December 23, 2013

It was hard to get out of Paris. We stayed an extra two days (out of our 25) in Belleville, the recently gentrifying part of northeast Paris proper. Not as bad as the completely over-developed Marais, formerly the old Jewish quarter, but well on its way. Perhaps the Echo Park of Pareee. Yet Belleville is charming, in a working man’s kind of way. Hardly any tourists, there is a school and a church, a “poste”, and the required neighborhood amenity shops: the boulangerie (for bread and bakery sweets), the boucherie (for fresh meats), small produce shops, large produce stores, and now, the local chain behemoth, “Mono Prix”, an innocuous and cheaper conglomerate that doesn’t sell any one product as well as any of the local stores. Oh, there’s the local bar, barber shop, bistro, cafe, pizzeria, shoe store, hairdresser, pharmacy (with the same Green Cross that all the pot shops, I mean medical marijuana dispensaries, have in LA), the dry cleaner, the immigrant food stands…. All this maybe multiplied by two. Belleville.

But we have to go to Switzerland on the 19th. It’s booked in advance. On a high speed train. Gotta go. So go… we do… to the Gare du Lyon, with Taxi Bleu, as we lug our two monster bags (I told her to pack just one carry-on size bag. What was she thinking?)… into one of France’s grand old dames of Paris train stations. Da wife has never seen anything like it. So cavernous. So elegant. Ok, maybe those huge rail stations in Beijing. But this? This…. is European. Not Asiatic. Big difference, you know? Just the je ne sais pas. Especially when you’re in Paris…

…which we’re not anymore… because we’re on the TGV Lyria hi-speed train to Zurich. Four hours going up to 368 kilometers an hour. How fast is that? 170 miles an hour? Afraid I don’t know, not being the mathematician in the family. Anyway, we race through the oddly green, mild winter countryside, thru plowed and aerated brown farm fields, small one steeple villages, straight east through Basel, to the cultural capital of Swiss-German Switzerland, Zurich. We check our bags in the station’s lost and found and we’re free to see all of Zurich…. in 3 hours…. which is when we next connect to St. Gallen, Switzerland, our final Swiss destination. We’re going to stay with Karin and Bruno, who stayed with us in LA for a couple of nights while on their way to the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, and our other national treasures. We’re returning their visit, their only travel friends who have actually ever accepted their invitation to come to St. Gallen, the immaculate Swiss town nestled at the foot of Swiss Alps. Hey, wait we still have to see Zurich….

…which we do… but even though a lovely and regal city, how much about a town can you really learn in just 3 hours, except for maybe that  it has a beautiful river, some very beautiful churches, a great Christmas market, lots of sparkly shops decorated for the holidays, nice looking hotels, generic words I use not for lack of a better vocabulary, but you get the picture, we’re on our way to St. Gallen.

And there she is… Karin…. waiting for us at the train station, on time and punctual, other words, which we will soon learn, will be the keys to our success over the next 4 days… as we will pack more into them than we usually do in a week. Dirty blond, curly-haired  and bespectacled Karin is smiling at the end of the platform and she seems genuinely glad to see us. And we her. It’s been well over a year. We walk out of the station and by default, we quickly learn that there is no car to chauffeur us back to Karin’s, or to… anywhere over the next 4 days.  Rather… we can “take the number 1,4, 7, or 11 buses” directly back to her place. “Got it,” I say with a smile. “One, four, seven, or eleven.” “Dot’s great,”Karin says with an even bigger smile. I can’t tell you how pleased she is to have recognized another human time piece in the universe. Yours Trulesly. But once again, note the key words, “public transportation”. Karin and the Swiss are experts.

Karin and Bruno are the perfects hosts. Other than living on the 5th floor without an elevator (oy!), they think of everything for us. Bus and train tickets, each and every meal, extra back packs and snow pants for hiking, maps, a much-needed laundry machine, a stocked refrigerator full of everything Swiss, and a daily schedule that, like I said, runs like a Swiss clock and leaves us exhausted at the end of each day. Still, it’s great to give over the reins to someone else for a change. Usually, I have to make all the travel decisions, when and where to go, how to get there, where to stay, for how long, what and where to eat, see, etc. etc. Although for now, being on the carefully choreographed Karin and Bruno bus (train and car) for these busy and scenic few days, is as good a Christmas gift as I could ask for.

The first day we bus and train up into the Alpine snow. Karin and Bruno keep apologizing and telling us “how little snow there is this year”, yet it seems to us like a perfectly white winter wonderland. There is a fog bank that sits in the valley between the peaks, and we bus right through it and above.

It looks like a lake of magical mist and there are blond-braided, Swiss miss fellow bus riders that get on and off the bus at every stop. And although my Indonesian wife has no “Sound of Music” childhood soundtrack to refer to, I feel like I’m traveling with the whole Von Trapp family. The snow and the mountains and the tots schussing down the slopes, or between their parents legs, remind me of a mountain fairy tale. Maybe not Grimm, but a happier one. And right on cue, da wife keeps smiling and saying, “once upon a time…”

 
Not to make the whole day too perfect or uneventful, the happy threesome convinces me to do some “easy Alpine hiking”. “No way,” I say, being more than a little reluctant, because if you know anything about me, you know that I don’t like to hike uphill, and secondly, on a more practical tip, I don’t have the right shoes. “Shoes,” they all scoff at me, “just follow us.” And off we go into the Alpine trails. “Happy trails, Trules.”

Within minutes, I’ve veered myself off the path into the deep snow up to my knees. I can’t do anything but fall down. Immediately the wife… takes out the video camera. She loves having video evidence to show me my Alpine ineptitude at exactly the right future moment. Fortunately, Karin and Bruno have a little more empathy for me, and they figure out an elaborate “pull Trules out of the snow” technique that temporarily saves the day and my cold Swiss ass for the next 5 minutes.
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But not six minutes later, and I’m upping my game. As the slopes get steeper, my city slicker, treadless shoes become more and more suspect. I am slipping and sliding up and down the slopes in a precarious clown ballet. If I wasn’t so challenged and afraid of falling off the side of the mountain, I’d probably think it was uproariously funny and take out my video camera to tape it myself… which of course my wife continues to do on her brand new mini iPad. Thanks, dear. Pretty soon, the only solution is for me to grab onto Karin on one side of me and Bruno on the other, and to have them comically walk me up and down every possible icy hurdle. And then, oh shit! All of sudden, I slip violently and both my feet shoot straight up in the air on an icy ridge. It feels like I’m in a Swiss cartoon and I’m going to fly straight into the Swiss air, do a triple somersault, land on my back and head, crack all ribs and skull, and end up in a Swiss hospital completely rapped and bandaged in white gauze and plaster. Fortunately, my fearsome twosome hold on for their lives, and as my feet and legs aim straight skyward, they completely support my 190 pounds with their sturdy arms which, if they didn’t, I would probably still be wrapped around some lonely Swiss juniper at the bottom of Santis mountain.

The next day is worse. Or should I say… better? This time we take a friendly Swiss neighbor’s car, and drive into a different part of the Alps to the Swiss cheese-making town of  Appenzeller .

Here we see how thousands of village cows produce millions of gallons of milk and how they are scientifically and alchemically turned into countless wheels of holy Swiss cheese, which of course we sample  and eat at every turn until we leave days later. Swiss cheese for breakfast with bread and yogurt, Swiss cheese for lunch on sandwiches and in various combinations of traditional meat and vegetable concoctions, and Swiss cheese for dinner in fondues and “raclettes”, a unique table oven technique for melting the cheese and to gobbing it onto more varieties potatoes, bread and vegetables. All, of course, completely delicious, although not very kind to one’s waistline, cholesterol count or blood pressure.

Then… onto the slopes themselves… with sleds. Or toboggans, as we honkies used to call them back in New Yawk. Wooden sleds with curved metal runners, and plastic sleds with no steering wheels and no control, except for one’s arms or legs… in the snow. And here we go. Down the slope. Surya manages… to go about 100 yards before heading off into the deep snow at the side of the slope. Me? I take the long wooden sled, figuring it’ll support my weight, and whoosh, down I go… also about 100 yards… before the sled zigs left and I zig right… off the friggin’ sled, down the slope another 100 yards… on my, quickly getting used to the Swiss snow, ass. Another comic masterpiece. Everyone is laughing. Me, da wife, Karin and Bruno (once they discover I’m not hurt), along with every mother, father, and child on the slope. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, it’s a kiddie slope, probably the only place my Swiss snow masters figured I could survive. Thanks, you guys. It seems that me and the Swiss Alps have a “thing goin’ on.”

For our final day in St. Gallen, we are rewarded for all our hard-working touristing over the last 3 days, by partaking in my favorite Alpine outdoor sport, by far, Nordic bathing. Yesiree, this is my idea of vacation athleticism. Sitting in the steamingly warm, luxuriously designed outdoor Swiss sulfur baths under the perfectly blue Swiss Alpine sky, and doing absolutely… nothing. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

But in all honesty, da wife and I love St. Gallen. We love the cozy little town, the beautiful 400 year old Catholic church, the hot mulled wine at the Christmas market, the Christmas carols in the town square, the chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. Even my comic Alpine misadventures are fun in retrospect. But what strikes me most of all are the people of St. Gallen. Not only our hosts, Karin and Bruno, but their parents and friends, the people singing in the town squares, even the Swiss misses on the buses. They all seem so… content. They were born right here in St. Gallen, they have grown up here in St. Gallen, their parents probably live just 4 blocks away, they work and teach and marry in St. Gallen, and they will probably die here. In St. Gallen.

The ones who stay, and we’re told it’s a very high percentage, don’t think of moving to the big city, Zurich. What for? They are happy here. No seeming ego. No seeming ambition. How antithetically different to the ravenous hunger and narcissism of LA. And… they’re friendly and polite and helpful. Downright nice. Probably moral too. We don’t see one person trying to ride a bus or train without paying for it, even though they’re almost never monitored or checked. Who wouldn’t want to move to St. Gallen, other than the fact that it seems to be one of the best kept secrets in Western Europe? Highly recommended for no nothing Americanos. Just bring your fairy tale sense of wonder, your snow shoes, and the white-covered slopes and friendly people await you…. 

But like I said, how much a good thing can the Trules take? It’s time to move on. To retrace our train tracks, back to Zurich and Paris, to adventurously change train stations from the Gare du Lyon to the notorious Gare du Nord (by Metro, no less), and to take the high speed Thalys train from Paris to Rotterdam, where Surya’s sister and brother in law, Wati and Dave, will pick us up Christmas Eve. So… early on the 24th, Karin and Bruno give us the exact amount of Swiss francs (no Euros in neutral and independent Switzerland), and they pack us onto our last local St. Gallen bus which will take is to the train station, where we can accompany St. Nicholas and his friendly Swiss reindeer all the way to Rotterdam.

Ho, ho, ho, y’all…………