Notes from Abroad

After paragliding I was handed a train ticket back to Lauterbrunnen and pointed in the direction of the train station. It was a nice little walk and at the end was something very exciting:

A supermarket.

I don’t know if you understand just how great supermarkets are, especially while you’re backpacking. You see – most places I’ve come across have grocery stores. They’re tiny little stores, generally no larger than a 7-11, and sell a decent selection of the basics. Sometimes you’ll find one a little bigger, but for the most part we’re talking just essentials.

But the thing is – in each an every city I’ve visited so far, it seems that the locals don’t consider VEGETABLES to be essentials. Try finding some lettuce in the grocery store. Good luck. And if you do manage to find yourself a bag salad, odds are it’s going to be really limp and brown. At least that’s been my luck.

So when I came across this giant co-op just across the street from Interlaken Ost, I swear the clouds opened up and the angels started to sing. Even though my train was scheduled to leave in about 10 minutes I made a quick turn right and headed straight for the entrance.

There it was: the produce section. The produce section alone was larger than any grocery store I’ve been to in the last 3+ weeks. There were bananas, strawberries, apples, nectarines, cherries, carrots, celery…well…I could continue but I’m going to hope that you can imagine for yourself the contents of a proper produce section. I was so excited. And REALLY hungry. I hadn’t eaten all day really for fear of getting sick while paragliding. I grabbed a basket and dug in. In a few minutes time I’d stocked up on bananas, strawberries, nectarines, salad, dressing, and a bottle of “multifruit” juice. I could have stopped there, but I was hungry. So I walked into the store a little bit further.

That’s when I came across the yogurt section. Yes, an entire SECTION of yogurt and dairy-like products. I’ve never seen so many types of yogurt and if I’d had a refridgerator at my disposal you could guarantee that my basket would have been filled to the brim, but unfortunately I was only able to get one. The cheapest, of course, but it would do the trick as an accompaniment to my muesli back at the campsite.

I also procured some jelly, a few slices of bread, some fanta, and some chocolate (of course). It was a lot of food, but like I said, I was hungry. And I hadn’t had fresh fruits or veggies in a while. At least it wasn’t an entire basket of bread and cheese. Oh how I’m sick of bread and cheese.

I checked out and headed back to the train station, eager to start picking away at my purchases. I settled on a nectarine to hold me over until I got back to the camp. It was a good day. Paragliding, fruits, vegetables, and Switzerland. It’s the simple things.

Back at the camp site I ate my salad and yogurt and hung around with some friends, planning our evening. There’s a bar at the campsite called the Bomb Shelter (it is an actual bomb shelter) and it was going to open that night for the first time during our stay. This place is legendary. When you mention to other travelers that you’re going to Lauterbrunnen and staying at Camping Jungfrau they all talk about the Bomb Shelter.

The evening turned out to be epic.

Starting out with a few mixed drinks in the sitting room before the Bomb Shelter opened, and then off to the actual Bomb Shelter. The place was PACKED and really, really, REALLY warm. The Contiki buses had arrived earlier in the day (which is why the Bomb Shelter was opened) and everyone in it was already pretty messy. The music was good though and we were having a lot of fun.

At one point, in the middle of a song, they turned off the music and the bartender pointed to the TV. He put on Billie Jean and everyone went back to dancing, confused as to why he didn’t just let the other song finish. We went over to the TV to see what was going on.

Michael Jackson died. Well, sort of. For a while there reports were mixed. “BREAKING: tmz.com reports Michael Jackson has died of a cardiac arrest” then another flash: “BREAKING: LATimes reports Michael Jackson is in a coma following a cardiac arrest,” etc. etc. etc.

Everyone around the TV was shocked. And confused. And generally unsure about how to react. Some people just stared and looked devastated, others cried, and others were too drunk to really process what was going on around them, but it was surreal. A few more Michael Jackson songs came on and though the TV was still running, everyone went back to trying to enjoy the evening, checking the TV periodically to see if anything else had developed.

For the rest of the evening and the next day, you’d hear people just say “Michael Jackson died??!” in the most confused of tones. How are you supposed to react to the death of someone who was basically an icon of your childhood, who you’ve never met, but for some reason you feel a great saddness over? I don’t think anyone’s quite figured it out just yet.

Despite the sad news of the evening, we did have a lot of fun. Lots of dancing, singing, laughing, and photos. Sometime around 1:30 in the morning (I think?) we decided to call it quits and headed back for our cabins. Renae and I were STARVING and thought it a good idea to chow down on the bread, jam, peanut butter, and nutella we had saved in our room. I should mention here that we also had 2 roommates who had come to the Bomb Shelter with us but who decided to leave early and go to sleep.

It was SO HOT in our room. Remember the heater I mentioned a while ago? The one that toasted my bread? It was on and you could really cook something in our room it was so warm. So we opened up the windows.

Our cabin is in a pretty central spot and lots of people were walking by and waving as we sat at the table next to the windows trying to cool down and devoured our bread. At one point these two people we didn’t know came up to the window. The girl asked if she lived in our cabin. We informed her that no, she did not. She inquired about our food and we said that if she could provide some nutella (we’d finished ours) that we would provide the bread. The two walked away and we didn’t expect to see them again.

But they came back. A knock at the door and nutella in hand. We couldn’t send them away, so we invited them in to our tiny cabin and we continued on with our picnic. More people would stop at the window to chat. It was a lot of fun.

Until one of our roommates woke up. It was about 2-2:30AM at this point and she got out of bed, put on a jacket and said “You know, revenge can be a real bitch at 6:30 in the morning.” Apparently we’d pissed her off.

That was our cue to pack up and go to bed. We sent our new friends home and were asleep before our roommate returned. She continued to hold her grudge in the morning and though we tried to pretend to be asleep we could hear to intentionally slamming doors and making all sorts of noise just out of spite. They caught the bus at 8, but we couldn’t get back to sleep.

I’d been having some internet withdrawal so I decided to head into town to this internet cafe I’d found and park it there for the morning. I brought my muesli with me, bought a yogurt from the mini co-op in town and set up shop on the front porch, overlooking the mountains. It was a bit chilly, but if I were in Ithaca I would have considered it a warm day, so I tried to treat it as such.

I think my latest tweet sums it up the best:
“sitting on the patio of a cafe in switz. with my yogurt, muesli, and laptop looking at the alps only a stone’s throw away. this is the life.”

After a few hours of sorting out where I’m going next (Munich) and how I would get there (train), I decided to head back to the campsite to take a nap. It was a cold and rainy day, I was feeling slightly off from the night before (I think it was the 4-5 slices of nutella and jam on bread, because I felt fine otherwise) and I hadn’t slept well in the last few nights thanks to 1) a snoring roommate, 2) being nervous about paragliding, and 3) being nervous that the other roommate would kill us in the middle of the night for waking her.

I woke up just before 5PM absolutely famished. It was POURING out. I’m talking buckets and buckets of rain falling from the sky. Those of you familiar with my love of thunderstorms will understand my excitement when the first claps of thunder came rolling through the valley. I’ve never heard thunder so loud, but it was echoing off of the mountains on either side of us. So cool. Then we had a couple bits of lightning and even more rain. If it were slightly warmer I probably would have run out and frolicked for old times sake, but it was pretty chilly and the last thing I want is a cold right now. I settled for the drops that hit me between my cabin and the kitchen.

Dinner time was dinner time – the usual antics. We all got together to hang out, chat about our days and how uneventful they were (we’d all been to the Bomb Shelter the night before). Renae and I actually had the most productive day of all. Most of our other friends didn’t wake up or leave their cabins until after 4PM. We’d already gotten up, showered, gone into town, had breakfast, read, sorted out online things, and took a 4-5 hour nap in that time. Go us.

After dinner we all went back to our own cabins to stay warm and dry and just relax. It was the kind of day where you wish you had your favorite pair of sweatpants, a nice blanket, a comfy couch, a hot chocolate, and either a book or a movie, or both, and you just snuggle up and lounge around all day. But we didn’t have any of that, so we had to settle for hostel sheets, itchy wool blankets, and books.

I finished reading The Last Lecture which turned out to be a really good book and then went to bed.

Big plans for my last day in Switzerland, but it turns out that today has decided to be cold and rainy too. I don’t know if I’ll make it to Trummelbach Falls, but I’ll go for a walk, maybe head back into Interlaken to pick up some final souvenirs, and then we’re all getting together for a BBQ.

Tags: Adventures, City, Journal, Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland