Fribourg

First things first:  I want to live in Switzerland one day.  I'll get my PhD in the States and find some clean-energy lab or company that's based in / has a branch in Switzerland (maybe the French-speaking part).  I’ll hike and bike and take prompt trains in my free time.  And then I'll magically teleport to see my family and friends whenever I want to, and also I will become impervious to cold winters.  That’s the plan.

The acute reader may infer from the above plan that my weekend in Fribourg was not disastrous.  On the contrary, I had a wonderful time and I had a lot of fun with Chris and Vicki, who are the most welcoming hosts anyone could imagine.  The solo traveling had a few nervous moments, but only a few, and everything worked out well.  So I’ll begin with my departure from the dorm around 6:30 am on Saturday.

I left my dorm around 6:30 am on Saturday, and made it to Gare de Lyon with ample time to find my track, buy a pain au chocolat for breakfast, and put a few spare minutes on my phone in case of emergency.  The train to Geneva passed through some very pretty countryside: darkly-forested hills with a striking green-blue river winding through them.  In Geneva, I had about fifteen minutes to catch my inter-city train to Fribourg.  It was here that things teetered on the edge of…significant departure from the plan.  I couldn’t find the track using only the signs down in the station (Fribourg wasn’t listed among the stops), and I couldn’t find an information desk.  With about five minutes to spare, I resorted to the last-ditch tactic of asking a random passerby.  Well, not entirely random – I picked someone who looked like a seasoned traveler, who wasn’t rushing off anywhere at the moment.  He pointed me to the right track, which very luckily was the nearest one to where we were standing.  So I caught the train.  If I had walked farther in the station before asking someone, I probably wouldn’t have caught it.  I don’t think that this would have been a calamity, as the inter-city trains run fairly often, but it certainly would have shaken up Chris’s and Vicki’s plans as well as my own.  All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

And since all was well, I got to enjoy even more dramatic scenery on my way to Fribourg.  Unfortunately, I think I’ve already saturated the superlative-scale when describing my experiences over the past five weeks.  So there’s no effective way for me to express how beautiful the countryside is – and since most of my weekend involved admiring the countryside, maybe this will wind up as a rather dull post despite my efforts.  I took a few pictures at various points, but they’re more to remind me of the trip when I look at them later than to convey the experience to someone else.  You’ll just have to keep in mind that anything I mention was stunningly, breath-taking-ly lovely.  That certainly goes for the vast blue lake with vineyards sloping down to its shores, and the mountains behind it, and the summer sky over it all.  

When I arrived at the Fribourg train station, Chris and Vicki were waiting for me.  We went back to Vicki’s apartment for lunch.  It’s in a converted grain silo, and Vicki got to design the floor plan herself, so it’s a very cool place.  Once there, I met (I may not spell her name correctly; I’m sorry) Frescia, who lived with Vicki and her family for – I believe – something like 18 years while Vicki’s children were growing up.  She’s very friendly and patient with me even though our only common language is a bit of French on both our parts, and she makes salad that is so tasty even I, the pickiest eater of them all, enjoyed every bite.  After lunch, Chris showed me Fribourg.  We walked down the main boulevard, past the new opera house, and along a road with a very good view of the “New Town” (still centuries old) down by the riverbanks outside the old city walls.  He pointed out ancient guard towers and an abbey that’s been an abbey continuously since the thirteenth century.  Wow.  Then we went down to the river, crossed an old wooden covered bridge and walked past the abbey before heading back to the apartment.  It was great to have a guide – as a student tourist, I’m used to just seeing what’s in front of me and maybe looking it up later online, but I could ask Chris questions about the history of the town and so on.

In the evening, Chris and Vicki and I went to the top of Cousimbert, a little pre-Alp foothill that commands the very best view of anywhere nearby.  After driving partway up the mini-mountain, we walked the rest of the way through a forest that seemed determined to demonstrate to me that there’s more to Switzerland than the cold, cloudy winters.  Wildflowers and ferns were everywhere, and the whole forest was glowing green with life.  As we reached the chalet at the top, a vast stretch of the country was there beneath us, stretching away through hills and lakes to the Jura mountains, with the Alps behind us almost hidden by the rising foothills.  (By the way, the Juras date from the – surprise – Jurassic period.  They are very very old.)  The sun was setting and the Holstein cows in the fields below sent up a gentle clangor of cowbells as they had their dinners.

And then it was time for our dinner, too.  I learned that the chalet, though it looks old and traditional, is actually almost self-sustaining, with solar panels and a solar water heater on the roof.  It’s a cozy, warm restaurant that reminds me in building style of Aunt Donna’s house at the farm.  We had a fondue (which the chalet very obligingly made without wine), and it was extremely tasty.  Bread and cheese will always make a good meal for me, and this was one of the best ways to eat them that I’ve yet encountered.  Then we took a short walk up to the very summit of the hill, which I found refreshing after the meal.  I felt that the atmosphere of the evening was akin to that during Thanksgiving at the farm, which essentially puts it at the pinnacle of peace and contentedness.

So how can one possibly improve upon such an evening?  By biking around the Lake of Gruyère the next day!  On Sunday, there was a bike route planned for an event called Slow Up, and Chris and Vicki reserved bikes for the three of us.  I hadn’t ridden a bike in, oh, probably a decade, now that I think about it, and I had to learn about things like hand brakes and gears, but it was an adventure!  And I didn’t have any mishaps, though I’m afraid I was rather slow.  The other two were very patient, and gave me a boost over the more difficult slopes.  Vicki had a bike with a motor that could be set to assist her on the hills, which turned out to be a very good idea.  I should have used one of those as well.  But I made it!  The route was quite well-organized and well-staffed with volunteers, and every few minutes there was a sort of stopping-point with food stands and free samples from various stores and companies.  Chris estimated that maybe 10,000 cyclists participated in total.  Quite an event!

We stopped at a few of the regrouping-places and snacked and rested.  We shared a Flammkuchen, which is essentially pizza, but invented by Alsace instead of Italy.  And we made a brief detour to a chocolate factory, but the factory tour would have taken too long.  Incidentally, the surrounding country was, of course, beautiful.  It was interesting to pass through a very modern neighborhood and then almost immediately an old, traditional one.  I was tired by the time we made it around the whole loop, and went to sleep around 9:00 pm.  Chris and Vicki both had to leave on their weekly travels before then, but Frescia and a student who’s renting a room were both in the apartment, so I didn’t feel too alone.  I left a bit after 5:00 am this morning, and caught my trains back to Paris without incident.

So that’s that.  It was an incredible weekend.  I keep calling things incredible in this blog.  That’s because I still can’t quite believe they all happened.   Maybe I’ll wake up soon and find that it’s May and I’m at home.  Someone pinch me.