On the Road Again
Wednesday, June 28 |
| No, Europe is not as dramatically exciting for me at this point as China was, but it is great to be back in touch with old friends. I ventured forth with two Internet experiments --Priceline and Easyjet. Priceline got me to London for $420 + tax round trip which is a great summer fare. They don't tell you ahead of time the route or the airline, but it was in fact Virgin Atlantic, very pleasant, with individual screens in the backs of the seats so everyone didn't have to watch the same movie. |
| Easyjet is a new intra-European airline which cost $50 to fly one way from London to Zurich, also a bargain. The catch is that you leave from an otherwise unknown airport called Luton which is north of London. It is on a direct trainline with Gatwick, so it is not too difficult, but it takes time to get across the city and sometimes time is money. In my case the challenge came from my luggage which included not only all the books and presents I am taking to South Africa but the fifty eight (58) videos! that I was taking to the Ecole. Thank the inventor who put wheels on luggage! |
| The reunion at my old school, The Ecole d'Humanite, was a great experience. despite the fact that it rained most of the time and we could only see the mountains during the first and last hour of the two-day event. It was fine for me -- I am here for ten days, but I felt sad for those who were leaving Switzerland right away. Ecole reunions are all-inclusive. There is one only every five years and everyone who attened in the role of student, helper or teacher is invited back at the same time. The first reunion was in 1980, so this was the fifth, and some different people have come each time. There were quite a few people this year for whom this was their first visit back to Goldern -- in forty or even fifty years! |
| I spoke to one woman who had only been at the school for six months as a helper in 1961 and yet somehow felt moved to come this year. For me there is always an interesting mixture of my former teachers, former students, teaching colleagues and student colleagues. Many of the old timers who were my teachers are still there -- a reflection of what a healthy lifestyle the school offers!. There was a solid collection of the sixties group, my student days, and several of the students from teaching days are now on the faculty. |
| Sunday night I headed across Switzerland to meet my friend Chris Boutelle along Lake Geneva in the town of Vevey, just outside Montreux. I have never really seen the French part of Switzerland, except for two brief days in Geneva, so this is a new exploration for me, too. Monday we rented bicycles and rode along the lake to Montreux and on to the rather picturesque castle at Chillon. |
| In Switzerland you can rent bicycles at one train station and leave them at another, which saves having to double back along the same route. They are no longer clunky old things, but speedy bright red mountain bikes and we had a great day except for forgetting the sunscreen. At one point we locked our bikes and headed up a mountain by funicular to get a different view of the lake. It is a reflection of the staid nature of Swiss culture that the bikes come with only tiny locks for the back wheels -- nothing to attach the bike to a stationary object -- no kryptonite here! |
| We were prepared for the fact that the museums were closed on Mondays, but totally puzzled to find that the restaurants atop the mountain were also closed. After the aggressive entrepreneurship I saw all over China, it seemed puzzling that one would keep a restaurant closed on a beautiful summer day, with dozens of tourists buzzing around. Ah well, the fact is that the Swiss are most comfortable. Some are of course rich, but the more important fact is that virtually none are poor -- they have to import labor from Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc., for the unskilled jobs . |
| Yesterday we visited the Food Museum (sponsored by Nestle) which had an exhibition about food in the year 1000 --it was particularly interesting to me with regard to the Medieval Banquet. It was a worthy exhibit, though I was disappointed that there wasn't more pictoral information of the foods of the Middle Ages, given the great number of illustrations of food that one finds in old manuscripts. There were, however, good displays of archaeological digs going on in Switzerland which are researching the European diet back no only to the Middle Ages but even to Roman times. |
| We took a boat from Vevey across Lake Geneva to Lausanne and spent three hours in the city, most of it in the "Musee de l'Art Brut." This is an unusual private museum started by Dubuffet, which includes a variety of works by unknown artists, many of whom were institutionalized for being crazy -- or jailed and then went crazy. The exhibitors try to make a distinction between this art and traditional folk art. Some of it was certainly interesting, but perhaps moreso forty years ago when sculptures made out of rags or drawings based on illustrations in basal readers were not readily accepted as part of the broad art culture.. |
| Now in Geneva, where it isn't hard to find an Internet cafe, we will head down to the lake and salute Woodrow Wilson and the failed legacy of the League of Nations. A bientŁt. |
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