Sunday, 22 September
LUCERNE (Luzern)
And Now for Something Completely Different
We awoke, early again, in Elke's comfortable guest room, with a great continental ... hey wait, I said this for yesterday. Well, it was true again. But this time, it was because we had set an alarm, had a quick shower and dressed in the clothes we laid out[46], and wolfed down the breakfast because we had to get going. Though Lissy was already up and assembling breakfast, Elke and Gunther didn't get up until...10 to 8? Our train leaves at 8! We better go!
We got to the train station in record time, Gunther carting us in his minivan with Elke in the back[47]. We got on the train just in time, watching how the peculiar clock[48] taunted that we had made our train by mere seconds. For the first and last time, we could wave to a friend as the train pulled out of the station until she disappeared out of sight. Such romantics we are.
So we rode from Bruchsal to Karlsruhe, then a train to Bern (boo, no compartment) and then towards Lucerne. We did all this by 13:00! This was my first view of Switzerland, which I envisioned to be vast green pastures surrounded by titanic mountains capped with snow, giant Alpine horns, and a heck of a lot of goats. Well, I knew that a large city such as Lucerne probably would have a human population that slightly surpassed the goat population, but I still expected the mountains to be there. And once again, I did not expect to see so much graffiti--it was rumored that the Swiss are so anally clean, if you walked in the street with your hair mussed up, the Swiss Neatness Police would come up and arrest you. So my first impression of Switzerland was that it was quite ugly. Surprise, surprise.
This was also my first contact with Swiss-German which goes under the facade of being German, but it is anything but. By this time, I was starting to get comfortable with my "Traveler's German"[49], and could understand basic conversations, most billboards (with help from the German dictionary), and SOME train announcements. But here it was all Greek to me (er, uh, Schweize-Deutch); a totally different language. Even an "accent" made normal, high-German mostly unrecognizable. For instance, our train conductor girl, though originally from Mainz, Germany, worked around the Swiss and thus has such a Swiss accent that I couldn't understand simple words. Back to square one, I guess.
When we first arrived in Lucerne[50], we found
a coin-op phone[51] and used the change we had
brought from Doug's "foreign money jar" at home. We tried calling his
(far-removed) cousin Leslie, getting an un-understandable recording. We then
called his other "cousin" Judy, the mother of Leslie[52], and got a slightly different recording, but equally
incomprehensible. Here we go again! So we looked up in the phone book, and both
people were listed and both phone numbers were correct. What is it now? Even
after asking a local, who said we were doing everything right, and looking in
the front of the phone book[53], we couldn't
figure anything out. We tried calling information again, this time to the tune
of 3 SF (~$2.75!), where Doug asked, "Sprechen Sie Englisch" and they
transferred him, then the woman said "How can I help..." click. Stupid thing
ran out again. Boy were we mad!
The local we asked earlier suggested we just go down to the telephone office, not far from the station, and ask their help directly. We did, going the wrong way first and ending up at the TI. "We'll come back here after we reach one of your cousins," I said[54]. But then we finally found the Telecom office, gave her the two numbers we were dialing, and she listened to the recordings for us. Leslie's was disconnected, but Judy's...went through? She talked to the person for us and said we would call her right back[55]. But she didn't sound like Judy, and when Doug discovered that she didn't speak English, he knew something was wrong. Oops, I had remembered the number wrong (OOOHHHH!). So she called the RIGHT one, and got the recording, which said the number had been changed and you had to call this other number to find out what the new number was. No wonder we didn't get anywhere!
So we were finally in possession of the right number, so Doug called her and said, "Hey, Judy, this is Doug." I was simply standing in the booth, but I could distinctly hear her reaction over the receiver, "OOOOH MMMMY GGGGGOD!". Priceless. We discovered she had just moved in with a guy, and had too many boxes around for us to stay with her, but that we could meet for dinner, etc. Perfect. Finally the phone systems were not fighting us every step of the way! Our bad luck with phones must be changing. We waved amicably to our helpful attendant, "Thank you so much!" as we started to leave. "Hey! You have to pay me for that!" she shouted, and we realized that she was running a "meter" on the help she was giving us the entire time. I think it cost about $4. What crap...
So we headed back to the TI to find a room.....closed? Doug scolded me[56], saying he KNEW we should have gotten a
room while the TI was open. Oh well. We called Judy back, and she suggested the
hotel board in the station. We found it and, voila, there was one
listing that was actually under the typical $150+/night. When we pushed it's
button, it lit a red light...wow, very nearby! We picked up the complimentary
phone[57]
, and found out there was a room open. We booked right over to the Pickwick Hotel
and bar, and got a great room, with a bath, TV, and a gorgeous view of the Tower
Bridge for $75 (not bad for Switzerland). It was also a perfect meeting place
for Judy later that night.
So we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Lucerne, carting around our 5-pound Hotel Pickwick key and assuming that there must be some mountains behind all that fog. We knew we could get a free steamer ride on Lake Lucerne with our train pass, but it was just a matter of finding the darn thing. Well, at least we did find, I kid you not, an ice cream vending machine! The craziest thing: this was not a vending machine for Eskimo Pies or sandwiches, but for soft serve yogurt! Boy was it good. Hmmm, statue of man with boobs, lots of tall swans, ah, here it is! And the next one leaves in one hour....just enough time to go to the McDonalds and get a large coke for....3,95 SF ($3.50!?) and some Swiss chocolate bars ($2.50 apiece). Great, albeit expensive, snacking for our boat ride.
We originally went to the top deck of the boat, but once it got moving, the
freezing wind forced us to seek shelter inside. Though our first stop was
breathtaking, after that, the fog made it impossible to see anything past the
bow of the boat, so we sat inside, looking at German newspapers and magazines.
At one point, while Doug left for the bathroom, I heard "Bitte, Wo ist der
Bahnhof?" or something like that, and turned around with a start. There, a
Japanese man was showing off his latest toy, a computerized translator, to a
group of awed onlookers. I joined this "group" and, by the time Doug returned,
we had a huge discussion between people from, 6? 7? different countries and
languages talking, miraculously in English, about...language!
We also talked about anything we had in common. For some odd reason, the Japanese men fawned all over me and used all 10 of the English words they knew over and over again to find out anything they could about me and our trip. The Swiss girl from Zug complained about her high priced train pass (2000 SF/year)...until we told her how much it costs to have a car in America! We learned that, though Switzerland is very expensive to outsiders, it isn't to locals because the average income is 4000 SF/month (~$3200) and they are only taxed one month's income/year to receive the free schooling and health. Two Japanese girls explained interesting Chinese/Japanese characters to us. One guy talked about programming in Pascal to Doug. The Hong Kong girl expressed her apprehension of Hong Kong returning to Chinese possession in 1997, and how many businesses are folding or pulling out already. Somehow Ranma 1/2, Akira, and Macross came up, as our notebook with
"WEattests. Basically, we spent the entire two hours ignoring the scenery and submerged in each others cultures. Doug was in heaven.RANMA"
After the cruise, we returned to our hotel to freshen up, watching the
television in 5+ languages[58], laughing at
the lottery slogan "TOTO LOTTO LOSE". We then met Judy and her new squeeze
Walter downstairs in the bar, who again hardly recognized Doug because his face
was no longer skinny and angular. We chatted in the bar, showing them some
pictures from home, sipping my "beer and grenadine" (rather strange, actually),
and watching the dog next to us[59]. They then
walked us past the "fast part" of the river to a little, authentic Swiss place
for dinner. We had wine (strong), a salad with beets, cabbage, eggs, and odd
dressing, and fondue (another interesting experience). We talked and nibbled
for 2-3 hours, the whole thing costing $150+ (Thank God they insisted on paying
the bill!). It was a very enjoyable evening and, though the food was very
strange to me, a memorable ethnic experience.
On the way back to our hotel, the four of us strolled over the bridge, which had recently been rebuilt after it burned down by arson three years ago, looking at the art and the huge spiders[60]. I told Judy how freaked out I was about the sanitizing machine in the restaurant bathroom--after I flushed, the toilet seat itself spun completely around while this brush ran over the rim! I joked that it seemed that the Swiss were so anal about cleanliness that if you didn't shave one day, you might get a fine! She burst out laughing on that one.
When we got to our hotel, Judy gave us each huge hugs and a teary smile. I think she really enjoyed our visit, since she must feel so far removed from her family way out there in Switzerland. Doug said something very similar as I later asked him to tell me his impressions of our day in Switzerland: "Though the Swiss people can be kind of cold, I really feel at home here." And I agreed...it really was a charming little city.
On to TO MUNICH.