Friday, November 4, 2011

In der Schweiz!

Midterm break was spent in Switzerland!!!  The weekend was quite a learning experience in many ways.

Ross, Abby, Teresa, and I took a night train on thursday to Zurich, then hopped another to Luzern to meet Sanna (Ross's and my friend from IU who is studying in der Schweiz for a year!).  In retrospect, I don't think I will ever take a night train again, if I can help it.  It's a great idea to save time, but I barely slept and I was completely wiped all of Friday.  We didn't get sleeping cabins, so we just opened up all of the seats so they were all connected and tried to sleep like that, but I really failed at getting a good amount of sleep.

Sanna had a test the morning we arrived, so we went to her flat and dropped off our things and then went into the city to explore before we met her again.   We walked across the Chapel Bridge, which is the oldest bridge in all of Europe.  It was first erected in the 14th century!  Parts of it actually did burn down and had to be rebuilt, but parts of it are still authentic.
Switzerland is absolutely beautiful.  Although our first look at the small city of Luzern was quite foggy, its beauty couldn't be concealed.  There are also an enormous amount of swans in Luzern.  I had never seen so many in one place ever in my life!  
I had always thought that swans were beautiful, graceful creatures.. but now I just see them as giant white geese.  They were not afraid to walk right up to us as if we were going to give them food.  They also defecate all over the place, constantly.  Although some can still be quite beautiful, I'll never see them the same way. =P

We also walked along the Museggmauer, or the Musegg Wall.  It was built in 1386 and is still almost totally intact.  We were able to actually enter three (i think) of the towers, and we got a really nice view of the old city from above.  
It's still pretty foggy at this point, but it's still a great view!

This is a shot of one of the towers that we climbed up.

After meeting up with Sanna and grabbing lunch, we went to see the Löwendenkmal, the Lion of Lucerne.  It's a monument that memorializes the Swiss Guard for their battle against the revolutionaries that stormed the palace of King Louis XVI in 1792.  Over 600 soldiers died because they were overwhelmed in numbers.  The lion is 10 meters by 6 meters and is dedicated "to the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss."  The lion is impaled by a spear and has 2 shields, one with the Fleur de Lis of the French monarchy and one with the Swiss coat of arms. 
As you can see, he rests in the pretty solemn, gorgeous little area over a little pond.   It's a really nice place for some solitude.  I really enjoyed this monument.

We then moved on to the Gletschergarten, or Glacier Garden.  It was interesting, but a bit of a strange concept.  In a ticket to the garden, you were granted access to the covered area, the museum, an old house, and a house of mirrors.  It was quite strange.  but it was interesting!  At this point, I had just about topped out on energy from not really sleeping the night before, so I couldn't really soak up the information that was being thrown at me about glaciers.  However, the house of mirrors was plenty entertaining for an exhausted group of poeple!  This is my favorite pic from it:
I'm pretty sure everyone agrees, ONE Ross is plenty.  :)

We also visited a couple churches, all completely gorgeous.  Mostly baroque in style.  This is my favorite:
It said IHS up high on the alter, and I don't know why still, so I've dubbed this church the international horn society church.  I also really liked the marble juxtaposed with the white walls and the gold.  I think it's my favorite church I've seen here.  Honestly, coming from our little synagogue back in Chicagoland, I can't even imagine worshipping in a place so large and decorated.  These churches have become something else completely in my mind, they represent more art than anything else.  Even though I went to a service in Vienna, it was still more about the art and I actually went for the music because they performed a full Haydn mass.  

The second day was really all about the hike.  However, before the hike, we found an Alphorn shop and we all played some alphorn in the Swiss Alps!  
This is me busting out my trills or maybe my attempt at Strauss 1, but there were not enough notes for it.  =P
His alphorns are really nice and he makes a little design on the end.  The cool thing about the design is that he doesn't color any of the wood, he just uses different types of wood to get the colors!
The shop owner also didn't really speak english, so we were all attempting to talk shop with him in German.  We made it! 
And then we began the hike.  We hiked up Mount Pilatus, which has an elevation of 2128 meters.  I believe we got around the 1200 meter mark.  This was by far the most tiring thing I've done since high school basketball.  I am not a hiker, and it turned out to be quite difficult!  To be fair, I didn't expect it to be a jaunt in the woods.  But boy, was it tough.  We hiked for about 4 hours, with a break about 2 1/2 hours, when we reached the top of our hike.  We ate lunch, which by the way never felt so good.  It felt pretty hot for most of  the time.  We all overdressed and had our coats pulled off and sleeves rolled up.  then we reached a point where the climate had definitively changed.  There were no more deciduous trees and it felt a lot colder.  It was very chilly where we stopped for lunch.
This is the top of mount pilatus, from our highest point.

This is the view from the mountain, on our way up.
This is me, at our highest point!

Although I wasn't sure my hips, legs, or ankles would ever function again (they do, don't worry!), it was definitely worth it.  It was a great experience and then we went straight home and made very traditional cheese fondue at Sanna's house. 
This is the group (except Abby!) about to eat fondue!  The fondue was really good, but it is so filling and we probably each ate around 200 grams of cheese.  I had to stop early, because I couldn't eat that much cheese!!!  You almost need something cold to balance out all the hot cheesiness.  Nonetheless, it was a great meal after a long hike.  

I forgot to mention, we saw a ton of animals throughout Lucerne, but I met this sheep:
He was letting us pet him and clearly wanted food.  He made a little sheep noise every time I pet his head and he felt like a memory foam mattress, which was quite entertaining.  Expect he had very dirty memory foam, b/c my hand was clearly dirty from him.  I call him Temperpedic.

Our last morning in der Schweiz, we made a trip to the Wagner museum.  It looked like a very new museum because it seemed to be still having some work done and there wasn't a huge amount there.  However, it was very interesting!  
He lived here for only about 6 years (if i remember correctly) but in those years, he had a lot of interesting people visit him there.  I also hadn't realized that Wagner married Liszt's daughter, Cosima!   Although Liszt was a friend of Wagner, he wasn't happy about his daughter marrying him.  I watched a portion of a BBC video about Wagner which was very interesting.  I may have to look up the rest.  There were a lot of original scores, and Siegfried Idyll seemed to be playing endlessly. lol.  There were also a bunch of his personal belongings, piano, chair, old photos, etc.  

After that weekend... I really needed a weekend to rest ;)












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