A Hike in the Mountains

On the morning of August 12th, I went to the Mohler pastry shop in the Unterseen old town, where I bought pastries and yogurt.  We breakfasted and at 10:00 Eva was outside.

We, she, Andreas, Jochen and Miriam took the bus to Beatenberg, a long village high on a hill overlooking the Thunersee (Lake Thun).  Interlaken and Mary Joy's ancestral town of Unterseen are across from each other along the part of the river Aare that connects the Brienzersee with the Thunersee.  Both lakes are big, lovely, surrounded by mountains and navigated by ferries that pass from village to village around each lake.

At Beatenberg, we took the cable car up to the Niederhorn, about 6500 feet above sea level (Interlaken is around 1800 feet) and there we started our hike even farther up, to the Gemmenalphorn (about 6700 feet), then came back down by another route.  All in all, it took about five hours, with plenty of ups and downs and, needless to say, plenty of rest stops, especially on behalf of the two senior citizens (Mary Joy and I, at 56 and 61, were the oldest).  With the help of our new hiking poles and a pair borrowed from Eva, we survived and even flourished.  The scenery, as always in this part of the world, was spectacular, the company was great and we came across wildlife (steinbock, or mountain goats, very close up) and not so wild life (cows, as always).

When we arrived back at the Niederhorn, we stopped for refreshments at the restaurant.  The weather was looking ominous at that point.  We went back down on the cable car to Beatenberg, where, since we had about an hour to wait for the bus, and it was starting to rain, we went to another restaurant for coffee and a cheese, ham and veggie tray.

There and on the bus there was a somewhat raucous discussion of what Eva and Andreas should do when they finally visit the United States, focussing on renting a large car with cruise control (unknown in Europe) and Johnny Cash or Bruce Springsteen tapes.

Finally, we got back to Unterseen and said goodbye to our hiking companions.

We had dinner (okay salad and great pizza) at Arcobaleno, a restaurant that we had good experiences with in the past, then, went home to bed.

William Tell

On Saturday, August 11th, after breakfast, it was decided that while Andreas continued his work, Eva, Mary Joy and I would go do some on-site research relating to William Tell.  Eva drove us to Hohle Gasse, an old, deep-cut road on the edge of the Rigi mountain near Kuessnacht.  According to the legend, this is where Tell killed the tyrant Gessler.  This is the story, if you don't know it: Gessler, as the Emperor's viceroy in the region around Lake Lucerne, had set his hat upon a tall pole in the center of Altdorf, commanding everyone who passed to bow down to the hat, as if it were Gessler himself.  William Tell, a hunter from the countryside came to town with his son Walter to visit his father-in-law.  Not knowing of the decree, Tell failed to bow to the hat and was arrested.  A riot was about to break out, when Gessler himself arrived, with his escort of soldiers.

"I hear that you're a great marksman with the crossbow, Tell," said Gessler.

"He can hit an apple at eighty paces," bragged young Walter.

"Is that true, Tell?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Then I will release you if you demonstrate this feat for me--but the apple will be sitting on your son's head!"

Tell refused, but Gessler said that if he didn't attempt and make this shot, both father and son would die.

Everyone around was shocked and pleaded with Gessler to relent, but in vain.

Walter, the apple on his head, bravely encouraged his father.  Tell took two crossbow bolts out of his quiver, put one in his belt and set the other up on his bow.  He trembled, his hand shook, but once he released the bolt it went true and straight and split the apple in two, without harming Walter!

"Well done," said Gessler.  "I noticed that you put a second bolt in your belt.  Why was that?"

"That my lord, was for you, in case I killed my son."

Gessler had Tell thrown in chains and promised to put him in the deepest dungeon of his castle in Kuessnacht, so that Tell would never again see the light of day.  The fastest route from Altdorf to Kuessnacht led across Lake Lucerne.  So Gessler and his entourage got into a boat, with the heavily chained Tell, and headed up the lake.

But soon a storm came up, and the boat was in serious danger of being thrown against one of Lake Lucerne's famous rocks.  Tell, who was renowned not only as a shot but as pilot and boatman on the lake, was released and given the tiller.  He had the oarsmen row until the boat was level with a flat-topped rock jutting into the lake.  Then he threw aside the tiller and suddenly jumped onto the rock, with his crossbow in hand!  The boat drifted back onto the raging lake, and for a while, it looked like Gessler and all the others would go down to a watery grave.  But somehow they managed to bring the boat to shore and continued on land around the Rigi toward Kuessnacht.

Meanwhile, Tell, knowing that they would have to come through the wooded ravine of the Hohle Gasse, set himself in ambush there, and when Gessler came down to the end, he soon found the crossbow bolt that Tell had saved for him, sticking out of his own chest.  The three cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden rose up and tossed out their Hapsburg oppressors, leading to the founding of Switzerland, billions of tons of cheese, millions of clocks and watches, the invention of milk chocolate, the arrival of banking Gnomes in Zurich, the settlement of Green County, Wisconsin, and the birth there of my beloved.

Until the 1930s, the Hohle Gasse was just part of the highway from Immensee to Kuessnacht, and had been widened, graded and paved.  There was a plan to improve it even more, for modern automobile traffic, but in 1935 the schoolchildren of Switzerland collected their pennies to pay for a highway bypass around the Hohle Gasse.  A foundation took over the land and tore everything up, completely rebuilding it to look like what they thought it must have looked like in the late thirteenth century.  Now there is a short audiovisual presentation in a pavilion there, telling the history of the Hohle Gasse and the legend of William Tell.  For a legend it apparently is.  The first mention of Tell and his adventures appeared in 1470, nearly two centuries after he supposedly lived.

We walked up the Hohle Gasse to the seventeenth-century Tell Chapel at the top.  A mural at the back of the tiny church shows how Tell met his heroic end: saving a child from a raging river, while he himself drowned.

We drove along the lake and Eva pointed out the Ruettli meadow, a patch of light green in the middle of an expanse of dark green, above the blue-green lake.  This is the place where, in 1291, the Forest Cantons swore a bond together that today is treated as the beginning of Switzerland.  Then we stopped at a restaurant above Tells Platte, the rock where Tell supposedly leaped from Gessler's boat.  There we had a coffee and viewed he lake as the ferry crossed from the Ruettli and put in below, much more easily than Tell had.

We returned to Zug, picked up Andreas, and headed for Interlaken.  Along the way there were several tunnels and the twisting climb over the Brunig Pass.  One German driver ahead of us was having some sort of trouble, perhaps vision problems in the dark tunnels.  He seemed to have difficulty keeping his car within the lines and slowed down dramatically when there were oncoming headlights.  Eventually, he pulled off, to cheers and clapping from our car.  Another German driver ahead of us appeared to be intimidated by the Brunig, and eventually he pulled off, too.

We went down the other side, into the valley of the Aare, then along the Brienzersee (Lake Brienz), then into the very familiar tourist crowds of Interlaken.  We dropped our luggage off at the apartment that we were renting, then went back to the Brienzersee, to Boenigen, where Kathi, the friend of Eva's father, Albert, was having a pre-theater apero--wine, gazpacho, hors d'oeuvres.  There, along with Albert and Kathi, were Eva's sisters, Silvia and Irma, and their husbands, Kurt and Heinz.  Also there were Jochen and Miriam, young German friends of Eva and Andreas, living in Zug.

It was a nice party, with very pleasant company, but we were together for a different purpose.  We went to Matten, checked Eva, Andreas, Jochen and Miriam into the Hotel Sonne, and walked from there to the nearby grounds of the Interlaken Tellspiele, where we would watch a grand, outdoor production of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell.  Once we were on the grounds, we had and took an opportunity to take a picture of William Tell himself, along with his son Walter.  They somehow looked amazingly familiar.

We went up to our seats and waited for the play to start.  The set had several houses, a castle in the process of construction and a wooded area that could be (and did become) a Ruettli or a Hohle Gasse.

It was a lot of fun, though it was a good thing that I had read an English version the day before, on the train from Colmar, and Mary Joy had read the original German version around the fourth of July.  As it was very faithful to Schiller (Kathi, who goes every year, said that this was because this year was the hundredth anniversary of the Interlaken Tellspiele), we knew who these people were and what they were doing.  The shooting of the apple, as Schiller had written it, happened very quickly, while everyone (except me) was distracted.  I have it on video on my camera, and will have to analyze it to see how it was done.  The incidental music, of course, was taken from the overture to the opera that Rossini wrote based on Schiller's play, the curtain calls being made to the famous finale of that overture ("Hiyo, Silver!  Away!" immediately comes to the mind of any American child born before 1960 or so).  

 We then went over to the bar at the Hotel Sonne and drank beer and talked for quite a while.  Then Eva drove us back to our apartment, and we went to bed.

On, to Switzerland

On Friday, August 10th, we had our continental breakfast and left for the station to catch the 10:23 train to Basel.  We arrived there in time to cross to the Swiss side of the station and just barely catch the 11:17 train to Lucerne.  The French station agent in Colmar had said that she couldn't sell us a ticket all the way to Zug, Switzerland, but that we wouldn't have to use our five minutes between trains to buy a ticket, because we could buy one from the conductor on the Basel-Lucerne train.  Only, no one had told that to said conductor, because he politely but firmly refused to sell us such a ticket, saying that he was not allowed to do so.

On arrival at Lucerne, we quickly found a ticket machine, but it, and another that we tried, refused to so much as recognize the existence of my Visa card.

Well, we would miss the 12:35 train.  The conductor had said that the next one would be along ten minutes later.  Not quite: sixteen minutes.  But that would give us time to buy tickets from live human beings who could probably understand English and could certainly understand even my paltry German.  That being achieved, we then tried to call Mary Joy's cousin Eva, who was going to be at the station in Zug to pick us up at 12:57.  We have a cell phone on this trip, but we are waiting until Italy to buy the SIM chip to activate it.  So we tried using a Swisscom phone booth.  It wouldn't take Visa.  When we  put in some coins and tried Eva's number, we couldn't get a connection.  Later, we would learn that it was a matter of incorrect non-use of zeroes (I'm not going to explain that here!).

So we had to give up and catch the S1, a sort of suburban commuter train that would take half an hour instead of twenty-three minutes to get to Zug.  But Eva met us, though we were forty minutes late.  When we told her why we were late, she said that it didn't sound right to her: the conductor should have been able to sell us a ticket on the train.  Maybe there would be a surcharge, but he should have been able to sell us the ticket.  So she went to the ticket counter with our tickets and discussed the situation with the ticket agent there, who agreed with her, and as a peace offering, gave her two chocolate tablet bars for us.

Eva took us to her home, high on the hill overlooking Zug (pronounced "tsoog") and we there had a snack with her and her husband Andreas.  Then Andreas went back to work and Eva, Mary Joy and I walked down to the old town and caught a bus for Arth, at the other end of the Zugersee (Lake Zug).  There we caught the ferry and spent a pleasant hour or so riding back up the lake.  Andreas, as usual, then cooked a wonderful dinner.  I remember the lamb (which I don't usually like) and the small potatoes cooked in butter and herbs, but two nights later, my memory fails me as to anything else.  Then we stayed up too late talking, over schnapps.

Colmar Museums and Wine

Our second day in Colmar we woke later than we had intended and got down to breakfast around nine.  We were staying at a B&B called Chez Leslie, run by an American who is married to a Frenchman.  Leslie is a very helpful host and runs a very pleasant place.  Our room, large, sunny, with wooden floors and a view over the back garden, was the "Shoe Room," decorated with shoe-related art.  Breakfast was continental-style: croissants and other pastries, fruit, yogurt (not skyr), orange juice, coffee and tea.  There was an older couple who had driven there from northern England and a younger couple who were from Toronto.

Chez Leslie is a great place, but you should expect to do a lot of walking if you stay there.  It is a five-minute walk from the train station, but in the opposite direction from the old town, which is a good fifteen-minute walk from the station.

After breakfast, we went to the old town, passing a renaissance mansion called "the House of Heads" because of all the grimacing heads sculpted on the facade, and finally arriving at the Unterlinden Museum, a medieval monastery dissolved during the French Revolution.  This would be a minor, somewhat quirky regional museum of arts and crafts (including an assortment of stoves that are covered with ceramic tiles), except for one major masterpiece, Mathias Grunewald's Issenheim altarpiece, the making of which is the subject of Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Mahler.

This huge and complicated collection of paintings, with associated sculptures, was painted between 1512 and 1516 for the chapel of an abbey and hospital (for sufferers from ergotism, a serious illness caused by parasites in grain) in Issenheim in Alsace.  Parts of the altarpiece are designed to fold in and out showing the various paintings and the sculptures behind them.  They are now divided up into their constituent parts, to allow them all to be displayed in what must have been the Unterlinden monastery chapel.

The main painting is a massive, deeply emotional crucifixion, that was shown to the patients to allow them to meditate on how Christ was also a sufferer, for them.  But other scenes show his triumphant resurrection, as well as a joyful angelic orchestra serenading his birth.  Several panels show scenes from the life of the patron saint of the order at Issenheim, St. Anthony Abbot, including him being attacked by a horde of demons.

After lunch at a very nice tea room, Jadis et Gourmande (Mary Joy had a very good fennel and zucchini quiche, with salad, while I had a tarte flambee--a sort of thin crust pizza with cream instead of cheese and onion slices and bacon bits), we went to the Dominican church, now a museum, to see native Colmarian Martin Schongauer's painting "Madonna of the Thorn Bush" (1473).  Photography there was forbidden, so I can't show you a picture here, and you'll have to take our word for it that this is a truly wonderful painting.  The virgin's face is so kind and sad as she faces the future of her innocent son.  Behind her is a rose bush full of flowers and different kinds of birds.

We went to the Martin Jund winery, in the old town, and did a tasting, then bought two bottles of a very good rieslings and one of a cremant (in Europe, the only wine that is allowed to be called "champagne" is wine from the Champagne region of France).  Two of the bottles would be gifts, one of the rieslings would be for us.

After coffee and pastries at Jadis et Gourmand, we went back to our room for a nap.  We went out again after eight, looking for a light dinner.  We stumbled onto a winstub (a kind of wine bar, but without the pretentiousness that that would imply in America) that Leslie had mentioned, called La Soi.  This is a small, restaurant with a couple of tables outside, a couple at the front and a few along the side opposite the bar, at which a number of people, apparently locals, were eating.   The wife was the chef, the husband poured wine and the young boy sat at the counter coloring until we came in, whereupon he ran to get Maman.  We weren't all that hungry, so we each ordered a chicken salad.  It was wonderful, with much more chicken meat than in an American salad, pan-fried, I think, in a butter and riesling sauce, along with sliced mushrooms, fresh lettuce and tomatoes.  Mary Joy was ecstatic.

Someone had bought a large bottle of cremant, and the owner came around and offered us each a glass.   The people at the front of the restaurant were laughing and joking with the owner and his wife.  As we were leaving, we talked with some of them.  When they found out that we were American, they laughed, because the owner had apparently thought that we were English.  One of them had just been to New York,which he had liked very much.  They approved of our going to hear the opera at the Roman arena in Verona, but said that we would need to bring cushions.  Then to bed.

Fashion News

I'll write more about Colmar on the train tomorrow, but our Internet access may be iffy for the next few days, so there might be a while until my next post. In the meantime, I'll warn you about a fashion trend that we've noticed here in Europe. I remember that my mother, on one of our trips here, noticed that the women were wearing shoes that were a different color than the rest of their outfits. Later, that fashion came to America. So, women of America, here's what's in your future for summer wear: light, baggy harem pants. Think of the old TV show "I Dream of Jeannie."

An Evening in Colmar

Colmar is a beautiful medieval German town that isn't in Germany. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, not long after taking over my ancestors in the French-speaking Franche Comte, Louis XIV of France conquered German-speaking Alsace. During the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Alsace went back and forth between France and Germany, but is now firmly French and French-speaking. At the time of the French Revolution, Alsace was divided into two departements, Haut-Rhin (Upper Rhine), with its capital at Colmar, and Bas-Rhin (Lower Rhine), with its capital at Strasbourg. The small part of Alsace that was originally French-speaking (containing yet more of my ancestors and many, if not most, of the other French-speaking settlers of eastern Stark County, Ohio) was separated out from Haut-Rhin as the Territoire de Belfort in the 1870s (around the time my great-grandfather left for America) and has since always remained French.

My father and I were in Colmar, after visiting our ancestral village, a little farther south and west, in 1991. I liked Colmar very much, with its half-timbered houses, canal-side "Little Venice", pedestrianized center and world-class art, and always hoped to come back. In the rather haphazard way that we put this trip together, at the center was arriving in Switzerland by a particular date. Due to airfare quirks, we decided to fly into Copenhagen, then get to Switzerland by flying EasyJet to Basel. With a few days available for a side trip and since Colmar is not far from Basel's airport, we decided to spend those few days here, before going on to Switzerland.

After checking in at our hotel, Mary Joy and I headed for the old town and, after wandering its charming streets, visiting the cathedral-sized church of St. Martin, and buying some macaroons, we went to la petite Venise for dinner, deciding to eat on a tiny deck out over the canal, at Le Petit Gourmand, a restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet.

Alsatian cuisine is basically germanic, but with a strong French accent. I told Mary Joy that choucroute is not the same as sauerkraut, that the French version is much subtler in taste. After having a dish consisting off choucroute with fish, as well as tasting my choucroute garnie (choucroute with ham and sausages), she agreed, but, unfortunately, decided that while choucroute is different from standard German sauerkraut, she doesn't like either of them. We finished off with a plate of three local cheeses: a goat cheese, a young Munster and a strong aged Munster. Then we wandered through the old town again before going back to our hotel.

I woke up around 1:30, and not being able to sleep (jet lag?), I sorted out some hardware problems (relating to uploading pictures to the blog from our new iPad. I'm still not able to move them around in the text, but at least I've figured a way to get them there. Mary Joy's CenturyLink e-mail doesn't coordinate very well with this machine, but she has been coping, despite inconvenience.

Copenhagen Walk and Away

This morning (Wednesday, August 8th), we went out around nine and walked into the pedestrianized area of the old town, stopping for a roll, cheese, orange juice and coffee each at a Cafe Baresso, a chain something like Starbucks. We got all the way to Nyhavn (New Harbor), a cute area with brightly colored buildings, bars, restaurants, old sailing boats and tour boats. Then we returned to our hotel the Cabinn Central) and checked out.

Cabinn is a Danish chain with an odd but successful idea. Why not keep rates cheap by providing a room that is like a cabin on a cruise ship: tiny, with bunk beds and a bathroom that consists almost entirely of the shower, which doesn't have a separate floor? This strange hotel gets reasonably good reviews on Tripadvisor and is recommended in most of the guidebooks. At first Mary Joy was skeptical, and feared that I would fall out of the narrow top bunk and break my neck. However, I survived and we got a good night's sleep.

We bought a ham and cheese baguette at the station. We had by then spent Icelandic and Danish money without seeing a bill or coin, thanks to the wonders of plastic. It is a very good thing that our new Visa card has a security chip embedded in it, because everywhere we used it in Iceland and Denmark required such a chip, though some places would accept a PIN number instead, and I had that as well. All European credit cards now have these chips. U.S. banks have been slow to adopt them, because it would mean changing all the card-readers. But eventually they will have to do so.

Our train ride back to the airport was uneventful, but EasyJet's suggestion that we be there two hours ahead of our flight proved to be a good one. We were there at 11:05 for our 12:45 flight, and since the security lines were very long, we had no time to spare for visiting the WC or buying water. And since EasyJet was one of the first budget airlines to charge for everything, we were expecting to have to buy water aboard, which we did: a small bottle for 2 euros.

The flight got into Basel early, around 2:15. Normally, in the past, we have tried to avoid checking luggage, but on this trip, since we are carrying hiking sticks, we've checked one bag each all the way, and found that to be much less of a hassle than lugging our full-sized carry-on bags around airports and onto planes. After picking up these bags, we went out through the French gate (the airport is actually in France, rather than in Switzerland) instead of the Swiss gate, waited twenty minutes for the navette (shuttle bus) to the nearby St. Louis railway station (8 minutes) bought our train ticket from the machine, and caught the 2:30 train for Colmar.