Easter Break, Episode II: Attack of the Cough

I started writing this post a while ago and then abandoned it for some reason. Now that I've loaded and edited my photos, it's ready for publication!

The lovely mountains of Valais / Wallis!

As the second half of a two-part Easter Break blog series, this post will be covering the second half of Easter Break. As I noted earlier, this week involved going to the canton of Valais / Wallis, with skiing in mind. And we did go skiing, but not every day. Being Swiss, and therefore always within reasonable proximity to a ski area, Swiss people only go skiing when the weather's really nice for it. Because why go skiing every single day of the week when there are nasty conditions on some of the days? You could always go next week, so there's no reason to go now if the conditions aren't perfect. This is different from the Kansan mindset: we are spending three days in Colorado and will be on the slopes from morning to late afternoon on each of these days because who knows when we'll make it back here again? It might take years! (It did take me years: My first skiing experience was on a MLK weekend ski trip with the Village Church, which I repeated a couple of times, but then I stopped going because the combination of sleep deprivation, costs, and unfinished homework made it too difficult. So after that I went skiing once with my family but we all ended up getting sick, so I only skied for one day on that trip. Since then I haven't skied at all until I ended up in Switzerland. I think I have done more skiing here than all the times I went skiing in America combined.)

Me, Caroline (Swan's friend), and Swan (host brother)

It was the first time I had ever skied on spring snow. Spring snow has a different feeling from winter snow. It's kind of melty and slushy, especially in open areas with no trees and no shade, and when you turn on the skis it pushes the snow a lot more. So by the end of the day a slope that started out flat ends up covered with bumps, an unintentionally created mogul run. Unfortunately I still had a nasty cough at this point, so the enjoyment in skiing was a bit diminished. I was normally fine while actually skiing but once I stopped the cough would catch up with me. I tried everything: I carried a pocketful of Ricola candies with me at all times, plus a water bottle. One day I stayed home from skiing and then went into Sion while my host mom and her dad were visiting her mom / his wife there. I found anti-cough tea at the Coop and then drank it frequently at home. My host aunt gave me some homeopathic thing that was supposed to make the cough disappear and that didn't work either. Did I mention the medicine that I had already been prescribed the week before? Nothing seemed to work, so obviously I had to go to the doctor when I went back. But that's a different story.

The view out of the cute little window in my cute little room.

One of the things that I did a lot during this week was reading. I read John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany in its entirety. I had a lot of free time between the day I spent at home and the day I went to Sion and had to stop walking around because my cough was bothering me, plus all the times I was sitting and waiting around for something to happen, like for a meal to finish cooking or for some host siblings and their friends to show up. It was a very interesting book and I recommend it to all of you readers (double meaning: blog readers / people who like to read things in general and might take a book recommendation). On the penultimate day of the trip, we drove to Grimentz to celebrate my host grandfather's 80th birthday. We ate a multi-course meal in a hotel there. It was very nice. One of the food items was foie gras, which I thought pretty disgusting so I don't see what the big deal is about it. I mean, I guess some gourmet people think it's special but in my book, it involves animal cruelty and it doesn't even taste good and has a weird texture. The rest of the meal was delicious, though, and it was enough to last through dinner as well. We just met for cake around dinner time. But instead of cake cake, we had millefeuille / Cremeschnitten, which is pretty much my favorite dessert here. I don't think I've ever seen it in the States, but it's possible that it exists. If not I will be trying to make it some time when I get back, which could be really difficult and will probably end up not looking at all like the real thing but still tasting pretty good.

So that was my week in Valais. On Friday we drove back in the morning and I went back to the doctor, who said that my cough had gotten worse (surprise, surprise!) and that it was now a bacterial infection and therefore curable by antibiotics. It's a good thing that antibiotics are a miracle drug because I spent the next four days (Saturday through Tuesday) at a camp for the school choir and was singing pretty much nonstop. The antibiotics worked fast enough that I barely had any problems, even though we had rehearsal for some seven hours a day or something. Possibly more. I think it depended on the day. More choir stories to come in a later post.

Easter Break, Part One

This internet situation is really bad for my blog. Well, I've been in this family for about a month now, so I'm giving up on any hope of wireless, considering that I will be leaving again not too long from now.

It's Easter break now. Not spring break. Easter break. This is presumably due to the fact that the canton, or at least the city of Fribourg, and perhaps the whole country generally speaking, is Catholic. Therefore it is not a problem to name breaks after Christian holidays, even if most people (or at least both of my host families so far) never attend church. They aren't even Christmas-and-Easter people, like a lot of Americans are. On Christmas Eve, we sat around the tree at home, opened presents, and sang in Swiss German. It's possible that we will go to church this Sunday, as it hasn't happened yet. However, considering that we'll be staying in a mountain chalet, I consider it unlikely. I'll update you when I get back.

So, the first week of break (yes, there are two!), was spent increasingly at home as the week went on. School ended on a Friday and that night was the birthday party of Katelyn, one of the Americans in Fribourg, plus her Swiss friend Julia that have birthdays around the same time. I think they went to a roller disco later, but I didn't come along because my last bus left too early. The next morning I went to Zürich to take a German language test, which Rotary wanted those of us not taking the language course to do in order to verify that we had picked up a reasonable amount of German. I passed the test, safely in the B2 zone of the European language level system (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). This is as far as they tested us, although I doubt that I'm already in the C level because this is only the second year I've been learning German.

That afternoon after the test I went to Olten to visit Sini, an exchange student from Finland, in her home turf. Unfortunately, she had forgotten that I was coming and didn't hear her phone ringing. But she eventually called me back after I had taken something of a self-guided walking tour of the city. It's a very pleasant city, if small. And sometimes I prefer these smaller Swiss cities because I can get a feel for them in a small space of time, just walking around. Here are some of the pictures I took there:

Sini had told me that she had a violin lesson before I was coming, so after a while I found the music school on a map and walked to it. It looked empty, so I didn't bother going in, but there was a music shop nearby that was going out of business and had some really good prices. I ended up finding two of the pieces I am learning this year for piano at about half price, so of course I ended up buying them because playing from a good edition is infinitely preferable to playing from photocopied pages. Even if these pages are masterfully taped together. When Sini called, I was in the music shop, and it turns out she lives right by the music school so I had sort of found her house without knowing where it was. She came back to the shop with me and I bought the music. Then we went had drank tea at the Coop restaurant. I ended up having to run for my train, and once I got to the train, I realized that I had left my music in the restaurant. Unfortunately, it had closed so it was too late for her to go back and get it for me. Instead I ended up waiting until Monday, when it reopened, to go find the music myself. This entailed a 1.5-hour train ride to Olten, 30 minutes of walking to the restaurant, recovering the music, walking back to the station, and waiting for the train, then another hour in the train to Bern, 30 minutes in Bern, and then the train ride back to Fribourg. It's a good thing I really like trains.

On Tuesday morning I rode the bus to Treyvaux, about 10 minutes from Ependes, to play the piano at an acquaintance's house. We have the same piano teacher at the conservatory and she used to have the lesson after mine. After I switched lesson times, she now has the lesson before mine. In any case, I sort of knew who she was and when I saw her waiting for the same bus as me in Fribourg I asked her about the possibility of coming to play at her house, since I don't have a piano here and the school is closed during vacation. It was really nice of them to let me come play, especially since most Swiss are pretty closed to new people and I barely know her. After about an hour of playing I drank tea with Heidi (yes, just like the famous Swiss storybook character) and her mom and they gave me a list of the things I still needed to see in Switzerland before I leave. I'll have to work on that. That afternoon I went to Basel and walked around and took pictures, but then it started raining and my cough started bothering me more so I went home an hour earlier than I had planned. I will probably have to post the pictures for you later since my computer is taking forever to get up the pictures from Olten. It's amazing how much the architecture and feel of a city can be so different here. Basel feels totally different from the other cities I have visited. It's right by Germany, so it has more of a German influence, I guess. The trams there look sort of like old-style trolleys. It's really big. Big enough to have three different McDonald's restaurants and three different Migros that I saw. I'll probably go back some time if I have the time to because I was only there for a couple of hours.

The next day I went to the doctor. I had been coughing for two weeks, and it seemed to be getting worse. She told me it was probably a virus, so no antibiotic, and told me I could treat the symptoms but otherwise I would basically have to wait for it to go away. I sure hope it does, because it won't be fun to try skiing with this nasty cough.

Thursday morning was a repeat of Tuesday morning at Heidi's house. This time her eight-year-old brother had a couple of friends over and they were emptying out eggs in preparation to dye them for Easter. Her mom said they were going to make crepes with the yolks and whites that they removed with a syringe. She gave me tea that's supposed to treat a cough and some apple cake. Tart? It was like a flat apple pie with the apple slices arranged in rows. I've had it at home too. She also gave me a couple of the tea bags so I could try finding it at the store. They are a really nice family and I feel lucky to have randomly met them through the assignment of my piano teacher and lesson time. Plus I love listening to little kids speaking French. It's so cute.

That evening a couple of guests were over for dinner. I don't know how they know my host parents exactly. The man was very curious and asked me a lot of questions about America but said he had only been there once, in New York for a few days on business. They told me I don't have an American accent. I asked, which accent do I have, then? And they told me it was more German. So I guess that's a good thing. In fact, it was the second time somebody thought I was a native German speaker based on how my French sounded, which I find interesting. However, I am somewhat at a loss as to why I would have a German accent.

And today we are leaving for the canton of Valais to do some skiing. I'm not sure exactly where we are going yet. However, I'm not worried about the road trip. I think it's only one and a half hours away, which might seem like a lot to Europeans but is half of a driving-to-Colorado-from-Kansas-to-go-skiing-behind-the-wheel-shift to me. I doubt I'll have Internet access there, so I will just have to update you when I return.