this isn’t the case with this trip. for those that don’t know, i’ve been a bit busy at work for the past couple months, and this isn’t so much a vacation i’m on as a forced escape from work. i don’t want to burn out, so i needed to get away, simple as that. in the limited planning i had done Switzerland was not much more than a good location from which to get to france and italy, not a destination i had planned to explore thoroughly in and of itself.

so, imagine my surprise that i find myself visiting nothing but Switzerland for this trip. the reasons were simple, the route to Italy was through Switzerland, giving this country enough time to impress upon me that ‘hey, wait a second, what’s all this then?’. it’s an astoundingly beautiful country. also, the Canadian dollar is almost the same as a swiss franc in value, so it’s easier to gauge expenses (bloody expensive) while the euro is more than $1.60! one quick purchase later and i had an all Switzerland rail pass and no idea what to do with it.

this, of course, is all a lead up to explain how, at 1pm today, i ended up in Gimmelwald (wow, beautiful) at the mountain hostel, where, if you’ll peruse their website, you’ll see that they don’t open until the 18th of April. ahem

Petra, the owner, was around when i arrived and graciously offered me the run of the hostel, even to stay the night in the empty hostel should i wish. it was gorgeous, and until about 5pm it was my plan to do so. after hiking up to Müren, enjoying a late lunch and a cappucino i returned to the hostel ready to get some domestic chores done, shower/shave, wash clothes, catch up on my blogging/photo processing & organizing, etc. having showered, and started my laundry i then discovered that the internet was down. faced with a long boring night in an empty hostel on a coldd mountain (it’s warm during the day, but even down in luzern it was sweater weather at night) i’ve decided to leave while i still could, semi-damp clothes be damned.

now i’m on the train, after catching the second last gondola/bus/train combo out of gimmelwald, heading back to interlaken in search of a hostel. if all goes according to plan, i’ll be posting this while drinking a beer and eating dinner. *fingers crossed*

p.s. found a wonderful hostel in interlaken – the happy inn lodge.Only one room left, a single room all to myself (perfect for drying all the clothes that was still damp), will stay another night in the dorm. joining a group going to the highest trainstation in europe tomorrow (over 3000meters!), many pics to follow.

today i went to visit titlis, a popular skiing mountain in the luzern area. there’s a train directly to the town, engelberg, where you then take a series of ski lifts and/or gondolas to the peak. the train from luzern to engelberg takes just about an hour, and it takes perhaps another 30 – 45 minutes to make it all the way to the peak. the whole thing is very surreal to me.

titlus is a mountain not merely conquered by humanity, but something more thorough. thousands of tons of steel and concrete were hauled to the very top of this part of earth’s skeletal system, all to build a playground. we truly are a spoiled segment of the human species.

if mountains had emotions, i wonder what the brothers and sistes of titlus think of the situation. what does one mountain feel for another? contempt at the subjegation, or piercing lonliness from watching a party that can never be joined.

you can see more mountain photos in my flickr set

it usually take a few days to go from ‘normal’ to ‘travel’ mode, thankfully i managed to fast track my entry into traveler mode thanks to my roommates in the hostel, a couple interesting people who helped keep me awake and fighting off the jet-lag.

Marc, from Spain.

Marc came into the room right as i was wondering how exactly i would stay awake for the next hour or two (it was around 9pm) in order to put my sleep schedule back in order. within five minutes of his arrival he was sitting next to me, giving me a detailed account of his whirlwind tour of Switzerland, complete with hundreds of photos to accompany the story.

Marc’s a young guy, living just outside of Barcelona where he’s going to university. he’s catalan, and when he started to explain to me what it meant to be catalonian vs. spanish, i was able to simply say “ah, like Quebec, i understand”.

i was way too tired to remember the details of his trip, but i know he went to Zürich, luzern and interlaken (places that i now intend to visit, in part thanks to his enthusiastic descriptions), but the one detail i do remember was his particular talent at posed photographs. i don’t think i’m exaggerating when i say he took at least a hundred self portraits with his little camera and tripod – i call it the “Marc Style Photo”

my attempt at a "Marc Style" photo

Marc, having helped me stay awake for at least an hour, left the room to take some night shots of Geneva, while I gave up and prepared to go to sleep regardless of the consequences of sleeping too early.

Kristine, a Canadian living in Germany who missed her flight to the UK

thankfully, distraction arrived again, this time in the form of Kristine a fellow Canadian (from Oakville) who had missed her flight due to a delayed train. she’s in the UK by now, visiting her boyfriend, but she lives in Frieburg, Germany while she’s doing her masters degree in materials science (studying solar cells, how cool is that?).

she was super friendly and nice, despite the crappy circumstance of missing her flight, and within 5 minutes of learning that i had just arrived in Geneva from Toronto she was trying to convince me to go visit her in Frieburg, offering me a space on her couch (apparently Frieburg is a very beautiful medieval town, worth a stop if you’re in the area).

she told me about living in Europe, and the strange combination of homesickness and attachment to Europe that develops when living here. on the one hand you miss your friends and family, the unique Canadian’ness of Canada. on the other, the thought of all the huge, unnecessary cars, the lack of decent regional transit (seriously, why can’t we have trains like in Europe?) and the lack of town squares and decent little cafe’s everywhere counts against Canada in a big way.

unfortunately in a bout of stupid i accidently deleted the photos i had taken of Marc and Kristine, i’m FB friends with Marc now, so i’ll try to get him to send me the photo he took of us and update the post

weirdo drunk guy in Zürich

Marc and Kristine helped alot, putting me into travel mode, so i was in a good mood as i set out. Zürich was beautiful as you can see from the photos, but i need to explain the photo of the drunk guy at a bar you’ll see in the set.

he introduced himself as “Voltaire”, although… ahem i don’t think that was his real name. he was several JD on the rocks into it, and it was only mid afternoon. i was only planning on stopping in the bar underneath the hotel to check my email (the wireless didn’t reach up to the sixth floor where my room was) but he bought me a beer and proceeded to talk my ear off.

ever have one of those circumstances where you only catch about a third of what’s going on? that was basically my conversation. he slipped between swiss-german, french, and english without really much warning.

the jist of the situation was that he had lost his scooter the night before. i asked him where it had been stolen, to which he explained that it was lost, not stolen. apparently after a particularly good go at drinking himself into oblivion, punctuated with a bout of bar hopping through the seedier areas of Zürich, he misplaced his scooter. now i’m no expert on the finer points of Zürich geography, but i was pretty certain he wasn’t going to find it at the bottom of his glass of JD.

he was a strange, kind of creepy guy, and by the end of our conversation i’m pretty sure he was confessing some pretty heavy stuff he had done in his life, but of course he was speaking german very earnestly and i didn’t understand a lick of what was going on. he left suddenly, after a seriously trying to get his point across to me, shaking my hand and walking out of the bar.

that’s it for the characters i’ve met. there has been some small talk with fellow tourists, but unfortunately due to my devil may care attitude towards ‘planning’ and ‘reservations’, combined with the fact that it’s easter weekend, has led me to full hostels each night. so i’ve been staying in budget hotels and not meeting people. tomorrow i head to luzern, where i have a bunk reserved at a hostel. i had planned on going to menaggio italy tomorrow, but the hostel there is full and i’m tired of hanging out alone, so to luzern!

d_c

things that didn’t make it into my piece there.

1. Andrew had a blog before running as a liberal candidate, but even though he had a bunch of people review it and make sure there wasn’t anything crazy, once the main party saw it they wanted it taken down (to be fair, they didn’t say it was bad, just distracted from his main campaign message). Andrew is a smart cookie though, so he’s recycling some of his old posts into his new and official campaign blog on his site. =D
2. Andrew is a bit of an astronomy buff, which is of course cool to me. he talked about taking an astronomy course in university and how it has influenced his thinking. as a sci-fi nerd and casual astronomy fan myself, i respect that.

i’m hoping to interview the conservative candidate, but i have my doubts that she’ll make herself available. also i want to interview Jack, but i’ll settle for interviewing someone on his staff. but not until after the debates. i think i need to think up something else to blog about until after the debates, any ideas?

http://www.democraticspace.com/canada2008/2008/09/toronto-danforth-is-there-any-chance-jack-wont-win/

a quick note on why i’m trying this again. it’s all vasta’s fault. seriously. i’m spending way too much time working with and hanging out with him so i think i’ve caught the ‘must publish whatever comes to mind’ mindset. so here goes

a photo too, just cause i can