Iceland - Day 1

So, getting to Iceland (on a five-hour overnight flight that got in to Reykjavik at 6:30AM and was full of screaming children and constant offers of drinks and snacks and they left the lights on FOR EVER) was not super fun, but since then things have been really lovely, although also really really cold.

We arrived right on time and caught our airport transfer bus with no difficulty, plus our hotel (Fosshotel Lind, booked through Icelandair as a package with the airfare) had a room available for us when we arrived before 9AM, which was great. Then we went out and did some sightseeing! We got a museum admission/discount card/bus pass, two days for something like $10-12 per person, and we have been using it all over town. So far today we've been to several museums (about which more later, maybe), and done some shopping (although not yet any buying).

Some of the highlights so far:

Going to the top of the Hallgrimskirkja, the tallest point in Reykjavik. The tower is under repair, so we had to look out through scaffolding, but it was great anyhow. It was incredibly windy up there. Here's Kris trying to take a photo:



Here is a guy working on the scaffolding:



I really hope there is some magical way that the guys up there manage to keep warm. They do get a lovely view, though:



Reykjavik is a very attractive city, small and easily walkable, and there are wonderful sea and mountain views everywhere:



A lot of the buildings have the kind of siding and metal roofs that I associate with Quebec - I guess they must be practical in cold weather for some reason?



So far we are finding costs very reasonable - we were really pleased at prices the yarn and knitwear products at the Handknitting Association of Iceland store, and there is some very nice lava-rock jewelry available in several stores. I'm still not quite sure what exchange rate we're going to receive, so we're just pretending that it's 100 Icelandic Kronur to $1 US, even though it will actually be better than that, possibly much better (some websites give the exchange rate as around 113 ISK/$1, others as more like 175 ISK/$1. Obviously I'm rooting for 175, no offense Icelanders).

OK, time for a much-needed shower before dinner!

Another low-content trip-planning post

So, I just booked plane tickets for another trip, and I'll be going to Turkey and Greece in May. I'm taking a full three weeks of vacation - the longest amount of time I've ever taken since I started working, unless you count a few months of complete unemployment here and there, which weren't entirely vacationlike - so that's exciting just in itself.

But even more exciting is the trip! I'll be flying into Istanbul and home from Athens three weeks later (with an overnight layover in Madrid - just long enough to visit the Prado, and maybe whatsitcalled, the museum with Guernica), and even with all that time I know I'm not going to be able to see everything I want to see. I have a lot of planning and prioritizing to do, but that's going to be part of the fun! I think I'm going to plan this trip out more precisely than my trip to Switzerland last summer; in theory I liked the idea of being able to do everything on the fly, but in practice I didn't really enjoy planning my trip while at the same time taking the trip.

Now it's off to the bookstore to drink coffee and peruse guidebooks, and off to TurkeyTravelPlanner.com (which I think I'm going to have to add to my LeechBlock list, it's so addictive), and tripadvisor, and picking the brains of friends, and all that good stuff...

I haven't been doing any travelling lately, unless you include to and from the homes of various family members in New England, but I've got a trip planned on the horizon. My roommate and I are heading for everyone's favorite new budget destination, Iceland! Icelandair has some really impressive deals - they are running an Iceland Winter Budget Getaway for $479pp double occupancy (single occupancy rates are not bad either) for flight to Reykjavik from Boston and two night hotel. Right now the website says that the offer is only available through December 31st, but when I booked (November 30th) it said the offer was expiring that day, so take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, we won't be going until the end of March - hopefully I will take at least a US-based minibreak between now and then, and I will try to post about it.

Home again, home again

So, yesterday I left my hotel right around sunrise and stayed awake until about 9:30 Boston time. Long day. My flight left Zurich at 10AM, and I was staying in Lucerne, a little more than an hour from the airport, and I didn't know what the lines would be like or anything, so caught a 6:30 train to Zurich airport. Well, that was unnecessary. It took me all of fifteen minutes to get from the airport train station to the gate, including check-in. Even though my passport wouldn't scan. (The blue cover on my passport bled through onto the photo page in several spots because it got a bit damp when I was in England -- I kept it in inside pocket most of the time. For the last two years I have been worried that I am going to get hassled about it, but so far nothing bad has happened. Of course, really I've only been to Canada the once and then this trip to Switzerland, so I haven't exactly put it to the test. I have five years left on that passport so I hope it doesn't get any worse. I don't keep it anywhere damp anymore.)

So I paid nine Swiss francs for a four-ounce cup of coffee and a chocolate croissant to pass the time. I had about 15 CHF when I got to the airport and I figured I might as well spend it, since it seemed unlikely that I would be able to hold on to $15 worth of foreign coins until the next time I go to Switzerland (the smallest-denomination Swiss bill is the 10 CHF note -- they have coins for fives, twos, and ones).

In Paris I was befriended by a slightly-lost Croatian boy who was going to do a senior year at boarding school in Maine. He liked my photos, and took a picture of me before we got on the plane. Good luck, Martin from Croatia! Then in the line for Customs at Boston a guy who appeared to be in his early twenties came up to me and asked if I would do him a favor. "It depends on the favor!" I said -- doing favors for strangers involving U.S. Customs seems like it would generally be a bad idea. He just wanted to use my phone, though, and it didn't work in there anyhow. He had just gotten back from two years with the Peace Corps in Armenia, he said.

My flights were fine, although I was oddly focused on what I would do if the plane crashed, something I don't ordinarily think about much. I wasn't afraid the plane was going to crash, I just felt like I needed to have a plan in case it did. I had decided who I would call if I had access to a phone, who I would email if I had access to email, and I decided that a Facebook status update would be a good part of an assuring-people-I'm-OK plan.

Being home is fine. I have been giving people chocolate, which makes them like me. I had Thai food for dinner last night and an iced coffee on my way home from work today (these, together, cost me less than the coffee and croissant I had had for breakfast yesterday). I was so excited to put on a different pair of shoes this morning! Two weeks alternating between my Dansko sandals, my flip-flops, and my hiking boots made me very ready to try on something else. Only flat shoes for more than two weeks! What will my Achilles think when I put on heels tomorrow?

As I walked to work this morning, number one it felt really nice to be walking on the flat for thirty minutes straight. Wow, I don't think I had two miles of flat walking anywhere in the whole country of Switzerland. And the Trader Joe's parking lot is finished, finally! And a building I walk past every day was completely torn down while I was gone (I knew this was going to happen, but it was really weird to see the big pile of bricks where it used to be).

I've been looking over all my photos -- I've got something around 500, although some of those are repeats, and some are just sort of for reference rather than being nice photos. I'm really happy with them, overall. They make me want to take more photos, and possibly to get a more fidgety camera that I can do things with. Although I do really like my current camera -- it is small and blue and it has a big screen and a 10x zoom. Also, once I discovered how to fiddle with the white balance (um, two days ago), I was able to get a better handle on taking photos in bright sunlight, I think.

Here are some of my favorites (they have probably all appeared in the blog already):











Well, I could go on. What a beautiful country. I'm playing my photos on the TiVo right now, and some of them I just look at and think, "that cannot possibly have been real."

I definitely hope to go back there someday. Overall I had a great time. I felt a little bummed and lonely this past weekend in Basel, but it's not like I generally go two weeks at home without ever feeling blue. Sometimes I think there's too much pressure to have fun on vacation. I have to remind myself that just because I'm not ecstatic non-stop doesn't mean the vacation is a failure or a waste!

This morning I woke up at 3:30 and thought, "Oh no! I forgot to go to the glacier cave!" Because, you know, I did forget. I had been planning on going in the glacier cave on Monday, but I got distracted with sledding and catching trains and things. It was right there (somewhere -- I didn't see any signs for it), but I just forgot to go in. So sad! So I'll definitely have to go back.

So, my last day in Switzerland, Monday (not counting Tuesday, which basically consists of a trip to the airport), I decided I would take a trip to one of the mountains that are relatively easily accessible from Lucerne, where I was staying. My candidates were Mt. Pilatus, the mountain which overlooks Lucerne; Mt. Rigi, a lower ridgey kind of mountain that supposedly has great views of other mountains and of basically the whole city, and Mt. Titlis, which is a little further away and more expensive than the other two but which has glaciers. I decided on Titlis, because I had been disappointed that I didn't get the chance to take the train up to the Jungfraujoch and see the glaciers there.



I think I made a good choice! To get to Titlis, you take the train from Lucerne to Engelberg, which is actually fairly fun just for itself, since the train goes at a very steep incline for part of the way. Then you take a six-person ski gondola for about twenty minutes. Then you get on a cable car for another five minutes. Then you get on a REVOLVING cable car for another five minutes.

The revolving cable car also plays music. While I was in the cable car it played "Karma Chameleon", "Just Like Heaven", and "Can't Touch This". So that was a bit odd, but highly entertaining,

Then when you get to the top, it's all cold and snowy! In August!



It was right around freezing up there, I believe. Very pleasant, actually, in the sun. I had packed a lunch, but then I saw some people eating french fries, and I thought those looked like they would really hit the spot, but then I looked at the price board and they were 7.50 CHF, which is about $7. So I decided I could live with my cheese sandwich and my peanut butter sandwich. I have basically lived on cheese sandwiches and peanut butter sandwiches for the last two weeks. Restaurants are so expensive here, and there are plenty of nice places to picnic.

Here are some more pictures from the top of Titlis:



Mountains!



Rock formations!

Also, you can take a ski lift over the glacier:


And then you can go sledding:



I went for three or four sledding runs. There is a "magic carpet" lift to bring you back up to the top of the run, and they provide sleds and helmets (although there are a lot less helmets than there are sleds -- I decided not to wait around for a helmet, since they probably wouldn't have had one that fit me.

Anyway, that was the first and probably last time I ever go sledding wearing capri pants (well, maybe clam diggers is more accurate). I only brought two pairs of trousers on the trip, khakis and my orangey-red nylon pants. I went with shorter nylon pants over the longer khakis, and that was a good choice because they dried out really fast, but still not exactly ideal because in slowing myself down I kicked up a lot of snow, half of which went right up my trouser leg. Next time I will bring long quick-drying pants.

Anyway, I spent an hour or two up on Titlis (by the way, Mt. Titlis is called Mt. Titlis for the same reason the Grand Tetons are called the Grand Tetons, but I never really saw the actual mountain except for a brief glimpse from the train, so I don't know striking the resemblance is).

Then I went back to Lucerne and went to a museum of modern art, the Rosengart Collection. This is one of those very personal museums, where all the art was collected by one family. There are over 100 works by Klee on the lowest floor, all arranged chronicologically. "Little X", which is a really cute little painting, is "Angela Rosengart's first Klee", which she bought when she was 16. This museum also had by far the best English-language exhibit interpretation booklet that I encountered while I was in Switzerland. I liked this place!

Then I went to the Jesuit Church, which is from the Counter-Reformation and very big and grand and Rococo.



In one of my guidebooks it says that this is actually a toned-down version of the way the church originally looked. In which case you can kind of start to get a feeling for where the Reformation people were coming from, jeez, lay off the decorations a little, guys.

Here's another last picture of Lucerne, of the Chapel Bridge, which was partially burned down in the 90s but rebuilt:



Anyway, I will probably do one more entry about my trip once I get home or possibly on the way home today, but this will be my last entry from Switzerland. I've had a great time.

Lucerne

(This is my second post in a fairly short period of time, so scroll down if you don't want to miss anything.)

So, Lucerne. I like Lucerne a lot! I would definitely come back here. Here is the famous lion sculpture of Lucerne:



It's a monument to the Swiss mercenary soldiers who died protecting the French royalty during the French Revolution. It's really big. It's a lion. The end!

Another famous feature of Lucerne are its wooden covered bridges. This is the Mill Bridge, I think. There are paintings in the middle of all the supports for the bridges. I like this one with the dancing skeletons:



There's a lot of stuff in the dancing-skeleton sort of vein. I believe all the paintings have skeletons in them somewhere (I read that somewhere and certainly in the ones I looked at there were skeletons), to remind people of their eventual demise. Cheery! Most of the skeletons are just sort of off to the side, leering and waiting.

The river water flows very fast to one side of the bridge because of a complicated kind of dam, and there was a guy surfing in sort of rapids there:



He seemed likely to meet his eventual demise sooner rather than later. Maybe he needs to take a hard look at those skeleton pictures.

Another cool thing in Lucerne is that many of the buildings in the old town have these murals on them, like this:



And this:



Pretty!

Also, I bought some souvenirs at the oldest giftshop in town:



Whee! Actually, it was not really a very good giftshop. There is a lot of Switzerland-themed crap in the world, my friends. I did end up buying a little of it.

That was all yesterday evening; today I took a really cool trip to the summit of Mt. Titlis, which I will write about in a separate entry which might not get posted until I am home. Which means tomorrow night, just a little over 24 hours from now. Sadness!

Basel and Fortress Furigen

So, I spent a day in Basel, then came to Lucerne. Basel was OK, with lots of classy museums, and I like Lucerne a lot. Here is the view from my hotel room window:



Later, there was a rainbow!

Anyway, Basel. The most impressive thing in Basel I didn't take any pictures of (I was a little burnt out on picture-taking after Lauterbrunnen); it's the Barfüsserkirche, the church where they have their city history museum. The impressive thing about it is that during the Reformation, the church was completely gutted, and all of the decorations and things were destroyed. I guess when you are radically changing your religion you can't just have a sale and hand off all your old saints' statues to someone else who isn't so into Reforming. It wasn't even used as a church for most of the last 400 years (they used it for storage and things, and as recently as 50 or 60 years ago they were going to tear it down to build a school). Anyway, the nave of the church (and it's quite a large church) is now filled with religious art that was mostly rescued from other Swiss churches; there may have been a few pieces that were original to that particular church, but I think basically everything from that church was destroyed.

I mean, obviously I learned about the Reformation in school, but imagining that big huge church being used as a grain store, and seeing examples of the kinds of treasures that were destroyed and can never be recovered was illuminating. And because it's All About Me, I also couldn't help but think about how less than a hundred years after that church was... well, let's say "renovated", people were getting on boats to America bringing practically nothing with them so that they could build a properly austere and God-fearing society in the place where I live now.

There are a lot of museums in Basel. I think I only visited three. I meant to visit a couple more, but then I couldn't find one of them, and I just got museumed-out after a while. The Natural History museum was pretty good, with a dodo and a quagga and a nice little mammoth exhibit with lots of skulls. Also they had a model of the Hobbit skull, Homo floresiensis, in their human evolution exhibit.



I also really like what they did with the little pictures of what the different hominids ate and what kinds of tools and things they had. Also there was a very cool exhibit with a colony of leaf-cutter ants! I think we should get one of those at the Museum of Science.

They had almost no English or French label copy, though, so I didn't really get to learn much that I didn't know already. This is one of the reasons I liked the little pictures of what the hominids ate.

Then I came to Lucerne by way of the Fortress Fürigen military museum. This is one of several fortresses that the Swiss constructed during WWII when Switzerland was surrounded by Nazi-occupied territory. The idea was to be able to defend the North-South route that runs near Lucerne and to be able to cut off the country (or at least the middle of the country) entirely if necessary. It was a dramatic illustration of the concept of "armed neutrality". The fortress is dug right into this cliff (the very unobtrusive entrance is not in this photo, but I don't know that it would show -- I nearly walked right by it):



Inside:



There are all sorts of machine-gun and other bigger kinds of guns, and ammunition for them. In the 60s they also installed anti-radiation air filters and things. The fortress was only decommissioned in the 80s, I think.





I'm no military buff and I didn't properly appreciate most of the stuff in there (and I didn't really stay all that long, either), but just its existence was eye-opening. Something like 150 soldiers plus officers and things would stay in the fortress. It's very compact and space-efficient, almost like a submarine. It's also cold and wet and filled with dehumidifiers.

I'll do another entry on Lucerne and the exciting place where I am going today tonight.