Still Behind

I haven't had much time to write: usually I do that early in the morning or on trains or planes. Tomorrow (July 31st) we take a train and then a plane, so I'll be able to catch up some. The problem is that our internet connection is then mostly lost until Monday night (August 3rd).

A Digression on Logistics

Mary Joy complains that I go into too much detail. Rick Steves says that in researching his guidebooks he makes all the mistakes, so that we don't have to. We like Lonely Planet guidebooks for their breadth of coverage, good restaurant advice and maps (Rick Steves's maps look hand-drawn and are sometimes hard to read). Steves excels at in-depth coverage of the (relatively few) places he writes about, as well as in details of the nuts and bolts of getting from point A to point B and getting done what you want to do once you get there (his restaurant recommendations have sometimes been iffy). Independent travel requires a great deal of such logistical planning. Doing such planning is the sort of intricate puzzle that I enjoy. Actually putting your planning into execution, however, can be stressful. In fact, the trips that I've enjoyed the most have tended to be the ones requiring the least responsibility.

On a bus tour or a cruise, all you have to do is show up with your pants on (though, on one occasion, which I've probably mentioned before and will not retell here, I didn't even manage to do that). This is more relaxing than being your own tour director, and you meet a lot of interesting people on tours, but it is pricier and you are stuck with the tour's itinerary and schedule. You also don't have the feeling of accomplishment and confidence in your own capability that results from managing a complicated itinerary. We did a tour in China and will do one in India, and we did one when we traveled to Spain and Portugal with my parents and brother and sister-in-law in 2005. Otherwise, I've been the tour director on our travels.

In any case, I feel a responsibility to tell as exactly as possible, if only for our future reference, how we managed to navigate through the shoals of these very foreign waters without running aground. There is always a certain degree of culture shock, even in a country like Switzerland, where I've been nine or ten times, or England, where we are, as George Bernard Shaw put it, two nations divided by the same language. When we travel we are strangers in a strange land, and can never take anything absolutely for granted.

Basel and Unterseen

On Friday, July 17th, we got up fairly late, after a good night's sleep, and just managed to get in for the last fifteen minutes of the hotel's very nice buffet breakfast. The online reservation I had made had also offered to add breakfast, WiFi and late checkout for a total of one franc extra. I had taken that offer. I hadn't expected to use the late checkout option, but in the end that proved necessary.

We went to the railroad station and had our Swiss Half-Fare Cards validated. Swiss rail tickets, and especially cable car and funicular tickets up the mountains, are very expensive. I hadn't thought that we would do enough travel to make an eight-day rail pass worthwhile, but we had used "halb-tax" cards before, and once you spend an amount on tickets equal to the price of the card, you are ahead of the game. We then bought our tickets to Interlaken West, and since we knew exactly which TGV bullet trains we wanted to take from Lyon to Avignon and back on Friday and were afraid that those trains might fill up if we didn't get our reservations soon, we asked if we could buy French train tickets somewhere in the station. Yes, in the travel center. We went there and, since buying tickets at the counter would cost ten francs a ticket, we first tried using one of the computer monitors, through which you could select and reserve your place, then pay for it at the counter without the fee (we learned this from the gentleman at the information station on the floor). I had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy tickets online from the French national railroad website--it had balked at the payment stage, without actually crashing my credit or debit card. (A digression: you must notify your card company before you go abroad, or they will assume that any payment or withdrawal is fraudulent and shut the card down.) Now, the machine here also took us through the whole process, only to be unable to finish it up at the very end. So, finally, we went to the counter and paid our twenty francs in fees to have the nice lady there get our tickets. And there turned out to be a problem, though not a major one. On the Avignon-Lyon train, only one assigned seat was available. The other would be assigned at the time of boarding. This apparently meant that the train was almost full, so it was a good thing that we had gotten our reservation now, since we would need to take that train, even though it was inconveniently early, or an even earlier one, in order to catch our flight to Berlin Friday afternoon.

Sorting this all out took us past the normal noon checkout time, so it was good that we had late checkout privileges. We returned to the Ibis, checked out and left our luggage in storage. Then we went around the corner to pick up the 16 tram into the Old Town, stopping at the Markplatz (Market Square), where there was a market going on in front of the City Hall, which dated from the Middle Ages, but had been renovated in the late nineteenth century, with a romanticized version of medieval decoration. As suggested by Lonely Planet Basel (which we had on our iPad) we went up the hill through the medieval streets to the Spalentor, one of the only three remaining city gates. (Another digression: one of the reasons I had gotten the iPad in the first place was to carry e-versions of guide books and other books. Books have been the principal very heavy weight in my daypack. It is slightly more awkward to be carrying an iPad from sight to sight, instead of a guidebook, but here it turned out pretty well.). We came back down by the Marktplatz, then went up the other side to the Muensterplatz. The Muenster is the medieval cathedral, built of reddish stone, with a large, stone St. George, in stone plate armor, spearing a stone dragon, on the front left facade. The most interesting thing inside is the tomb of the famous 16th-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose best-known work, the satirical "In Praise of Folly," was dedicated to his friend Thomas More (the original Latin version--"Moriae Encomium"--

of the book's title involves a pun on More's name). Though he hoped for reform of the Renaissance Catholic Church, in the end he disappointed his Protestant friends because he thought that the Reformation went too far. I had to ask where he is buried--there is a large inscription on the back side of a pillar near the front of the nave.

So far, we hadn't had so much as a glimpse of the Rhine, Basel's reason for existence. The city is at the head of navigation on the river, just below the mighty Rhine Falls at nearby Schaffhausen, just as St. Paul, Minnesota is at the head of navigation on the Mississippi, below the St. Anthony Falls at Minneapolis.

We went to the Baerfusserplatz, where we picked up the 16 tram again and took it through the Marktplatz to the Schifflaende stop, the end of the line, at the Middle Bridge over the Rhine. We went out onto the bridge and looked upstream and down. There were some bathing places nearby, full of swimmers in the unaccustomed heat. Then we went back to find the 16 tram again, but we couldn't find a stop for it going toward the railroad station. No problem: we took the 14 instead back to the Marktplatz, where we got off and caught the next 16 to our hotel. We picked up our bags, went to the station, bought some lunch sandwiches at a standstill, then caught the 3:30 train to Interlaken.

At Thun, four recent University of Colorado graduates boarded the train and sat across from us. They were still on their first day of travel, having flown from Denver to Amsterdam to Zurich. They would finish their very long day at Gimmelwald, going on to Milan on Sunday, then to Nice, Venice and other points that I don't now remember. We suggested some hikes as we rounded the Thunersee, then we said goodbye as we arrived at Interlaken West, around 5:30. We rolled our bags across the Aare on Bahnhofstrasse into Unterseen, checked into our nice apartment for the third time since 2010, and, after picking up some provisions at Co-op, went to dinner in Unterseen's old town, sharing a pizza and salad at Citta Vecchia, where I had my first Rugenbrau beer of this return to Interlaken. Across the street is the Unterseen Stadthaus (city hall), which has a restaurant where we've also eaten. Family tradition has it that Mary Joy's great-great-grandfather worked at the Stadthaus in the second half of the nineteenth century, whether managing the restaurant or in some other capacity isn't clear. So maybe Mary Joy has restaurateurs on both sides of the family (her maternal grandfather had a restaurant in Kenosha, Wisconsin), which might explain her interest in good food. Then, back to our apartment, which now, unlike earlier, had WiFi, catching up on e-mails and doing some planning, then went to bed. It was raining heavily--we were told later that this was the first rain here in three weeks.

A 34-Hour Day (Part 2)

The airport for Basel, Switzerland is not in Switzerland but in France. Officially, it is Euroairport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg, serving the area where Switzerland, France and Germany meet. We didn't have to go through passport control because we'd already done that in Amsterdam. From the baggage claim there are separate exits for Switzerland and for France and Germany. We just rolled our bags through the Swiss customs gate in the green "nothing to declare" lane--there was nobody there. After getting some Swiss francs from an ATM, we found the bus to Basel--if, like us, you have a confirmed reservation for a hotel in the city, you just show it to the driver and you don't have to buy a ticket.

The bus dropped us off at the main railroad station, where we went into the concourse to the Mobile Zone store to find a Swiss SIM card to insert into the cellular phone we had brought from home. We use Verizon at home and their phones aren't configured the same as European phones, so for our 2012 trip we had bought a phone with European configuration, with the idea of changing the SIM card as we changed countries. We had, however, never used it on that trip. Problem: the three-year-old phone used an outdated style of SIM card, which Mobile Zone didn't carry. The clerk suggested that we buy a cheap new phone from the Media Max store in the station. We did that, but I'm not sure we did it right. Our new phone and new SIM card (for the Salt phone system) with 25 francs in credit, cost us 49.95 Swiss francs (a little over $50), but it's run through our credits like a drunken sailor. Apparently, it's charging us 1/3 franc per minute for a domestic call and a whole franc a minute for an international call, which makes it expensive for Mary Joy to call her mother. We've had to add more francs to the card's credit.

Just down the street from the station's rear entrance is the Hotel Ibis Bahnhof. Ibis is a budget brand of the Accor hotel chain (Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, etc.). They are modern, clean, formulaic and barebones (think a classy Super 8). In 2009 we stayed at the one at Charles de Gaulle Airport (Paris). The room, I think, was almost exactly the same as this one. The desk clerk was very welcoming and helpful. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to remember which trams to take to the old town and back, which led me to rely on my interpretation of the dense and complicated route map she gave us. Basel must be among the most streetcarred cities in the world--there are nearly twenty routes, going every which way. In the center city, you can't go more than a minute or two without coming within sight and sound of one or two or three of these big green or yellow metal monsters, growling up and down the streets.

It was after nine o'clock (though still light out), but I was hungry, so we decided to follow the desk clerk's recommendation and walk down to Baerfusserplatz, at the south edge of the Old Town, where there are all sorts of restaurants. The walk was a gradual downhill most of the way and took less than half an hour. We ate at a beer hall called "Braunen Mutz," sitting outside. I should give a weather report here: dry and unusually hot, around 36 degrees Celsius (97 Fahrenheit), though probably a little cooler by then. Unfortunately, most of Europe is currently suffering from extreme heat, and since air conditioning is the exception there rather than the rule, we'll be suffering, too.

I had a large bratwurst in onion sauce, with roesti (a sort of Swiss hash browns). Better than I've had in New Glarus, Wisconsin, and the brown beer I had was very good, too. Mary Joy had a salad and a good Swiss white fondant wine. As I looked at the tram route map, it seemed to me that the number 10 tram would go right past our hotel. We had a free transit pass from our hotel, so we might as well make use of it. The trams have specific stops, and they stop at all of them. As soon as we crossed the bridge over the railroad tracks, we would stand by the door and, at the next stop, push the button to open the door and get out. But after a while, we seemed to have gone a long way without crossing the bridge--it was dark out and not a whole lot was visible. I checked my map again and saw that we had gone several stops farther than we should have, so we got off at the next stop, which appeared to be in some suburb. Since the shelter for the stop for the other direction was minimal and had no schedule posted, we walked ten or fifteen minutes down to the next stop, just as a train was arriving. We got off at the next stop, which, according to my reading of the stylized map, should have been just up the line from our hotel, but as we followed the street, across from the tracks, the sidewalk suddenly went up a hill, away from the street and tracks. At first we followed the street, in the street, but I didn't think that was safe, so we went up the steps with the sidewalk, expecting it to come back down and rejoin the street. Instead, it joined and followed another street that curved off to the right. Down the hill to our left appeared not just one tram track but many tracks coming together, indicating a railroad yard. We asked a man if he could tell us how to get to the Hotel Ibis Bahnhof. He replied that the street we were walking along would take us right there. Sure enough, after a few blocks we arrived at the hotel, coming in from the side street, from the west instead of from the south, as I would have expected! When I was able to look at the map in better light, I realized that the number 10 line passed substantially to the west of our hotel, and that the line we should have used was number 16. All's well that ends well--Mary Joy was not amused.

Finally, we got to bed around 11:30, the end of a very long day.

On the Move

Where we are now (Gimmelwald, Switzerland) has slow WiFi, and we probably won't have any the next two days. Expect more posts tThursday night or Friday.

A 34-Hour Day (Part 1)

On Wednesday, July 15, 2015, we were picked up at our house at 11:55 a.m. by Fred, the very courteous and capable driver for a company recommended by Mary Joy's brother.  We have been leery of taking taxis to the airport since the time that one had simply not shown up, despite repeated reassurances, when we called, that he was "on his way."  We drove ourselves, parked in MSP's pricey long-term parking, and managed to catch our plane.

But Fred was actually a little early, with his luxury SUV, and though we paid a little more, we got to the airport.  When we were getting into line for security, we were told that since our boarding passes said "TSA PRE-CHK," we could get into a different line altogether, where, wonder of wonders, there was no such thing as taking off your shoes or belt, or pulling out your laptop or 3-1-1 baggie for inspection, or going through the full-body scan.  Delta had said to be at the airport three hours ahead of an international flight, but we were through security in less than fifteen minutes, so, as planned, we had lunch at the French Meadow Bakery.

Our plane was an Airbus A-300, with cramped seats in a 2-4-2 configuration, the two aisles being barely wide enough for one person to walk down.  The overhead wasn't big enough for my    standard-sized (according to Delta's own website) carry-on to fit end-on, so I had to put it in sideways.  Our seats were right next to the toilet--one extra source of noise working against our plan to sleep on this flight.  But I have never been able to sleep on a plane, and this trip was no exception, though I tried, using the earplugs and mask that Delta gave us.  Mary Joy, as usual, had better success, once we had our meal (called "lunch," though it was around 4 p.m. CDT) of chicken stuffed with broccoli, salad, bread, cheese, crackers and a brownie.  One loud guy in line for the WC told the others in line that he had been on a tour where the bus had made a restroom stop at an outbuilding with a single toilet.  As the others had gone in, one by one, he had conducted a scientific experiment, timing each visit.  He said that the men usually took 70 or 80 seconds, but the women, on average, took 2.3 times as long.  Well, travel is supposed to be educational.

We landed in Amsterdam about 20 minutes early and had to walk what seemed like forever in order to get to passport control, then another ten minutes to our gate, D74.  Amsterdam Schiphol is a big airport.  They gate-checked our main, large carry-ons, because the flight was full and the plane was small.  We travel with bags that we can normally carry on--each of us with one full-sized carry-on in the overhead bin and one daypack under the seat in front.  We don't usually check luggage except for the European budget airlines, like EasyJet or Ryanair, which are tight on luggage.

The KLM flight to Copenhagen left on time.  An oddity of airline pricing, but not unusual: it would have cost us substantially more to take our flight to Amsterdam without going onwards than it is costing us to take that flight and then go on to Copenhagen.  Which is why we were going on to Copenhagen.

We were astonished when, on this one-hour flight, the flight attendants handed out little boxes with egg salad sandwiches!  Very good egg salad sandwiches on dark bread.  That is much more than we got from Icelandair on the flight from Minneapolis to Reykjavik three years ago!  The boxes informed us that the bread was organic, and the following:

Have a nice day
Ready to enjoy Rondeel chicken/egg, products with a unique story?  At Rondeel they care for their chickens.  They care for the environment and for their health.  The farms meet the natural requirements of chickens.  The chickens have access to night quarters, day quarters and a wooded area.  Rondeel was therefore awarded 3 better life stars by the Dutch society for the protection of animals.

We care for our chickens
The farmers take really good care of their chickens.  They make sure they have a nice day every single day.  Transparency is a key feature, which means that the farms are open to visitors on a daily basis.  So visit one of our farms or go to the webcam via the website and see for yourself how they live the good life. www.rondeeleieren.nl/webcam

We had a long layover at Copenhagen, so we went into the city.  First, we had to stow our bags.    There are baggage lockers in one of the parking ramps across from Terminal 2, not a long walk from Terminal 3, where we had come in.  There are large lockers and (many more) small lockers.  We needed a large locker.  You hold the locker shut until it clicks and a big green dot turns red.  Then a computer screen on the wall beeps at you, so you rush over to see that it shows the number of your locker and asks you for payment, either in kroner coins (Denmark isn't on the euro) or by credit card.  The large lockers cost 75 kroner (about $12.50--not cheap); the small ones 50).  As on our last Copenhagen layover, three years ago, when we stayed overnight and flew out in the morning, we didn't bother getting any Danish money, but relied entirely on our Visa card.  The first locker we tried wouldn't click over from green to red.  With the second, we tried twice unsuccessfully to get it to accept our card: it would think awhile, then give up and pop our locker back open.  If we couldn't store our luggage, we would have to sit around at the airport for seven-and-a-half hours!  Meanwhile, someone else was having a worse problem.  The way you retrieve your luggage is that when you come back from wherever you've been, you stick the same card into the machine and your locker pops open.  Theoretically, at least.  This other guy kept sticking his card in, but his locker wouldn't open.  So he flagged down one of the parking ramp employees and was soon speaking Danish with a voice from the machine.  Our third try with our Visa card was a success, however, so we didn't stay to see if the voice could get the locker open (so far, it didn't seem to be working out).

We went back to Terminal 3, where the train and Metro stations are.  We had already bought our Metro tickets from a ticket machine for 36 kroner (about six dollars) apiece, so we got aboard the next train.  For most of the day, the airport Metro line (M2) runs trains everY four minutes.  You can also take a railroad train downtown to the Central station, which we had done in 2012.  Which you choose depends on where you are going: three years ago, our hotel was near the railway station and Tivoli Gardens; now we were heading for the waterfront.

We took the Metro for eight stops, to Kongens Nytorv.  It took about fifteen minutes.  From there it was a short walk to Nyhavn.   Nyhavn is a little harbor with sailing ships and tour boats, faced by cute, pastel-colored old buildings fronted by millions of sidewalk cafes frequented by billions of humans.  Mary Joy had, based on reviews, picked a restaurant there for lunch.  We had an hour before it opened at 11:30.  I hadn't done any research on things to see in Copenhagen, so we wandered around, looking for the Amalienborg Palace.  We knew that it was somewhere near the Marble Church, which, after visiting the Garrison Church (beautiful organ!), we soon found.  While this impressive, circular, domed building was apparently begun in the eighteenth century, it wasn't finished until 1894, and the interior decoration is very much of that time, except for a wonderful organ, smothered in wooden cherubs, that looks much older.  The palace is just down the street, four buildings on four sides of a square, at the center of which is a greened bronze equestrian statue of an early-eighteenth-century Danish king, dressed as a Roman.  Each of the doors of the palace was flanked by two sentry boxes.  Near two of those boxes, on the northeastern and northwestern blocks, stood one Guardsman apiece, dressed in Napoleonic--era blue uniforms and tall, black bearskin hats and carrying submachineguns.  While the British queen's guards are known for their imperturbability in the face of tourist provocation, the Amalienborg guard on the northwest block at one point marched down to another guardhouse to shoo away some kids who were playing with it.  If you got too close to him while taking his picture, he would shake his finger at you.

We then continued down the street to a nice park on the waterfront, right across from the modern opera house.  We went looking for the Little Mermaid statue, but gave up when it became clear that it would be too far away, on the other side of the big Kastellet fortress.  So we went to lunch.

Told og Snaps is a Victorian-looking restaurant several steps down from the street.  As you go in the door and down more steps you are met immediately by the large, wooden bar.  The walls of the rest of the room are covered by photograph portraits of Danish royalty, who no doubt were alive a century ago, or maybe a century-and-a quarter ago, but who are presumably now defunct.   The restaurant serves only smoerrebroed, Danish open-faced sandwiches, along with beverages.  Their specialty drink is the eponymous "snaps," which, I assume is cognate to the German "schnapps," i.e., a flavored liqueur.  We decided that in our situation it would be too dangerous to try one of their house versions.  I had a local India pale ale, Mary Joy had water and we both had smoerrebroed involving pickled herring, mine with a sauce containing apples and horseradish.  Very good.  Our waitress, whose father is American, was very helpful.  She even told Mary Joy where to find an Ecco store, to replace the sandals she had left on the plane to Amsterdam.  Next to us was a couple who talked to each other in Chinese but spoke to the waitress in nearly unaccented American English.  It turned out that they had grown up and gone to university in China, but had gotten graduate degrees in the U.S. and now lived in Connecticut.  One of their Chinese college classmates had gotten his graduate degree in Denmark and now lived in Norway.  They had just been to a reunion he had held for 43 of his classmates there.

We had the only dessert on the menu: berries in sweetened milk, if memory serves, then said goodbye to everyone and headed for the Ecco store on the Stroeget, the pedestrianized shopping street that leads from downtown to Nyhavn--we had walked it three years ago.  Mary Joy got her new sandals and we took the Metro back to the airport.  At first, we went to the wrong baggage-locker area--I hadn't paid close enough attention to my research sources to realize that there were two, in the two adjoining entrances to the P4 parking ramp.  Mary Joy, however, was sharp enough to notice immediately that the locker I thought was ours was numbered "2-6" and not "3-6."  We went to the correct machine, inserted our Visa card and, after an anxious moment, the locker popped open with a click.

Since it was now two hours until our flight, EasyJet was accepting luggage checked for it.  They no longer do personal check-ins at the airport.  You have to check yourselves in from home, online,  but, unlike most other airlines, rather than only allowing online check-ins within 24 hours of the flight, EasyJet allows you to check in and print your boarding passes up to 30 days in advance, which I had done back home.  When I had bought the tickets, knowing that we were going to check bags, I had paid for that at the same time (cheaper).

After handing in our bags, we went to the desk for VAT refunds, to turn in the form that we had been given at the Ecco store, in order to get a refund of the Value Added Tax, since we were giving these Danish sandals a new home in America.  Then we went through security, passed the gauntlet of duty-free temptations and walked to EasyJet's F concourse at the far, far end of the Terminal 2 gates.  The way is so far and so desolate that toward the end they start putting remaining walking times on the floor, so you can count down the half-minutes to your arrival in the promised land of concourse F, or even compare whether your walking speed is faster than their prediction.

EasyJet has changed its boarding and seating procedures.  It used to be that there was no assigned seating and you grabbed whatever available seat you wanted when you boarded the plane, but EasyJet has now come to the realization that they can charge passengers for choosing particular seats, holding over them the threat that if they allow the airline to choose their seats for them, something dreadful might happen--maybe John Smith in 1A and Jane Smith in 29F.  We were willing to risk that rather than pay extra, and while we didn't get our preferred setup (we were aisle-middle instead of middle-window), that was okay.

The one-and-three-quarter hour flight to Basel went well, though nothing  on EasyJet is free, not even water, so since Mary Joy was very thirsty, she bought a little bottle of water for two euros.

Toward the end of the flight I noticed that the young woman sitting in front of Mary Joy was sketching a portrait of a young, bearded man across the aisle, who, oblivious to everything, was engrossed in his German news magazine.