A Swiss Travel Guide, or I Hop on a Train with my GA

I thought I would let you in on my travel experiences in Switzerland. Rotary has generously paid for my general subscription ticket (Generalabonnement in German or abonnement général in French) which works on trains, buses, and boats throughout the country for the entire year. Thus, it is very easy for me to travel around when I have some time, like on weekends or breaks. And I have been all over the place.

On a Friday in the middle of September, each class in the school takes a day trip somewhere. My class rode the train to Bern and went to the Paul Klee Center in the morning and then spent the rest of the afternoon free. I walked around and took pictures with the two other girls in this picture, Fitore and Sophie. It was nice to spend time with classmates outside of school.

Another weekend, I went to Luzern with three other American exchange students that go to my school. I almost missed the train because the bus I thought I was going to take into Fribourg apparently doesn't run on Saturdays, and the next one came ten minutes late! But I managed to run to the train and jump on before it left. One of the students I was traveling with, Jessica, knows a girl that lives in Luzern because she spent an exchange year in Missouri, where Jessica is from. We met her there too and spent the day walking around and seeing what there was to see. We also took advantage of our GA tickets and hopped on a boat that went around the lake. Luzern is a beautiful city, especially when the lights reflect off the water at night. And, yes, those are swans at the bottom center of the photograph.

There is an organization, called Rotex, for people who recently did an exchange with Rotary, and they sponsor weekend outings for the inbound students. Our first one was in Chur, or Coire, and we were to bring a dessert from our home country to share. So a day or two beforehand, I made cookies in my host family's kitchen. It was something of an adventure. My host mom obviously had never made cookies, which didn't surprise me because they don't really exist here, and when she saw the finished batter in a bowl, she asked, "How many does that make?" And I told her it would be enough for four dozen cookies, which she didn't believe until she saw them. Also, my ingredients were slightly different from usual, plus I had to convert the recipe from cups to milliliters so I could measure my ingredients. I was originally offered a scale to weigh the ingredients, but since the American recipe gave the amounts in volume, I did not feel like looking up the densities of each ingredient to convert to grams. Anyway, I commented that they looked flatter than normal, and my host sister said, "Can you still eat them?" And my host dad, who was sampling one, said something along the lines of, "Yes, and they are pretty good!" So the cookies were a success.

And so was the Rotex weekend. We spent the night in a nuclear accident bunker under an elementary school. The bunks were three high. I was convinced I would hit my head upon waking up, but I managed not to somehow. It was great to see everyone, and it is a really unique group of people. Of course I hung out with some Americans, but also with people from Canada, Ecuador, Germany, and other countries. Most of the inbounds speak English as a first or second language, and the ones who speak it as a second language speak it surprisingly well. On the first day we competed in a scavenger hunt involving finding the price of a certain bakery product, taking a picture of the whole group in front of a monument, and finding people in the city to teach us a song in Swiss German and draw a picture for us. Since I was the only one in my group who could speak German (the others are here to learn French), I had to do all the talking. And it was raining, which led me to discover that what I thought was a rain jacket that I was wearing was just a simple windbreaker and didn't block the water out at all. But it was still fun, and I dried out eventually. The second day was spent at the Viamala Schlucht, the beautiful ravine pictured below.

I have a fall break here, something I always wished I could have in high school. My host family wanted me to tell them where I wanted to go within Switzerland, but the problem was that I am unfamiliar with the country and didn't know what to tell them. I asked a lot of people for suggestions, but even the Swiss people I asked had very few ideas to give me. It made me think about how familiar people really are with their surroundings. When I asked my host sister if she had any places that she wanted to see, she said, "I don't really know what there is to see here." I think people get stuck in their daily routines and become familiar with just a few places, their homes, the office, school, the nearest grocery store. So I encourage all of you to find something new to do in your own cities or familiarize yourself with a new area somewhere near to you. It could come in handy if you ever host an exchange student!

Well, we ended up finding some places to visit, and it turned out to be a spectacular week. On Monday we visited the Aletsch Glacier, located in the heart of the Alps near Fiesch. The night before we left, my host mom said, "You aren't scared of riding on gondolas, are you?" I suppose that if I were, it would have been too late. So we rode on some trains, then some gondolas, and the glacier was beautiful. We were lucky enough to have chosen a very clear day with few clouds, and I could see the most famous Alps from there, including the Matterhorn, Jungfrau, Eiger, and Mönch. The two people in the photograph can give you an idea of its scale.

The next two days we spent in the canton of Ticino, in the southeast of the country, where Italian is the official language. Unfortunately, my Italian is sorely lacking. But fortunately, everyone in the service industries there also speaks German, meaning I could order my food in German. Ticino is apparently the warm, sunny place for Swiss people to go to on vacation if they don't want to leave the country. It wasn't terribly warm and sunny while we were there, but it was still very nice. Near Lugano, there is a miniature park (Swissminiatur) with representations of all the famous sites in the country. So if you ever come to Switzerland and want to be able to see everything there, just come to the Swissminiatur, and you won't have to go any farther to see buildings from all the major cities, small versions of the most famous mountains, and examples of architectural styles of the different regions.

We spent the night in Ascona. As we neared the hotel, my host mom said, "By the way, I'm using bank coupons to pay for the hotel room, and technically, it is supposed to be four family members listed, so if anyone asks, your name is Krista Tinguely and you only speak French and a little German, absolutely no English." I guess the idea is that the hotel people would be able to speak good German and English but not as much French. But nobody asked. Ascona is very pretty. It's on the edge of Lago Maggiore, which is a pretty big lake that extends into Italy. The town itself has a lot of narrow, twisting alleys full of shops. There is also a modern art museum, where my family left me for an hour. Either they aren't interested in art, or they ran out of coupons from the bank. Probably both.

Something I noticed at about this point in the trip is that being around my host family all the time had an interesting effect on my Swiss German. When not directly talking to me, they speak to each other in Swiss German. And hearing it almost constantly, while sitting in the train, while walking around, while eating, I began to understand it more and more. By the end of the week, Swiss German phrases were floating around in my head. Now, I am not at all boasting that I have a mastery of the language. In fact, I still have a lot of trouble understanding most of it. But I am making progress. The other thing about spending a week just with my host family is that I only spoke German all week, and I found that I have gotten comfortable enough with it that I can joke around. Jokes and puns are something I have always enjoyed in English, but at the beginning of my exchange, joking around rarely came to mind because it took so much effort to try to explain things seriously. And jokes are a completely different level of communication. So I really enjoyed being able to use my sense of humor in another language. It made the week that much more fun. Speaking of jokes, here's one from my host dad, who often tells me jokes in German, few of which I understand completely. But he tries. So the joke:

-Philosopher 1: Do you know what time it is?

-Philosopher 2: No, I don't have a watch. Sorry.

-Philosopher 1: That's okay. It was nice to discuss the matter with you anyway.

This is a rough translation. And it's not even that funny. It was just funny to me because I usually laugh when I think I'm supposed to, even if I don't get what's funny, and this time I actually understood the joke.

After we got back from Ticino, there was no set plan for the next day because it was supposed to be kind of rainy and nasty. One of my dreams in coming to Switzerland was to see CERN (Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), so of course I had been looking around on their website for ways to visit, and I found that tours of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) have to be planned three to four months in advance. But there are also exhibits about the research that goes on there, and I suggested that we go to Geneva and see them. My family isn't really into science that much either, but they agreed to go and my host dad suggested we see the UN while we were there. We did, and the tour at that time was in English, so I understood it okay and so did Dominique, but the host parents were a little lost.

Finding CERN was a tram and bus adventure. It takes about thirty minutes to get there from the train station. This wooden dome was a gift for CERN's 50th anniversary. I guess I was surprised to learn that the research facility opened in the 1950s because it seems like most of the hype has been more recent. But the exhibits were pretty interesting, and I'm definitely going to look into taking a tour of the LHC sometime later this year.

The last day of the week was spent in Sion (Settin) and the surrounding area. In St. Léonard there is an underground lake that we visited. It was cold and rainy and nasty but kind of cool. The hills there are covered in vineyards. In Sion, or just next to the city, there are a few castles. We hiked up to two of them, the less elevated one first. The view from the top was beautiful, and at Château Tourbillon, part of which is pictured below, I finally found a place that felt magical to me. Don't go thinking of the Disney Castle, please. I think there are different places that speak to different people, and I found mine. Inside those walls on the top of a very high hill, surrounded by high grass, trees, and little yellow and purple flowers, I felt like I could have spent hours just sitting. The elevation somehow elevated my mood, which continued for the rest of the day. And just look at it! Doesn't it look a little magical to you too? And on the right, the cat was looking at me. I just had to take a picture.