Gruyères

Last Sunday I went to Gruyères with my host dad Anton and my host sister Fabienne. Anton drove, and I was once again reminded of how Americans tend to be able to tolerate long car trips. The trip to Gruyères was not long at all, probably forty-five minutes or so, but there were definitely a couple of Swiss German "Are we there yet?"s (not coming from me; I don't speak Swiss German yet). But I understand enough to know the trip seemed long to the other two. This is a theme that was brought up a couple of weekends ago at the family reunion. There was a host something-or-other that wanted to practice his English, so he spoke English to me and I tried to answer in German. The conversation went something like this:

Relative: How long did you drive to get here?

Me: Etwa zwei Stunden. (About two hours.)

Relative: Wow, that's long! I think that Americans take long car trips. You must be used to it.

Me: Ja. (Yes.)

Relative: We Swiss don't like long trips. We just get on the train and one hour is a long trip for us.

Me: Ja, ich finde zwei Stunden nicht so lang. Ich und meine Familie in Amerika fahren manchmal zwei oder drei Tage. Wie sagt man "roadtrip?" (Yes, I don't think two hours is that long. Sometimes my family in America and I drive for two or three days. How do you say "roadtrip?")

It must be because everything is so close together in Europe that everyone has this attitude about traveling. When I first mentioned roadtrips to my host family, my host dad said that if they spent that long on the train, they could already be in Spain. Unfortunately, train and Spain do not rhyme in German. (Zug, Spanien).

Anyway, my post is supposed to be about Gruyères, so let me tell you about that. After the short-by-American-standards drive, we found an illegal-by-American-standards parking space and proceeded to walk around. Next to Gruyères is a mountain town called Moléson. Maybe that is also the name of the mountain; I'm not sure. But there was a fun little cheese-making demonstration that Anton wanted to see, and then we went on a hike. Fabienne walks surprisingly fast considering how short she is (a good foot shorter than me!). Even with my long legs, I sometimes have trouble keeping up. So we went ahead while Anton lagged behind. I always enjoy my hikes with Fabienne. First, I find her High German very easy to understand, and second, she does most of the talking. It's not that I don't like to talk, it's just that it can be nice to sit back (or passively walk-run up the mountain) and listen, especially when it takes so much effort to think of how to formulate what you want to say in the other language. It is getting easier, but I am still far from fluent.

Anton and Fabienne were disappointed by the foggy weather, saying it would make for bad photography conditions. I beg to differ. Also, I did not realize the trees lined up in the middle of these two photos until I put them up here. Cool!

After Moléson was Gruyères. The touristy-town-area was filled with restaurants, souvenir shops, and artistically decorated motorcycles. I think the motorcycles were a temporary installment. Then we went into the castle and looked around. I used it as an opportunity to look for cool patterns to photograph. In a few of the rooms, there were paintings on exhibition, which I really liked.

My host family showed me a website (wilmaa.com) where you can watch the major Swiss TV channels online. It's pretty cool, because I can choose German, French, or Italian. Not that I'm really trying to learn Italian or anything like that. At least not yet. And it's nice when I'm in the mood for something other than what everybody else is watching. For those of you who would like this kind of thing, I am sorry to have to tell you it only works here. But wwitv.com is good for language learning, if you are interested.

This week: Oral presentation about the Milky Way for geography class on Thursday (I'm a little nervous! One, it will be in French. Two, I don't know how well the OpenOffice version of PowerPoint will work on the computer there.) On Friday, c'est la journée de classe. Each class chooses something to spend the day doing instead of going to school. My class is going to the Paul Klee museum in Bern, then eating and shopping. Yay for European fashion! Boo for European prices!