Impulse

I never did fin­ish writ­ing about my trip to Europe in May (1, 2). I bet­ter get on it as I just booked tick­ets to go back to Austria next month. (read on for why). Here’s some high­lights and sto­ries from the remain­der of the May trip.

Tired of the Venetian labyrinth, I returned to Murano. The open spaces and soft breeze refreshed me as I toured the shops. Murano is an island of shiny, beau­ti­ful things. Stemware, jew­elry, sculp­tures, vases, and even refrig­er­a­tor mag­nets for those on a bud­get. Everything was finely detailed, often with many col­ors or tex­tures embed­ded into the glass. The lines are very clas­sic — not at all like the sea crea­ture, Chihuly-style work that wears on me in Seattle.
In one of the shops, I saw an amaz­ing vase made in a old roman style. The mate­r­ial had been infused with some milky sub­stance so that the vase appeared to be made of ivory. Little col­ored facets embed­ded in it shown like jew­els. It was absolutely stun­ning — and merely 4,500 euros (about $5,700). So taken with it, I found myself think­ing, “4,500 euros isn’t that much. It’s so beau­ti­ful. Maybe I should get it.” Luckily, real­ity set­tled back in and I con­tin­ued on my way. Gradually, my resolve weak­ened, and at a shop at the other end of the island, I ended up buy­ing a set of wine glasses. No, chal­ices. (pic­tured above)
In all, I found Venice to be a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing. Once you get over the canal schtick, and visit the usual places, there’s not much to it. I was spoiled by Florence, one of the great­est Italian cities, a few years ago. In com­par­i­son, Venice is an quaint lit­tle place — good for a few days stay. All that said, if you have a spe­cial some­one, Venice would be an excel­lent, and very roman­tic city to visit together. Which brings me to…

Bregenz is a lit­tle town on the Austrian edge of Lake Constance (also called the Bodensee). From one a local cas­tle perched on a hill, you can see the Swiss and German coasts just a few miles away. In fact, the German island city of Lindau is just a 20 minute ferry ride away.
Bregenz is a nice, quiet lit­tle town to relax in. As an added bonus, it hosts numer­ous music fes­ti­vals dur­ing the sum­mer — all of which seem to take place when I’m not there. Last month, they had a New Orleans fes­ti­val with many artists from that very city fly­ing in to per­form (one of whom, Chucky C is a reg­u­lar). This month begins their largest fes­ti­val, the Bregenzer Festspiele — com­plete with operas per­formed on a mas­sive float­ing stage (the archive shows how visu­ally strik­ing it is — you must see it).
What was I doing in this lit­tle cor­ner of Europe? It all began many years ago with an exchange stu­dent from Bregenz that my par­ents hosted while I was in col­lege. At his wed­ding last year, I met sev­eral of his child­hood friends — one of whom I stayed in touch with. My trip to Bregenz this year was to visit my new friend and her son. That was the plan any­way.
Communicating with my friend’s son, all of 7 years old, was amus­ing as we had no com­mon lan­guage. I quickly fig­ured out what “Magst du spiel Lego?” means, and in return, I taught him to prop­erly say “Darth Vader” (this is an incred­i­bly hard name for German speak­ers — they say it like “Dart Wadah”, a pro­nun­ci­a­tion which elim­i­nates all of the name’s evil gusto). Apart from these, we com­mu­ni­cated pri­mar­ily with ges­tures and grunts. While play­ing chess, one would com­mu­ni­cate that the other player was about to make an impru­dent move by point­ing to a threat­en­ing piece of his own and utter­ing a low “uhh uhh”. One sug­gested moves by point­ing to the rel­e­vant squares while grunt­ing in ques­tion­ing glis­sando. Approval of a well played move was announced with, “oooooohh”. Primitive, yes, but effec­tive.
Together, the three of us went to the Inatura — by far the coolest nat­ural his­tory museum I’ve ever seen. The motif here is inter­ac­tion. They don’t put stuffed ani­mals in a glass box, they put them in the mid­dle of the room so you can touch them, walk around them, and really get to know them. (Who knew Moose fur was so abra­sive?) All senses are engaged. Some sta­tions allow you to smell some­thing, with a hid­den label telling you what you were sam­pling, while other sta­tions have a tube you put your hand in and guess at what you’re touch­ing. Elsewhere, a wrap-around dis­play describes local avalanches, then sim­u­lates being in one. They’ve got a short climb­ing wall for kids with video mon­i­tors embed­ded in it show­ing views of the Alps. All these exhibits were great, but I was blown away by the space itself. Rooms are divided by inter­est­ing shapes and col­ors, all with light­ing that must have been designed by a cin­e­matog­ra­pher rather than a dec­o­ra­tor. Excellent place.
Though the visit included other trips — a drive around the Bregenzerwald and a mem­o­rable jour­ney to Lindau — we spent most of our time hang­ing out around the house. This per­fectly suited me as the trip was sand­wiched between a tech writ­ing binge and a trans-continental bicy­cle race. Just a friendly visit. Between friends. Sure, she’s a beau­ti­ful, joy­ful, intel­li­gent lawyer, but I didn’t have to worry about any­thing roman­tic spark­ing up. We were just friends. And, I was offi­cially Not Dating.
The best time to whack some­one on the head is when they’re look­ing the other way.
What started as a friendly visit became a roman­tic visit as we com­pletely fell head over heels for each other. For me, it grew out of a story I told her which con­cluded, “I’ve learned that peo­ple come and go from my life all the time. I’ve had peo­ple I care about move away, drift away, and even die. They come and go all the time, and there’s noth­ing I can do about it. All I can do is throw myself into enjoy­ing the time we have together and savor­ing what we had after­wards.“
And so, I have a new girl­friend. Sure, she lives on a dif­fer­ent con­ti­nent and English is her 2nd or 3rd lan­guage — we’re both really enjoy­ing it.

(oh, and in case you’re won­der­ing, accord­ing to my cost analy­sis, Qwest has the best inter­na­tional call­ing plan and much higher qual­ity than von­age and skype. Also, British Air has the fastest flights from Seattle to Zurich, but costs the most. NWA/KLM is sec­ond. United has the best blend of cheap & fast. Oh and Munich, Frankfurt, and Zurich are all nearly equiv­a­lent air­ports in com­par­i­son (rat­ing = dol­lars x hours in tran­sit), but Zurich is a just beats the other two and has more direct trains… umm… you know… just in case…
ok, then).

A friend’s wed­ding awaited me in Basel, Switzerland. The ser­vice was held in a lovely coun­try church out­side of Basel, fol­lowed by a short recep­tion. Apparently, the Swiss tra­di­tion is that any­body who wants to come to the cer­e­mony and recep­tion can — there were folks prob­a­bly from the local vil­lage, busi­ness asso­ciates, etc. The din­ner and party are by invi­ta­tion only. Being a for­mer house­mate of the bride, I rated an invi­ta­tion.
Another tra­di­tion amongst German-speaking peo­ple, is that friends of the bride and groom make a mock tabloid mag­a­zine about the happy cou­ple — com­plete with embar­rass­ing pho­tos and sto­ries. The more out­landish, the bet­ter, though all in good fun. This mag­a­zine was quite mul­ti­lin­gual: Half of us, being Yanks, spoke English and no German; the other half, being Europeans, spoke English as well as their native German, French, Czech, or all of the above. It included a cross­word puz­zle, and a con­test for those with the most cor­rect answers. Seeing as the bride teaches English to the locals, this was prob­a­bly intended to help improve our lan­guage skills and to get the Americans and locals to inter­act more. It didn’t quite turn out that way.
I had been hang­ing out with two of the brides American friends — all of us type A per­son­al­i­ties. We turned our play­ful cross­word into a fierce com­pe­ti­tion, the three of us pool­ing our resources to com­plete the cross­word before any­one else. My pass­ing famil­iar­ity with German made me the rel­a­tive expert, so I sifted the German arti­cles, while my team­mates divided up the rest. Excitement rose with each suc­cess­ful dis­cov­ery. By the time we fin­ished, we were as pumped on adren­a­line as any ath­lete and raced to turn in our results. Frantically we ran to find the per­son run­ning the con­test, and proudly handed him our papers, know­ing we had achieved great­ness. The offi­cial politely accepted are papers, smiled, and walked away. “That’s it? Where’s our prize for being first?” It was then that we noticed every­one else enjoy­ing them­selves, laugh­ing and chat­ting, slowly work­ing their way through the puz­zle. We took solace in the knowl­edge that there was no way any­one else could get as many cor­rect answers as we — we had to have per­fect scores.
Later that night, we dis­cov­ered that there was a twelve-way-tie for first place — all per­fect scores. The orga­niz­ers had to draw lots to find who would get the prizes. I hap­pened to be one of the win­ners, and gra­ciously accepted the award of Swiss candy on behalf of my team.
Which brings me to dessert. The groom loves desert. When faced with the deci­sion about what cake they’d like to serve, the groom decreed that cake was not enough and they must have a “dessert buf­fet”.
Remember, we’re in Switzerland — where they make excel­lent choco­late, ice cream, hot choco­late, and all man­ner of sweet, deca­dent things. To expe­ri­ence a Swiss Dessert Buffet is to expe­ri­ence heaven. They had wed­ding cake — choco­late with rasp­berry fill­ing. That’s Swiss choco­late with fresh rasp­ber­ries, folks. Following this was lemon par­fait, twelve kinds of ice cream, three choco­late mousse — each a dif­fer­ent grade of dark­ness, a straw­berry flan-like-thing, and for those from the French side of the coun­try: a moun­tain of assorted cheeses. The mousse was excel­lent as was the flan-like-thing. The choco­late ice cream was the best I’ve ever had and brought con­ver­sa­tion to a stand­still. The straw­berry ice cream elim­i­nated all higher brain func­tions leav­ing me in a state of sen­sual bliss. To top it all off, they served the most exquis­ite Moscato I’ve had, some­how being light, sweet, and tart at the same time. It sat­is­fied any need I’d ever had.
The mem­o­rable desert buf­fet aside, I was really happy to see my friend (and for­mer house­mate) get mar­ried. She’s so happy and settled.

Some things I noticed about Basel:

• Cool ferry boats — Amidst all of this are the most roman­tic ferry boats. For 2CHF, you can glide across the river on one. Though they are pleas­ant and roman­tic, the thing that drew me most was the engi­neer­ing. These boats are pro­pelled by the cur­rent: a taught cable hangs per­pen­dic­u­lar to the river. They ferry has a line from its bow to a free-wheeling pul­ley on the cable. To cross the river, the fer­ry­man sim­ply sets the tiller so that the boat points slightly towards the far side. The cur­rent does the rest, dri­ving the boat grace­fully across. Elegant design sim­plic­ity. I am such a geek.
• Great shop­ping — There was more shop­ping to be had than I’ve seen in most cities. Everywhere I walked, the streets were lined with stores — not just local shops, but big inter­na­tional stores. It was a bit astounding.
• Great night life — This place has quite a nightlife — at 1am, the streets were full of peo­ple out for a stroll, in groups laugh­ing, or hav­ing drinks in cafes and bars. Young folks con­gre­gated along the quay, hang­ing out or walk­ing along the river. The Barfuserplatz was com­pletely packed: the main street has bars and restau­rants with out­door seat­ing spilling into the street (bless­edly pedes­trian only), leav­ing just a bit of room for the throng to migrate up and down. It’s like a huge block party.

I ended up leav­ing the party early, with many apolo­gies. The fol­low­ing day was my last in Europe for this trip. I could have either spent it sit­ting in a Swiss café recov­er­ing from the party, or hop­ping the 1.5hr long train back to Bregenz.
Which do you think I picked?