Many years ago, we took the boat to Iseltwald, to start a walk along the lakeshore to the Giessbach Falls. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant. Noticing pictures and, I think, awards on the wall relating to accordion music, Mary Joy asked the proprietor, an elderly man, about them. He promptly pulled out his accordion and played for us!
Now, we went to the closest restaurant, the Strandhotel, and liking what we saw on the menu, went immediately to their lake terrace for lunch, since we didn't have much time. We had a smoked trout salad--very good. It was very nice to sit there on a sunny day by the Brienzersee.
Then we went to the town square to wait for the bus back. While we were there, a squad of fourteen or fifteen Swiss soldiers, carrying weapons and heavily laden backpacks, walked into the square. One of them asked Mary Joy, in German, where the castle was. She replied that she was an American tourist. Immediately, a local man stepped up and the soldier asked him. However, the local man appeared bewildered. Apparently, there isn't a Schloss in Iseltwald. One of the soldiers jogged over to the fountain, his backpack banging on his back, and filled a plastic mineral water bottle. A sergeant (?) appeared and sorted things out, and the squad headed up the hill.
The Swiss still have compulsory military service for males. Most men who have finished their service are in the reserves, and they keep their assault rifles at home. Andreas, who is German, says that the Germans find this incomprehensible. I suppose it is as if the scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control were required to take home the samples of bubonic plague they were working with and keep them in their home refrigerators.
We caught the bus back to the Interlaken Ost station. It was a normal trip except for one thing. The bus wasn't full, and toward the middle there were a couple of guys in tee shirts, shorts, sandals or sneakers. One had a baseball cap, while the other had a goatee. As we were approaching the station, they suddenly got up, showed yellow badges and asked to see tickets. Our passes were good, of course.
So we walked back along the Aare to the West station, with a few minutes to spare, took our luggage out of the locker and caught the train to Spiez, where our adventures began.
The day before, we had bought our train tickets. Our options were limited to early morning (7:52, I think) and early afternoon (1:32). We chose the latter, with a projected arrival time in Milan a little after five. We were warned that because of construction on the line, we would have to get off the train at Iselle, in Italy, and board a shuttle bus for Domodossola, where we would be put on another train. This construction had been going on two years ago when we went through this area, coming from Locarno on the Centovalli line, but they had been letting trains through, at least from the south, at certain times of day, so we had avoided the shuttle bus situation. Not this time.
Shortly after we arrived in Spiez, there was an announcent that the train from Bern to Milan would be late because of mechanical problems. Okay. Then there was another announcement: that train was cancelled and passengers would have to take the next one. While our tickets would be honored, this introduced the complication of a train change, since this new train would only be going to Brig, so we would have to transfer to the next Brig-Milan train. All this was explained over the loudspeakers and handled calmly and graciously by the railroad personnel. We would end up arriving in Milan an hour later than originally planned.
The train to Brig arrived and Mary Joy and I had an upper level of a double-decker car all to ourselves. But that was only a relatively short part of the trip. We had a 33-minute layover in Brig, which was not long enough to wander up into our old haunts of two years ago. The next train was jam-packed with people, chaotically trying to find seats and places for their luggage for the fourteen-minute run to Iselle.
We ended up with our bags on our knees, seated next to an older French woman, from Paris, who was on her way to stay with her niece in Locarno, so at Domodossola she would take the scenic Centovalli ("hundred valleys") train into the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. We followed the same route in the other direction two years ago. Her English was very good: she had been an au pair in South Carolina. It turns out that she sings in the choir of a Protestant church near the Louvre, and recommended that we visit there to hear them the next time we're in Paris. She said that they'd had a wonderful well-known organist for many years (Mary Joy didn't recognize her name), but that she had retired and the new one wasn't nearly as good.
Soon the train came out of a tunnel and stopped at Iselle, a village in the Simplon Pass. The Simplon was a principal trade route between Lombardy and the Rhone Valley (i.e., Geneva, Lyon). We have passed under it many times through the long rail tunnels on the way between Interlaken and Italy. But now we had to come out of our train burrows, into the open air, walk fifteen minutes with our luggage (carts were provided, if necessary), and get onto one of six or seven buses lined up on the road, beneath the towering rims of the narrow valley. This was semi-chaotic, with people shoving their bags into the bays under the buses, then trying to find a place on one of the buses, which wouldn't leave until full, and also wouldn't leave if more than full (no standing!).
We got the last two seats on the second-to-last bus, and it drove off down the pass. The scenery was impressive. Eventually, we arrived in Domodossola, and there was an even more chaotic scene, with people dragging their luggage down the narrow side aisles, peeking into the six-passenger compartments as they passed, sometimes asking if a seat were available. We ended up in a compartment with four young people. There was not much room for storing bags. This was a couchette car, with four pull-down beds in their daytime folded-up positions. I got my big bag up on a rack over the window, but part of it was hanging over, so to secure it I wrapped one of the bed-support buckle straps around the end, tying it to the luggage rack.
Otherwise, the trip to Milano Centrale station was uneventful. We got in a little after six, and went to look for our hotel, the Hotel Stazione. As you might guess from the name, it was very close to the station, a few blocks away to the front, at the base of the Pirelli skyscraper.
There were several small hotels in a row, and since our hotel's glass doors didn't slide open automatically, when we stopped in front of them, I assumed that the entrance was the next door down. But when we tried to check in there, it turned out that that was the Hotel New York, instead. So we went back to the glass doors and the desk clerk buzzed us in. Our room was plain and simple, and had two extra beds folded up into the wall. Occasionally, we heard the rumble of Metro trains beneath the ground. But the most important thing was that it had air conditioning!
We had already noticed that Brig was noticeably warmer than Interlaken. Milan was noticeably warmer than Brig. I had expected this. There is a reason why most Italians quit work during August and head for the beaches and mountains. I had made absolutely certain that all our Italian hotels had air conditioning. Even so, the combination of heat and humidity in places like Venice has to be experienced to be believed. I doubt very much that we will ever again go to Italy in August.
The desk clerk was very nice. We had brought a European cellular phone with us from home, and intended to buy an Italian SIM card for it, but we hadn't had a chance to do so yet, and it was too late today. We couldn't figure out how to operate the room phone, but when we told the desk clerk that we wanted to call a particular restaurant that Mary Joy had picked out in her researches, he called for us, but got an answering machine: they were closed until the end of August. This became a recurring theme. I had warned Mary Joy that many of the better restaurants in the cities in Italy might be closed for August. In addition, today was the eve of a national holiday, Ferragosto, the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Even more stores and restaurants would be closed from now through the weekend. This is very frustrating to Mary Joy, who (as we shall see in Venice) sees bad restaurant food as a personal insult, so she needs to have some indication (usually a review in a guide book) of whether it is worthwhile to eat at a particular restaurant. Therefore, if all the restaurants that she has marked down in Lonely Planet Italy or Rick Steves' Venice are closed, she is tossed into dangerous waters and has to steer her way past the treacherous rocks and icebergs while siren menus posted outside plausible but deceitful trattorias or osterias try their best to lure her inside to culinary doom!
We asked the desk clerk if he had any recommendations for restaurants. He gave us the card of a nearby pizzeria, saying that it was okay, but not terrific--the people working there were Chinese. I have some difficulty envisioning Chinese pizza. We asked if we would be more likely to find something good by the Duomo (Cathedral). He said yes, there were a lot of restaurants clustered in that area.
So we took the Metro down to the Duomo and looked around for somewhere to eat. We ended up at a bar (the Italian equivalent of a cafe) where the waitress talked us into staying--we didn't see anything better and were hungry. It wasn't too bad. It wasn't great.
We were much luckier with dessert. Lonely Planet recommends Grom, for some of the best gelato around. We found it, open, a few blocks north of the Duomo, almost across from La Scala. This gelato is made with the best ingredients and imaginative flavoring. As in most Italian shops, you go to the cash register first, tell them what you're getting (two small--two scoops) copette ("little cups"), pay, then take the receipt to the person doing the scooping--often the same person who took your money. I had two favors, coffee and the Grom special, while Mary Joy had coffee and pistachio. We enjoyed our wonderful gelato while walking the block or so to the Galleria, the grandmother of all indoor shopping malls. The Galleria is late nineteenth-century, with common areas roofed with glass. There are various pictures, including signs of the zodiac, inlaid in the floor. We, like all Milanese and tourists to Milan, could not leave the Galleria without doing a spin on our toe on the private parts of the bull, now very worn.
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