Conquering La Suisse

One of the benefits of living for a period in a tiny country is that you get to explore it north, south, east, and west (and, in Switzerland's case, up and down). Lausanne is a nice place to work in, but when the weekend rolls around it's no different than New Haven: you just gotta get away. To facilitate my escapism, I have bought a Swiss half-price travel card, which provides me a lot of benefits including (surprise!) half-price train (snooze), boat (barf/drown), and bus (yuck) travel and also makes me look cool because they did some crazy transparent shit with the card (see photos!). Pretty much every weekend I have been able to go somewhere at least mildly interesting. Here's a summary:

1. Evian, France. Where they make the water! Or harvest it, as Melinda would say. The first weekend some of us took a ferry across Lac Leman (Lake Geneva for those of you who can't pretend to speak French) to Evian. Turns out Evian is a little aspirational - there's a few sources where you can "harvest" water with surprisingly nice mineral balance (Patrick's tounge tested and approved!) but not really that much else. It's like whatever - at least I got some international travel in.

2. Sion. A little town east of the lake that has two amazing castles on hills facing each other. Apparently in 1350 or something the rulers of...Sion thought that their old digs were nasty and built a new one on the hill across the valley. I think the old one is cooler - the ruins make it really mysterious!

3. Montreux. The next big city east of Lausanne on the lake. There was a jazz festival there for the first few weeks of July that's apparently pretty famous. I went twice, even though I'm not really a jazz person (doubt that I've ever been relaxed enough to catch the "vibes" or whatever hippie shit those crazy performers think up next). Montreux is prettier than Lausanne because it abuts a nice mountain range and wasn't destroyed by renegade architects in the 1960s and 70s, as my temporary home was.

4. Leysin. Still can't say this name differently than "Lausanne." in Leysin is a pretty tall mountain called the Tour d'Ai (say it out loud! It sounds like Tower of Death!). We climbed it one Sunday. It took about 4 hours!

5. Bern. Switzerland is ALL UP in "independence" rhetoric so doesn't actually have a capital, but if it did Bern would come closest to fitting the bill. The American embassy and Switzerland sponsored a trip for us here one weekend to see the embassy, parliament building, etc. It's a pretty city and is in the German part of Switzerland, so I had my fun pretending to be one of them! We jumped off a bridge into the river and floated (freezing) through the city as well. A good experience!

6. Interlaken. The same trip to Bern brought us to nearby Interlaken, a kitschy ski resort/tourist death trap. We took a train one day from the town to the Jungfraujoch train station, elevation 12000 ft, the highest in Europe. There was a snowstorm so we couldn't see anything from the top. I kept thinking that it was the highest that I'd ever been until someone pointed out airplanes. What a Debbie downer! The next day a few of us (lord not me) paraglided in Interlaken. It looked reckless.

7. Thun. I'm pretty sure this name is French for tuna. It's a small city in between Bern and Interlaken with a castle. Charming, but I've seen it all before. Jadedness!

8. Zermatt. A town at the bottom of the Materhorn. Also touristy but actually much better than Interlaken. The views of the Materhorn are magnificent, and the hiking opportunities in the area are impressive. A great weekend trip!

9. Locarno. A charming lakeside town in Ticino, the only Italian-speaking canton of Schweiz. We went to the international film festival there and saw some very interesting films. One was a highly explicit exploration of gay sexuality (Melinda and Alex were LOVING this one, I'm sure), one was a movie about a scary kid scaring away potential suitors for his mothers, and one was a Finnish Christmas tale. Variety!

10. Bellinzona. The capital of the Ticino canton and a town know for having not two but three castles on a hill. You would think that castles on a hill get old, but these ones were charming still. We stayed here during the Locarno trip because Locarno was all booked due to the film festival.

And I still have la suisse metropolises Geneva and Zürich to go! Zürich is next weekend and Geneva has a festival going on all this week. I'll write about them and Lausanne as well in a post soon!

A bientôit! I hate French.

Patrick, V. 3.42853

Finally, my readers, an update from the namesake of this blog, la suisse. I apologize for making you sit on your hands waiting for this. It's just that in Switzerland, unlike everywhere else I had to go this summer, I actually have something concrete to do: my job. As you will learn in this post, productive Patrick is not equal to creative Patrick.

So: the dirty deets first.

My job: parfait. That's French for perfect! I get to play with little disabled mice all day and then try to cure them. It's edifying.

My place: so-so. I live in the Malley section of Lausanne, which my new friends (see below) and I have concluded is the ugliest section of Switzerland. Luckily, Switzerland is in general laughably gorgeous, so Malley turns out to be mediocre in the grand scheme of things. I have a beautiful balcony that overlooks...a traffic circle. But hey, it's a single with wood floors. What else can a guy ask for?

My friends: I made friends! This is SO not sixth grade Patrick talking here! I've mostly been traveling with Alex, Amber, and Melinda, three endlessly entertaining students from my program. Some of the other people in the program are interesting too!

Now, down to business: the Swiss and their souls. It's rough going here, folks: the Swiss aren't exactly the friendliest bunch. I've done well in German Switzerland because everyone thinks that I'm one of them until I speak, but unfortunately I live in the French-speaking canton on Vaud. Background: my struggles with French are epic and self-renewing. Every time a French-speaking person is mean to me because I can't speak French, I get more and more scared of the Gauls. Now it's at the point where I tremble when I pass old ladies holding baguettes. Pretty rough. The Swiss all know English, but wringing it out of them is like trying to pinch ants - it just doesn't happen.

Nonetheless, I have gained some insights:

-The Swiss are robots. Like, real robots. When they walk, their arms sway in the same way. When they judge me for not speaking French, it is always with the same robotic smirk. When any train is 15 seconds late, the old ladyrobots whip out their Tissots and check the time with the same robotic dismay. Remember that recession a few years ago? Yeah, never happened in Switzerland. No one knows why. I say robots.

-The Swiss love time. Not so much time but more the passing of time. Never have I been in a place where time moves as inexorably forward as it does in la suisse. In contrast to America, where buses are timeless because they never come, most Swiss buses are 2.5 minutes early. Lunch breaks last from 12 to 1245. The work day ends at 5. In Switzerland, on time is late.

-The Swiss can't dance. This is actually probably related to the fact that they're robots (but can't do The Robot). Any of my friends will gleefully tell you that I cannot dance. But when I am on the dance floor at a club here, I feel like the (adopted) love child of Beyonce and David Guetta compared to the Swiss, who merely sway back and forth, obviously waiting for someone to give them chocolate or a watch or something.

I'm not gonna lie: I kind of like it. Nothing unexpected ever happens in la suisse. Trains are on time. People come to work. Prices are ridiculous. It will always stay that way: robots can't break rules. It's a good place to get stuff done - I'm glad that I ended up here for the only slightly serious part of my Eurotrip.

That's why I too am a robot, at least for July and August. I'm Patrick, version 3.42853.