So, here’s the thing. Our apartment-based internet access has gone from unreliable to nonexistent. I suppose free internet can only get you so far. Please be patient if we take a little while to respond to emails, and if there’s something really important that we need to know immediately, call us. For now.
Back to your regularly scheduled Switzerland!
I made some allusions at the end of the last post about being around tall things on the morning of the 18th of November. But, if we were going to only be hanging out near them, then why did I need this adorable harness seat thingy? I know it’s all the rage here in fashion-conscious Europe, but still…
And why would we pick our way through cow patties on top of a foothill just outside Interlaken – certainly not for this sort of strange picture. And those things in the background?
I’m not so good at being cagey, so I’ll just cut to the chase here. OMGOMG!!!!1!!!!111 WE WENT PARAGLIDING!!!1!!!1!!1
This was a gift from Auntie, who said she was fine with us jumping off of things as long as we were attached to someone or something. (Her way of nixing solo hang-gliding.) Husbear and Auntie did some research before leaving, and discovered that another casualty of low season was the bungee jump outside of Interlaken, apparently one of the tallest in the world. But they found paragliding, and especially this outfit called Paragliding Interlaken, that seemed to have a good handle on safety and awesomeness.
After I got my harness on, I was attached to this Swiss guy. The two of us practiced our run down the hill once, since I was a little nervous that I would trip and eat face for a hundred meters or so until I hit a tree. This didn’t happen, of course – when our time to take off came, it was completely smooth.
It was just indescribable. We floated along for what simultaneously felt like two minutes and two hours. We used updrafts off of a nearby hill to get a little more air above Interlaken, where I could see the two lakes spread out on either side. The rivers looked strange, an impossible creamy green-blue that looked like a result of pollution, but was actually glacial runoff.
Husbear’s takeoff wasn’t as smooth, since he was attached to a Japanese man who was a good six inches shorter than him, but the result was the same.
He had our little camera with him, so he was actually able to take some pictures from the air. When Miky noticed him doing so, he said “Get your foot in there, so people know you were paragliding!"
Husbear obliged, which led to what I think are a couple of hilarious pictures.
(btw, that’s the hill we used for updrafts – most of the flight was a lot further from the ground.)
He also got a couple of great views of Interlaken. This one happens to include me, so I’m partial to it. See what I mean about the water? Isn’t it a strange color?
The great thing about paragliding over Interlaken was the ability to see the city from above. There’s a large park right in the middle of town (directly behind our hotel, in fact) that was our landing target, so almost the whole way was over the town. I liked the perspective this gave us on Interlaken’s location.
Unsurprisingly, all too soon we were landing, with a couple of stutter steps onto the dewy grass of Interlaken’s park. Our landings were uneventful, but just behind us we could hear the high-pitched yelps of another man circling in for his landing. He yelped until his feet were on the ground, and then let go with a couple of full-throated bellows for good measure. I feel for his pilot, if he’d been doing that since they took off.
Auntie elected to come down from the mountain in a supply car, wheels firmly attached to the earth. We reunited and Husbear and I gabbled about our ride while she checked us for missing limbs or teeth. The rolls of film taken by our pilots during the flight were collected and taken to be developed, and then there was some brief rumination over what to do next.
I mean, a day that starts with paragliding – where do you go from there? We decided on Thun, a small town around one of Interlaken’s lakes (the Thunersee). It wasn’t in any of our all-Europe guidebooks, so we didn’t really know what to expect other than hearing it was pretty.
If we were going to go in blind, we figured we better go in fed, so Husbear picked us up sausage and sauerkraut and a Rivella. I obliquely mentioned this pop in a previous post; it’s the one that’s 30% milk. Sounds bad, right? But we had to try it, seeing as it’s the drink of Switzerland.
He looks happy in this picture because he hadn’t yet tried the Rivella. We found out later that Rivella tried to break into the US market, but pulled out due to low sales – this is because it tastes kind of like slightly fizzy cough syrup. We weren’t fans.
We were fans of the train ride to Thun, a twenty-minute forty-dollar trip along the shore of the Thunersee. It was hard to get any good pictures off of the train, since it was moving so quickly. Silently, too – the contrast between Italian and Swiss trains was striking. The Swiss just didn’t talk on their trains, that we heard. A little too quiet for comfort.
We arrived in Thun to another of the differences between Switzerland and Italy – clean bathrooms. You might not be able to see this on this picture of the McClean bathrooms, but they charged 1 CHF (Swiss Franc) for the “pissoir” and 2 CHF for the WC – meaning toilet. Categorization leads to efficiency. Roight?
The area directly around Thun’s train station was disappointingly modern, but Husbear located the tourist information bureau and soon had us pointed in the right direction – towards the old part of town, which occupied an area just around a small island in the middle of Thun’s river.
We saw a great sign on the way to the island; anyone that checks this blog who has a bit of Yiddish will probably find this picture amusing. “Shmuck” is Yiddish for the part of the male anatomy the Italians slangily call “cazzo.”
Once we neared the older part of Thun, it became clear that it was beautiful as advertised. The architecture was very Northern European, a little reminiscent of Belgium and the Netherlands with the narrow homes sitting right off the water. It was probably closest to Germany and Austria, though.
We sat for a little while and watched the aquatic birdlife squabble over chunks of bread thrown by children. There were several types of ducks and some beautiful swans.
We came upon Thun’s town square, the rathskellar (town hall) sitting amongst guildhouses. The castle loomed above everything, a little creepily given the sky’s darkening towards an early night in late fall.
Actually, the castle kept popping up wherever we went. We didn’t get up to see their view, but I’m sure the inhabitants always had a pretty good idea of what was going on down in Thun.
The older shopping thoroughfares in the town were interesting. The sidewalk was at two levels, so there were shops up above at building level and then below the sidewalk at street level. Here’s a picture, since I’m not sure that sentence makes sense.
As we made our way back to the river, I took this picture of Auntie walking with Husbear that I rather like. It’s got the Swiss German, the water, and one of the ubiquitous Swiss water-breaks.
At this point, we were getting a little hungry, so Husbear and I were starting to read menus. We’ve gotten to the point in Italy where we understand the majority of what’s on the menus we see, but in Switzerland we were back almost to square one – with the exceptions of fondue and raclette. Otherwise, we were in the dark. After a few more snaps of the town, (see, kind of Dutch, right?)
we settled on a small bar on the water, with outside tables where we could people-watch and snack.
We started out ordering lots of little glasses. Usually, when you order a pitcher of beer, it’s a little bit of a deal, but not with this tiny guy – paying for the pitcher and paying for glasses of beer gave you exactly the same amount. Auntie opted for Coke Light, what she calls the life-force.
I wanted the raclette, so we knew we were ordering that, but from there we were a little stuck. When the waiter came to take our order, I settled on the Knoblauchbrot, thinking it might be something interesting. I knew “brot” = bread, but this Knoblauch sounded exotic. I explained to Auntie my philosophy of occasionally ordering randomly if you can’t understand the menu, because sometimes you get great things you wouldn’t have tried on your own.
This time, my high-falutin’ ideas led to an enormous basket of garlic bread to go with our raclette. Yeah, knoblauch is garlic. Now I know. Want an extra cheesy starchy meal?
At least it was good garlic bread. At just about every meal in Switzerland, we discovered anew the fact that the Swiss just aren’t fans of vegetables. They love starch, and they want to marry dairy and have its little creamy babies, but veg is often very hard to come by. A little later, wandering around in Thun, we found the perfect Swiss souvenir and holiday gift:
A sausage bouquet.
Until the next time I can get to an internet café that allows me to use our laptop, g’night from Switzerland (well, actually from Florence, but you know what I mean).
Actually, I’ll leave you with this picture from Interlaken of a sign Auntie felt very strongly was about the most wonderful thing she saw in Switzerland.
girlie
