Zug

We are now (Sunday, June 27) enjoying free wi-fi at the most expensive hotel on our trip, in the resort town of Pontresina, just a few miles from St. Moritz, in southeastern Switzerland--but more about that later.

Friday, we treated Albert and Kathi to a nice lunch on the terrace at the Hotel Interlaken, the oldest hotel in the city (it has plaques indicating that Lord Byron stayed there in 1816 and Mendelssohn stayed there five times in the 1830s and 1840s). We sat and talked until about 2:30, when Albert took us to the Interlaken Ost station and we said goodbye. We caught the 3:04 train to Lucerne, and got in a few minutes late, but the train to Zug was delayed by about ten minutes. When it finally arrived, crowds of people were getting on. We were quick to get into a second-class car, and stow our luggage above, but then a horde of kids started boarding, and an adult told us that the car was reserved. So we grabbed our luggage and fought our way out through the boarding children and their gear. Once off, Mary Joy asked if we had everything. No, we didn’t. I struggled through the army of kids backed onto the train, grabbed my bag and managed to swim upstream off the car. It later occurred to me that once on the train I could always have gone back through the cars to that one and found my bag under calmer circumstances, but in the heat of the moment, I didn’t think of that. We found another (crowded) second-class car and stood for the twenty-minute ride to Zug.

This was the second time that I had left something on a train on this trip. On the way to Interlaken, when we changed trains at one point, a man had to run after us with the bag with bottles of wine that we had received from Bernard’s friends. At least I haven’t yet left Mary Joy on any train.

Albert and Jolanda’s daughter Eva (thus, Mary Joy’s third cousin, once removed), picked us up at the station and drove us to her apartment, on a hillside overlooking the old town and the Zugersee (Lake Zug). This doesn’t give you any detailed idea of where Eva and her husband Andreas live, because almost all of Zug could be described as being on the slope of the Zugerberg mountain and overlooking the old town and the lake. We had steaks and tabouleh on the picnic table in their garden, as the sun was going down over the lake.

The four of us walked down the hill to the courtyard of a restaurant, where we joined some of their friends in drinking a beer and watching the World Cup game between Switzerland and Honduras. At the same time, Spain was playing Chile, and Switzerland needed to do better than Spain to get to the next round. But we saw as Spain pulled ahead of Chile 2-0, and though Chile later scored a goal, Switzerland couldn’t penetrate Honduras’s defense, so their game ended in a 0-0 tie, and Switzerland was out. Switzerland only gave up one goal in its three games, but it also only scored one goal.