The Land of Cold and Quiet

I got into Bristol Airport late. Supa late. Something around 11:15 p.m. But that didn't matter, because my flight was at 7 that morning.

Bristol International is actually a very nice airport, it's small, remote, yet fully capable. It's not bustling, it's not busy, it's just a nice little airport. I found a spot and sat down. For a while I was hungry, but eventually I found out that they had one place open, and I bought myself some treats and an apple. Also I found a vending machine in the bathroom that sold "chewable toothbrushes," so I bought a few for the journey. They turned out to be a little bristly thing and a packet of mouthwash (essentially) that you break open by chewing it, and apparently it cleans your teeth. I paid money for it too.

A few hours in, a guy that I had been sitting nearby/seeing a lot walking back and forth started talking to me. He turned out to be from Portugal - he had tried many different jobs, like being a truck driver, or a mall worker, but in all the jobs he had spent a large amount of time doing whatever he was doing, so he could send the money back to his girlfriend and family in Portugal. There were apparently days when he just wouldn't sleep. And he had kidney stones, like right when I was talking to him, and they were too big to blow up with surgery, and he'd already passed one - I don't think that night though.

He looked something like 30 something. He was 27. But we stayed up and talked pretty much the whole night. Then he left for Portugal, and I for Geneva.

Easyjet has a nice little business, I have to say. Sort of cramped and a little wonky, but it works.

I got into Geneva where I met my friend Ian, who took me to my first completely foreign food store, where he recommended a Swiss cheese, Le Gruyere (spelling?), that would come back to haunt me. We hopped on a train and away we spend to Lesanne.

It was strange being in a country where nobody speaks your language (for once I get the real abroad experience). I found myself rooting through my rudimentary french to say much of anything to anyone, even though most people know English here anyway. Usually I was too timid to even say as much as "merci" and "bonjour," and I remember hiding behind Ian as we approached any kind of counter or place where I had to talk someone to get something - throughout the entire journey. But I survived with minimal French skills. And I got cheese, and in fact not only cheese, but crackers as well, with bits of bacon in it! And in Switzerland, everything has to be in several languages and so the label advertised that the crackers were "avec epature!" (I think), but also "mit Dinkel!" Dinkel, I'm assuming, is the German word for bacon.

Heh heh, dinkel.

Switzerland, as I learned not only by riding on the train but by cumulative experience, is an overpuffed place, I think. It's shrouded in mystery cause of all the mountains, and the clouds, and the neutrality, and you think of it as this magical chocolate/clock kingdom. It's really a lot like most places, though the buildings are a little old. The government and the culture do seem very strict though. I mean, you'd be like that too if you had one of the most stunning geographical defenses known to man on your side.

In many ways, just in the feel, I suppose Switzerland is the opposite of England. England is surrounded by water, naturally defended, and chose to try to go everywhere with the Empire. That's collapsed now, but there's still a sense of what the UK has to do on a world scale. Think BBC World News.

Switzerland is surrounded by mountains and it doesn't seem like it much cares what happens elsewhere. I don't know about Swiss politics at all, but the whole place seems catered towards either keeping the money/lives people already have, encouraging the tourism, or perfecting what already is. I didn't see a single homeless person in the whole country, and for a three day visit I did a lot of traveling. What I saw were picturesque views that were refined, everything had an extra polish to it. And for some reasons pictures of George Clooney either drinking coffee or wearing a watch were everywhere. That's what Switzerland is, a place that famous people endorse. It's an "in" thing.

Perhaps I'm being very bitter about Switzerland, it really is a nice place. And there is native culture - Ian cooked me a classic Swiss meal, consisting of a dish with potatoes and cheese, and then several kinds of sausages. It was tastey.

Switzerland is also amazingly quiet. There's no such thing as bustle. People move around but there's never any street arguments or conflict - sometimes streets are just empty.

Anyway, I'm telling you all abotu the general without ever having mentioned the specific. From Geneva we took a train to Lesanne, where we met up with another of Ian's friends, who was actually American. Her louder voice and intense accent (more intense than mine) starkly contrasted her entire environment. But she was awesome. We had kababs for lunch (NOTE: Sprite does not go well with kababs), and went shopping around Lesanne, which has so many hills it makes Exeter look flat. I got myself a pair of neeto fingerless gloves.

Sean Bye once made a comment on this blog saying that Switzerland made England look cheap. It does.

Lesanne was by far the busiest place we saw, and it seems like it's the shopping center of Switzerland. It is, as Ian also pointed out, the gay city of Switzerland, but compared to the other gay centers I knew of - San Francisco, Soho, New Hope - it lacked that a certain, oh, how shall I say this... pizaz. Moxy. Sparkle, one might go so far to say. What it had was a lot of quaintness and a decent financial backing behind everything in it.

From Lesanne we went to Brig, where Ian went to college, and where we'd be staying. You all know how the Swiss make people do military service once they turn 18? Well, apparently the military training in Switzerland goes far beyond the knives ("Now: many of you have never opened Chardonnay under fire..." - Robin Williams). According to our friend we met in Lesanne, the mountains around Brig were some of the mountains that contained - get this

SECRET AIRBASES.

According to her, the Swiss have hollowed out some of their mountains, made secret militray bases, and ... well I don't know what they'd do in there since they really have nothing to need a military for anyway, but they have BATCAVES! Not only that, there are apparently huge chunks of government owned property in the valleys, complete with houses and garages, etc., that have secret entrances to these bases. As we took a train past them, Ian pointed the houses out to me. Neither of us could tell if they were real or fake.

Ian also had a large sum of knowledge about the valley that Brig was in. He filled me in on a lot of it, but I've forgotten most of what he told me. We crossed the Rhone river though. That's historically significant, I think.

Some of the mountains, called The Teeth of Morning (I think...?), literally jut up and are really narrow, so whenever the sun rises and it tops them, it looks like they're literally biting up into the sun and stuff. It's cool.

Brig was a really nice little town. Same Swiss quaint/moneyed feeling going for it, and it was tiny, in a nice way. We stayed overnight in Brig visiting Ian's college friends.

From there, the next day, we went to Bern, which means "Bear" in German, or French, or Swiss... but it's the capital. In fact, this entry was almost called "DAAAAAAA Berns." There are supposed to be famous Berns, and by Berns I mean bears, in Bern that we almost saw, but we couldn't find them. I did, however, sit next to a stone statue of a bear, and I just concluded Aslan hadn't gotten to him yet.

Switzerland is COOOOOOLD, by the way. I ended up getting sick while I was in Bern. Ian was already sick for a bit.

Instead we went to the Bern Cathedral, which was great. We saw a choir get ready for a service - they went into the main part of the sanctuary and started doing weird vocal exercises together, like bending over and padding their backs, or testing the entirety of their range. And they were all wearing black, so it looked like they were doing some weird Polynesian ritual in a cathedral. And I was like, "heeheehee, I do those exercises when I act."

Bern is also the home of the big Swiss Clock. Like THE Swiss Clock, it's in Bern. I saw it.

From Bern we went to Zurich, where we stayed overnight. Ian and I were both sick, so we stayed in and slept/forced liquids while we watched the Futurama movie. The next day we went to the airport, because his flight was a few minutes after mine. Or SUPPOSED to be. Like any good Act Three, both our planes were delayed. Mine was so delayed because of fog around London (Fog? London? I never would've guessed) that I had to wait a good four hours. It was even moved to a different terminal, so I had to get everything I had, go out through security, find the new terminal, wait four hours, then go back through security. I ended up waiting right nearby a big sign of a bunch of celebrities wearing watches, and George Clooney wasn't far off. A lot of what I think about Switzerland I concluded waiting in that airport.

I finally made it back to London, Underground'd it up all the way from Heathrow to Paddington Station all by myself with my handy dandy Oyster card, and I just barely missed the train I wanted to take back to Exeter, leaving me with only the overnight train that left two hours after when I got there, and arrived in Exeter at 1:45 am. So, I hung around Paddington for a while, and I needed food, so I looked into my bag and huzzah! There was my Le Gruyere cheese and my crackers "mit Dinkel" so I wripped open the cheese and crackers. The cheese had been...sitting there, though. I had to break off the top part cause it just didn't look right, but after that I just kept breaking of parts to put on my crackers. But I had this top rind of cheese that I really didn't want to eat. So I looked around for a trash can.

There are no trash cans anywhere in London Paddington. I even paid 20p to go to the bathroom to find a trash can, but in the advent of hand dryers, there's been no need for any. I seriously considered flushing the cheese down the toilet, and if it weren't so an inherently absurd idea with potential reprecussions just for being silly (i.e. the cheese clogs the toilet, or ruins the water supply and no one knows why, until they finally dig in and remove this one bit of cheese and exclaim, "what idiot would flush CHEESE down the toilet!"), if it hadn't been for all that, I wouldn've done it. But I didn't. So there I was, wandering around Paddington Station like a maniac with a lump of bad cheese in my jacket pocket, because I didn't have anywhere else to put it. I ended up going to the Sainsbury's Local in the station and buying apple juice just to get a bag, which I then put the cheese in.

When the train finally DID get there, I felt like I was melting just getting into it. There's no heating, of course, anywhere in Paddington Station, and all the shops were closed, and my seat while I waited was metal, so literally sitting down I could feel things in my body work again. These two people got on that, forgive me for judging, just seemed a little awry. After the train started, it turned out that they kept dodging the ticket conductor. Finally, when they fell asleep, he came up to them and confronted them about it. He was very matter of fact about it, but really, what could he do? Throw them off the train? This wasn't Indiana Jones. He threatened them with letting them off at Exeter and not allowing them to get back on until they'd paid.

When I did get off the train at Exeter St. Davids, the air was its usual moist and cold, but it was nowhere near as cold as Switzerland. It actually was balmy. And, while nightime, it was just noisy enough, with the wind in the trees and the branches, to make me feel at home again, as at home as I can feel in England.