Its our last night in Switzerland as we are cuddled up waiting for our night train to take us to Italy. We’ve spent the past two days taking it slow and catching up on editing photos, hopefully you’ve been checking them out. We made a snowman yesterday in the freshly fallen snow beneath the shadows of the huge mountains. Tonight we went out for a really good meal at a restaurant I’d gone to in 2002. It was just as delicious this time around. We’ve met some interesting characters since we crossed the swiss border both native europeans and travelers like us. First we met Vietal on the train here from Paris. He smelled of beer and cigarettes and invited himself to play Rummy with us. When he won the first round we thought perhaps he was less inebriated than he seemed, but were soon proven wrong when he smoked in the non-smoking car, swore about how much he hated the french, and told Michael that his mother was a thief. Apparently Michael’s mother has stolen stars from the sky and put them into his eyes to make them so beautiful. I agree, but am still sure that Vietal was drunk. After a spirited conversation in four or five languages sometimes intermixed all into one sentence our friend’s stop came and we were left with a table covered in ashes and a much quieter car.
Next we met our roommate who we woke up as we arrived at the hostel. He got out of bed to greet us and explain that his alarm clock was very loud and we’d be hearing it the next morning. The next morning his alarm clock WAS very loud, but nothing compared to his stomping and shuffling of plastic. After about 45 minutes of noise he finally left us to slumber. We met him again later that night and learned that he was from the Rhine Valley in Germany. It was hard to hate him for the mornings noise because he was genuinely sweet and good natured, but strange. He has a habit of abruptly ending conversations and just walking out the door. We never learned his name, but enjoyed talking with him about our travels.
Finally we met a series of American travelers who are just the kind of backpackers (and americans) that give us a bad name. They were making dinner in the common kitchen area where we were cooking. They were loud, opinionated and unaware of when to hide it. After enduring a long drawn out conversation about how they were all avoiding France because French people hate Americans they moved on to criticising the hours of business in Europe. Michael and I were glad to be finished consuming and cleaning up our dinners in order to escape. However that wasn’t the last of their (Michael calls them meatheads) commentary. Over the course of the next two days they managed to make the rest of the world seem like a barren wasteland of crime, there simply for the plundering of goods that were cheaper than they could find in the states. I don’t think I once heard them mention the beauty of any place they conversed about.
So in closing I would like to mention the awe inspiring view out the window:
A blue green lake strechting along the slopes of a snow capped evergreen covered mountain, concealed here and there by tufts of transclucent clouds sliding through the crisp cool air.
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