a cool word. I might apronymise it. And schlaffunada means hit. I think I'm going to like this language.
Tomorrow, I'll go home and get ready to start the second half of my trip.
Okay, now it's tomorrow, and I'm on the train to Chur on the way to Geneva, and I have one thing to add. Today while I was having breakfast a squirrel came up to the other side of the window and sat there eating food that had been left out for it, and looking very cute. That's my second squirrel I've seen in Switzerland. I love living in a country that has squirrels.
Oh wow, the girl across the isle from me on the train has an iPod nano. Those things are so thin, Clarus could almost carry one.
Aah, I have another thing to add... Hotel Guy told me over a slice of zernezertorte that since St. Moritz practically closes down when the ski season is over, in May you will find people from Engadin all over the world, taking their holidays. Then when the ski season starts up again, you will find people from all over the world in Engadin, giving St. Moritz and the neighbouring towns a population larger than Zurich's. It makes me think of an oscillating universe, or something involving a whole lot of rubber bands, simple harmonic motion, and a goat. (Yes, I threw in the goat just for the sake of absurdity, it would probably work almost as well without it.)
Another update... I'm on the train from Zurich, still on the way to Geneva, and I just saw the first nuclear power station (American-style) I've seen in Switzerland. We must be passing through Aargau, the energy canton. Aren't apronyms educational?
It's funny how they shuffle, add and remove the languages of the 'next stop: X' announcements as we move into different regions. I think the same combination of one to four of German, French, Italian, and English is used for the duration of each train journey. However, they switch the order so that the language of the canton the train is about to stop in comes first (aha... it's explained here. This is the kind of observation you get from me when I'm able to write a travelogue while on a train. Ooh! A field of deer! We must be going through an agricultural canton. I think there's something wrong with this country, Every so often I see a field of cows, sheep, or deer, but in between there are all these green paddocks with no sheep in them. It's just not right.
I just remembered to mention that there were no Moritz icecreams in St. Moritz. Ticino
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25 April 2006
After a day in Ticino, it still doesn't seem all that Swiss. There are big green tree-covered hills instead of mountains, rather like Wellington really. Although I suspect that my definition of mountain is a hill with snow on top, so it could be a seasonal thing. But mountains also seem to only have pine trees and deciduous trees that look like naked pine trees, whereas the hills in Bellinzona look like piles of broccoli, as they do in Wellington. It was raining this morning and I didn't feel like going to see the castle on the hill, but luckily there's another castle (historically, perhaps part of the same castle) just around the corner, so I had a look around that. For the afternoon I went to Locarno. I like Locarno more, perhaps partly because it wasn't raining, but also because the lake is kind of nice, and things are more interesting-looking in general.
While the weird thing about Bellinzona was that instead of Swiss German, everyone speaks Italian (or maybe it's Ticinese), the weird thing about Locarno was that so many people spoke German there. In Geneva, I'm quite used to people switching to English the moment I show the slightest bit of uncertainty about what they're saying. In Locarno, at least five times, people responded to my blank stares with German, which I was surprised to find was actually helpful sometimes. Even when I spoke in English they replied in German. It's as though Ticino is used to most of the rest of the country being German-speaking, while being insulated from the general dominance of English in the rest of the world. It was kind of cool, I wonder if I would do better here if I just forgot about English and went straight to French when I don't understand them. It begins
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24 April 2006
Well here I am heading through the St. Gotthard tunnel, so I should have a while without any scenery to distract me. I've done and seen so much that it's hard to believe it's only been five days since I started out on this trip. I'll try my best to be brief rather than rambling so much that I don't get to write it all down, but I can't make any promises. I've never been any good at not rambling.
The first day, I went to Bern. I intended to visit the parliament buildings. I'm not entirely sure why, since I'm not very interested in politics, but that's the sort of thing that people who live in a country do, even if the tourists don't. And the Swiss political system is actually kind of interesting, although I might only have that impression because the book I bought from the supermarket about the Swiss political system has a lot of cartoons. Anyway, as it turned out, the building was being repaired, so there were no guided tours. Instead, I sat in front of parliament for a while watching kids run around in the forest of unpredictable spurts of water that covers part of the square. At first they were trying to run through it without getting wet, later it seemed that getting wet was the aim. It occurred to me that the water spurts could be there in order to scare off pigeons.
Last time I went to Bern, I was surprised to see that even though Swiss flags are hung all over the place everywhere I've been in Switzerland, there was no Swiss flag on the parliament building. This time, I watched some men put up a lot of flags on the parliament building, and actually filmed them putting up the Swiss flag. It looked to me like some flags were slightly bigger than others, which I believe to be bad flag etiquette. Certainly the Swiss flag was smaller, since it's square while all the others are rectangular. Here I see an application for an old class of geometrical puzzles... the first person who can tell me how to construct a square (Swiss flag) with twice the area of a given square (i.e, the area of a rectangular flag of twice the width of a given Swiss flag) using only a straightedge and a compass wins a photograph of a mountain of chocolate.
Oh dear, two long paragraphs and I've only got through Bern. The same day, I headed to Interlaken, where even the scenery from the train station is awesome. I checked into the Rugenpark Hotel. It's a nice little B&B run by an American and his Swiss wife... they were both very friendly and gave me ideas about what to do over breakfast. They also told me some things about Swiss German and Switzerland in general, which is exactly what I'm on this trip to find out about.
That night I went to a crazy restaurant where they did fun stuff like playing alphorns and cowbells. They seemed to have a native speaker on staff for any guest's language, in fact they occasionally played a Korean song that made the Koreans get all excited in a patriotic sort of way. The staff seemed to be both drunk and on stimulants or something, always actively making fools of themselves for our benefit. It seemed ludicrously touristy without being particularly Swiss, not that I know much about what is Swiss. Anyway, it was fun.
The next day, the first thing I did after breakfast was a tandem paraglide. Yep, you read it correctly. Actually it's not dangerous or scary or anything, I just sat there serenely admiring the view and taking photos. Now, if I'd been the pilot, that would have been a whole different matter. So that was awesome, but I can't think of much to say about it so you'll just have to look at the photos when I get around to uploading them. Or you could look at the videos I took... here's a short one which I think actually has the best views, a medium-length one, and a really long one I took while we seemed to be basically spinning on the spot for a while. I also have real film photos taken by the pilot using a camera on a stick, which show us dangling there in the air.
Later that day, I hopped on a bus to see where it would go. Aah, that reminds me, buses are very scarce in Interlaken compared with Geneva. You could easily walk around for half an hour without seeing a single bus, I actually wondered whether the bus stop signs were just for show. In Geneva there are buses everywhere. Anyway, this particular bus went to one of the lakes which Interlaken is between, so I got off and took pictures of that. It's really pretty, nice blue water with mountains behind it and all that. There were also some classic wooden Swiss cottages nearby with the ornately carved balconies and mottos written in German. I'd have taken photos of them but it would have seemed a bit weird, since there were clearly people living in the houses and kids playing outside them, so they might have wondered why I was taking pictures of their houses. I wonder what it's like to live in a tourist attraction.
After going back to the hotel for a while and looking at photos, I decided to go to the other lake, which didn't seem very far away on the map. Well, it was a lot further away than it looked. After I'd been walking for ages, and thought about turning back several times, I was just thinking that the view had better be really, really good to be worth this when I saw the back of a castle through the trees! It was the ruins of Beregruine Weissenau. I vaguely remembered reading something online about a castle in Interlaken, but I had probably read that it could only be reached by walking quite a way and resigned myself to not seeing it. So it was really quite awesome to come across it by accident like that. If I'd known how far I was going to walk, or if I had known that I'd be walking all the way to see that castle, I wouldn't have gone, but since I didn't know what I was doing it turned out I got to see something I never thought I'd see. I actually didn't really get a good view of the lake, in the end, because the trail I was following didn't go as close to it as it looked like it did on the map. But there was a nice view from the top of the castle.
When I got back into town after dark, I went back to the crazy restaurant for chocolate fondue. I can hardly ever finish an entire main course, let alone dessert in the same meal, so, having had dinner the night before, I went back specifically for dessert.
All that in one day! The next day I planned to go to Jungfraujoch, much publicised as 'the top of Europe' because it has Europe's highest train station. It's a bit like how Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Western Europe, if you add enough criteria anything is the highest something. Anyway, by the time I'd got up, had a leisurely breakfast, showered, and everything, it was really a bit too late to go there. So the woman from the hotel suggested I go to Schilthorn instead, which was closer and cheaper, and I could visit a little village called Mürren on the way. That I did. Mürren is a car-free village, so a nice preview of Zermatt, my next stop. It wasn't entirely car-free though, the peace being shattered by a bulldozer fixing something or other. The views from Schilthorn were much like those from Mont Blanc, really... mountains everywhere. The difference was that a James Bond movie I've never seen was set partially on Schilthorn.
Wow, a huge crowd of teenagers has just boarded this train at Biasca. wonder where they're all going. It's 4:43p.m. so anything school-related seems unlikely.
And back to the past... the next day, I went to Zermatt, which is the starting point for the Glacier Express. I mentioned that the B&B in Interlaken was awesome, because of the people running it. Well, the hotel I stayed at in Zermatt was a whole different kind of awesome. It was a big hotel so the staff were the usual, professional, hotel-employee type staff, nothing awesome about that. But it turned out to be a real yuppie hotel, with an entire fitness centre with pool and exercise equipment, and massages and other obscure therapies at extra charge. I swam in the pool a fair bit. It was the sort of hotel that has little packets of things which I always neglect to bring with me on vacation, because I never use them... a shoe sponge, shaving kit, nail kit, etc. But the most awesome thing was, there was wireless internet access available in the rooms, at no extra charge. This seems to be unusual at big hotels... remember the Marriott charged an extra $12.50 a night for internet, and that was only by ethernet. Cheaper hotels tend to have free wireless internet, but usually only in the lobby. The hotel in Interlaken had one of those awful coin-operated terminals, with a fixed (German) user interface and keyboard layout and most of the normal features for things such as text editing disabled, so if I managed to figure out how to type something I couldn't then copy and paste that something. Hotel Daniela in Zermatt, however, had free wireless access in the rooms, served by genuine Apple AirPort base stations. And what's more, they had an iMac for people without laptops to use, and it had separate logins for different languages. They clearly knew what they were doing. And in the low season, the prices are pretty reasonable. I'd definitely stay there again if I had any reason to go back to Zermatt, which I don't.
So, about Zermatt itself. It's a car-free village, which is misleading because there are still little electric taxis buzzing around the place, and bigger (presumably electric) buses advertising Gruyère. What Zermatt is is a tourist resort. It's for rich people who want to ski or be pampered in 'wellness' centres. And yet, considering how tourist-centric it was, I felt sort of like an odd one out as an English speaker. It seemed like most of the guests at my hotel spoke Swiss German or French, and people at restaurants weren't so used to dealing with English speakers. I wonder if Zermatt is simply where rich people from the canton of Valais (which is a bilingual canton, in some areas they speak French, in others, Swiss German) go to ski or be pampered in 'wellness' centres.
Apart from the one bar which always seemed to be overflowing with partygoers, I found it to be a bright, peaceful town. Or at least a peaceful town with bright weather. The main attraction is the Matterhorn, of which there is a fairly good view, but to get the sort of view of it that you see on postcards, you have to walk further than I could be bothered to. I could have taken a cable car up the Klein Matterhorn to get a better view, but it occurred to me that I tend to go to a town to get a good view of its mountain, then go up the mountain to get a good view of the town, and there's something oddly redundant about that. I didn't get around to doing that, so I just wandered around, swam in the hotel pool, and relaxed. There was a nice park to sit in and read.
I stayed in Zermatt for two nights, and then took the Glacier Express to Andermatt. I wasn't particularly impressed with the Glacier Express, it's supposed to be an amazing scenic train ride but I didn't find it to be any more scenic than the other train rides through Switzerland that I've been on. The publicity for it always shows the train going over a high bridge and into a tunnel, which looks really impressive, but when you're in the train you don't see the bridge, and the inside of the tunnel is nothing much to look at. While I was toward the middle of the train I took a photo of the front of the train going over a bridge and into a tunnel.
The Glacier Express goes all the way to Saint Moritz, but I got off at Andermatt in order to go on a little excursion to Ticino, the Italian speaking (or, more accurately, Italian-writing, Ticinese-speaking) canton. I wandered around Andermatt, my only stop in the canton of Uri, for about an hour before going to Göschnen to catch the train to Bellinzona. Where other cantons tend to have decorated cow statues around the place, Uri has decorated bear statues. I'm not entirely sure why since their flag seems to feature a ram, and if any canton is to be associated with bears, it ought to be Bern. The other thing about Andermatt is that it has some really nice mountain views, but then, so does almost everywhere else in Switzerland. I also noticed that a shopkeeper said something like 'grüzi' to me (meaning hello), while in Interlaken it was more like 'grüsse', and a book I have on Swiss culture says it's 'grüezi', which is how it's pronounced on an mp3 of Swiss German that I have. I guess that was a difference in dialect.
So on to Bellinzona, the capital of Ticino. To be honest, I think the ride from Andermatt to Göschnen was at least as impressive as that on the Glacier Express itself. I am currently in a hotel room in Bellinzona, late in the evening, looking up at the lit up castle on the hill. It really is just a hill, this time... for once I don't see any mountains. I haven't really looked around here yet, but I have all of tomorrow plus some time the next morning before I go back to Andermatt and rejoin the Glacier Express. I might see if I have time to go to Locarno. Actually, from the web I couldn't find much information on anything interesting in Ticino, apart from Bellinzona having a castle. Locarno might be nice since it has a lake, but there doesn't seem to be anything I must see. I'm here to experience Switzerland in Italian. It's weird, alright, like being surrounded by the many Italians at CERN or at that conference. It doesn't seem like I'm still in Switzerland. Manchester
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19 April 2006
I'm currently on a train to Bern, with no distractions but the breathtaking scenery (not really... the train is still in Geneva. I'm just trying to make you jealous) so I'm going to write up my trip to Manchester.
Manchester? When was I in Manchester? Well, I never got around to adding it to my itinerary, but the week before Easter I went to Manchester for the second Marie Curie Conference at Manchester university. The conference logo is noteable because it resembles a famous equation for energy, and the university's because, by coincidence, the 'EST' in the Manchester is in a different colour... seemingly to welcome Marie Curie Early Stage Training fellows, but in fact to avoid writing a second 'est.' for 'established'. Manchester itself is notable for the fact that it's where my dad came from. Also, like most other communities, it has various sports teams, but I don't see why the logo of one of them should be the only thing I could find on a Manchester-specific keyring. Yes, that's right, I didn't manage to find a Manchester-specific keyring worth buying, and my keyring collection will forever be poorer for it.
Anyway, let's see if I can remember anything about the actual trip. Actually, I think it must be time for me to take a proper vacation, because I noticed all sorts of mundane differences that for some reason I thought were worth mentioning. For instance, on the train ride from the airport to the university, I was thinking about how all the buildings were the same... red brick, universally the same design, kind of like on Coronation Street. Then I saw a building like all the others which had a sign saying, 'Universal Buildings'. Indeed they are, I thought, and chuckled to myself, thinking of how bored you would all be reading that.
I checked into Weston Hall, the student/conference attendee residence at Manchester University, and was pleased to find the necessary equipment to make a cup of tea. I promptly made one, because of course, when in England, one should do as the English do. The thing that made it stand out from the Continent was, there were only supplies to make a cup of tea. The packet of drinks-making supplies contained:
- Two sachets of white sugar
- One sachet of brown sugar
- One sachet of coffee sugar
- Four sachets of tea & coffee whitener (I haven't seen that stuff for years! What is it? Do people really use it? Why?)
- One little pottle of UHT milk
- Two teabags
No coffee to go with the coffee sugar or coffee whitener. Not even much tea. I can only conclude that the English like to drink very sweet, very white (but not very milky), tea.
And now a short break as I watch Lausanne and its great view of Lac Leman and the mountains pass me by.
There, wasn't that nice? Now, Manchester. Well, most of the time I was at a conference, which is technically work rather than travel, so I won't go into details. Of course I met a lot of interesting people and found out some interesting things (such as how to pronounce the name Erdos) but I won't go into it here.
Ooh, a house with '2000' written on its roof in brighter roof tiles. Anyway, I'll describe Manchester. Manchester is rainy. It drizzles most of the time, with the occasional five minute break, Auckland style, in which it's either sunny or it hails. This seems to be a fair representation of normal Mancunian weather, since on the last day I saw a lot of poems about Manchester jazzing up the perimeter of a building site, and about half of them mentioned rain. This hints that rain is not only very common, but according to the locals it's one of the most interesting things about Manchester. Given that it's made of the principle component of ditchwater, that doesn't exactly make the place seem exciting.
Ha! A Nokia 6600 just tried to send me a file via Bluetooth! Hang on... do I even have Bluetooth? How on Earth did a Nokia 6600 just offer to send my Mac a file? I don't even have AirPort turned on. Well, that's weird. I rejected it, but now I'm curious, I wish I had looked more carefully at that dialog.
Actually, I didn't end up doing a whole lot in Manchester, except for my usual aimless wandering during which I was amused by all sorts of mundane things which I'm going to spare you from only because I have other places to write about. We had a dinner in the museum, and then there were 'cultural visits' on the last day of the conference, which turned out to be simply a pile of sheets of paper showing where some interesting things were. I expected there would be some kind of organised visits, but basically we were left to do our own tourism for the afternoon, and it seemed like most people went home instead. So I wandered in the direction of the bus stop to go to a Science museum of some sort, and got distracted by poems about rain, and a bookshop. In the end I didn't see anything particularly touristic, but I guess I got a feel for Manchester. And, illogical though it is to import chocolate into Switzerland, I bought a dozen Cadbury creme eggs for myself and my colleagues.
And that's all I have to say about that. The grand tour of Switzerland (and Liechtenstein)
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I decided it was about time I got to know this country I'm living in, so I bought a 22 day youth travel pass (after I turn 26, I will no longer be a youth.) I was going to just treat the Swiss rail network like an extension of the Geneva bus network, and wander at random to wherever I could find a place to sleep, but in the end I decided that could mean I spend too much time in internet cafes looking for accommodation, and I wouldn't have much information on the places I was going. I guess I'm not the backpacker type, yet. Although, I do enjoy that I can pick which time of day I go to my next destination, and don' t have to worry about missing a particular train. Perhaps if I get a half-fare card, I'll eventually get into the habit of treating a trip across the country like a trip across town.
So I planned it all out, and booked my accommodation for the first part of the trip in advance. The plans were to go to Bern for a day, then on to Interlaken the same day, spend a few days there, then go to Zermatt, spend a few days there, and take the famed Glacier Express to Andermatt. The Glacier Express is included in the travel pass, but it has to be booked at least a day in advance, so that was another reason to plan things out a bit. Actually, it goes all the way to Saint Moritz, but I decided to stop at Andermatt and have a little excursion down to Bellinzona in Ticino, so that I can experience the Italian part of Switzerland. After Bellinzona, I'll go back up to Andermatt and rejoin the Glacier Express and go onto Saint Moritz. And then... I'll go home. Home?! Yes, well the cool thing about having a travel pass, and being in a fairly small country, is that I can go home whenever I feel like it. So I'll go back to Geneva for a day to water my plants, wash my clothes, drop off any junk I've accumulated, enjoy a few nights of free accommodation (with towels, internet access and breakfast included) and, most importantly, go to the Salon du Livre. It's a book expo which I expect some people from the Geneva Writers' Group will be involved in.
And then I will head out for the second leg of my trip, which I haven't really planned out much yet. I will start by heading to Liechtenstein, because, well, it's just there, about the size of Geneva, and who do you know who's been to Liechtenstein, eh? I read somewhere that it's the only country in the world whose only official language is German. And they don't even speak it. I think they actually speak an Allemanic dialect of some sort. Next Page |
