Auslanders: Blitzfahrt #3

Switzerland

Switzerland looks like a phoshopped picture of itself.

It looks fake, like you’re looking at a bunch of postcards blown up and stitched together on a really good hi-def monitor, and I guess the Swiss government has decided that is a good thing, because you have to pay thirty Euros just to go into the country and look at it.

I am still offended by that entry fee.

It’s like paying admission for the privilege of going into a store. I’m going to be buying stuff the whole time I’m inside, so why should I have to pay to get in? I’m thinking that the owner should be paying me to enter. I am currently drafting a formal letter of complaint to the Swiss government as we speak, assuming I am speaking.

Of course, I paid the extortionate entry fee anyway. Having driven a traffic grinding ten hours to the border, I was hardly going to turn around and fight my way back home to Strump as a sad form of protest, and there were a lot of cars behind me in the line, so I didn’t have a choice anyway. I had to suck it up and drive on. They did give me a sticker to put on my window, however. It was green.

The main things about Switzerland that the random man on the street knows would be:

Army knives

Chocolate Bars

Mountains

Neutrality

Banks

Cheese

Milk Maids

Yodelling

Movenpick

Pig-headed Refusal to Smarten Up and Adopt the Euro, Which Would Make Everything A Lot Better For Pretty Much Everybody

There are other, much less random men on other, more learned streets who, I am certain, would be able to explain in great detail any number of much less popular and stereotypical things about Switzerland, but unfortunately I didn’t have any experience with those. I had to make do with the well known stuff, although I was the only one yodeling, which was disappointing. Especially to my family, who were stuck in the car with me.  

Our key destination in the country was the touristy town of Interlaken, which would be our overnight stop on the way to Italy. I should add that, if there is a non-touristy town in Switzerland, I was not privy to that town.

We found our Interlaken hotel with little trouble, and were amazed at the incredible view from this patio room on the edge of a cliff. The town is ringed with mountains, and a river of stunning cobalt blue, no doubt rife with deadly industrial runoff of some sort, slices through it. The kids were capering about in amazement at our dumb luck at finding such a room. Which made it all the more disappointing when the owner came back and said that room wasn’t ours. Instead, we would be put up in the attic.

Literally.

We were taken from the good room and given two dingy rooms in the attic. I shouldn’t complain though, because at least we had a couple of windows and access to an old coffee can in the hallway for our biological needs. Okay, I made that part up. There was a toilet, but it was shared between all the attic rooms. Yes, there was one more room up there, but we were told not to open that door and I can only assume that the owner’s inbred step-brother was chained to a radiator in there, which would be one less person using that toilet, if you’re trying to look on the bright side.   

The town of Interlaken itself seems to be some kind of gambling mecca for wealthy Asian tourists, and walking around, it was obvious that we wouldn’t be doing any shopping, not that we had planned on it. There were a lot of high end stores with one word French names, ornate hotels and casinos, typical tourist shops, and a twenty franc note blowing between some unconcerned guy’s legs.

The twenty blew up and stopped right in front of me, daring me to bend down and snap it up.  

I did so with impunity and held it out to show my son.  

“Check it out, buds. Now we can eat supper.”

He was stunned.

“You mean there’s money on the ground here?”

He began to methodically pick through any trash he could find scattered around the parking lot. My daughter, having just come back from the bank machine with my wife, couldn’t figure out what he was doing.

“He’s looking for money because I found twenty francs.” I showed her the bill.

Her eyes lit up. “I’m looking too!”

I shook my head. “I already told him not to bother. It’s pure fluke that I found this twenty. There’s no way it’s going to happen again.”

Being kids, they wouldn’t listen, and I had to drag them away from the parking lot, across the road to one of those tourist shops that sells only Army knives, chocolate bars, cheese and milk maid outfits where my wife was fruitlessly searching for tea towels.

“Come on kids, you’re just going to drive yourselves crazy. There’s no way you’re going to find-“

“Something like this?”

My daughter was giddy, cackling as she held a fifty franc note in her hand.  

If not for my wife, we would all have ended up in the dumpster, rifling through crumpled Toblerone wrappers and putrefied bananas.

Eventually we ended up pooling our found monies and entering the Swissest looking restaurant we could find, lured in by the prospect of rosti.

In terms of calories per franc, the rostis we ordered were unmatched. Imagine that you are in a restaurant where the patrons don’t receive a plate for their food. Instead, the waiter drops the whole sixteen inch frying pan down in front of you, loaded with potatoes, ham, onions, garlic and topped with a melted brick of cheese. It’s enough for the whole family, and you are about to parcel it out as such, but then the waiter brings a similar frying pan for everybody else. And then, because you are a disgusting pig and perhaps owing to a lack of understanding as to which is the good cholesterol and which is the bad, you eat damn near everything in that frying pan.

I dealt out as much punishment unto that rosti pan as I could, sitting there on a patio under a kerosene heater watching the Japanese tourists beside us pull out and display on their table an unending an assortment of electronic devices whilst pretending that the hot runny cheese into which they were mime dipping their bread didn’t gross them out. I wasn’t any more convinced by their performances than the waiter was.

“They always do this,” he muttered as he leaned over to clear our table.

“Who?” I asked.

“Them” he sniffed.

I didn’t tell him that I agreed with them about the fondue cheese. The smell of it hung over the patio like running shoe man feet in a dorm room. We paid up and left before he had a chance to try and make me eat some. Of the cheese, not the man feet. 

After such an extravagant feed, and hoping to fend off late night heart attacks, we undertook a vigorous walk back to our cells in the attic, looking up from the ground only to gawk at people in impossibly expensive clothes getting out of impossibly expensive cars and walking into impossibly expensive hotels.

For all that scrutiny of every scrap of litter, we didn’t find any more money, but I am pretty sure I could have made a lot more than seventy francs if I had been brave enough to knock one of the rich gamblers over their beer sodden heads and take their stuff y main force. My wife said no.

After a night of semi-restful attic sleep, and a few handfuls of dried old bread crusts much enriched in quality by a thick layer of Nutella the next morning (I was not paid any money for this product placement), we packed into the car and headed up the Sussten Pass.

The Sussten Pass is exactly what it sounds like: a dangerous mountain pass blasted out of the rock by some crazed surveyor with too much dynamite and a faulty survival instinct.

My daughter, who has always read in the car and never once complained about getting car sick, looked up from her book after the forty-third hairpin turn and said that she felt gross. 

I suggested that she pull her head out of the book and take a look out the window at the miniature Swiss villages thousands of feet below, just down there where the right lane of the road was washed out and crumbled away.

She chose car sickness.

Eventually, we were up amongst the glaciers, driving around them, dodging yetis, feeling only mildly concerned about being the only car on the road for over an hour and driving past what looked like a remote Antarctic research station behind electric fences topped with concertina wire.

But we needn’t have worried.

Sure, it took us an extra five hours to get to Italy and the precarious driving conditions shaved a couple months of hard use off my daughter’s heart, but it was worth it. I have seldom felt more like Sir Edmund Hillary, albeit in a rented Volkswagon Touran instead of riding herd over a team of trusty Sherpas.

And I bet Sir Edmund never found seventy francs.    

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Auslanders: Blitzfahrt #2

Italy

On The Beverly Hillbillies, whenever the characters went to a different country, or if someone from that country came to visit the Hillbillies, a particular song would be played that created an instant association with the country in question. This was clearly crucial in the United States, where some 85% of the population still doesn’t have a passport and 100% of the population pronounces Iraq like it was spelled “Eye rack”. In a country where not knowing anything of substance about any other place in the world is celebrated as a character attribute, those handy musical cues to the stereotype of choice is useful.

If you were here right now, perhaps sitting on my knee, I would ask you to get off because it hurts, but then I would hum that stereotypical song for each country and you would easily recognize them all. Such is their power.

Note: don’t let the fact that there are maybe only three episodes of the Hillbillies where those songs are used ruin my point. The same songs would probably get put to good use in Scooby Do, The Facts of Life, and pretty much any other piece of good, warm hearted, lowest common denominator TV enjoyment.

This reference to music is only relevant because when we drove to Italy, I couldn’t stop singing the Italy song and the strange thing is that when I sing the Italian song, I find myself singing the words Hot Tamales over and over again, which you would have to assume would, in terms of content, be more suited to a Mexican Beverly Hillbillies episode. There is no obvious reason why I used those lyrics other than the fact that Hot Tamales fits the syllable count, which now that I think about it, explains a lot about most of the lyrics to songs from the 1980s. Does it have three syllables? Check. Does it rhyme? Check. Does it make sense? Who cares?

Literally from the exact moment we suspected we would be living in Germany, we started planning a trip to Italy and by “we” I mean my wife.

Any time we are thinking about going somewhere with an overnight stay, and sometimes even when we are not, she does that thing where she gets on the Internet for hours, combing exhaustively through all these sites with names like waytooexpensiveholidayrentals.com or luxuryvillasyouwonteverstayin.com, looking for the right combination of price, amenities, location and price.

There is an art to this process, but the art of it pales next to the jawgrinding tedium necessary to perform that art.

First she finds a lot of sites, then she reads all the reviews on other sites, then she cross checks, then she generates a possible list of places, then she tells me all about each one and watches me carefully to gauge my reaction, but I have an unintentional deadpan expression all the time so she can’t read the correct response she deserves after all that work so she starts again and then I say, “what was wrong with that first one?”.

Sometimes we have a talk about how hard this process is, and I completely agree. I would never spend so long as trying to book a place to have fun. I would give up very quickly, thinking “we can have a lot of fun right here in the basement for way less money and effort.”

Eventually, she always finds the right place, however.

She calls and she books the place and I always say that it’s expensive and she always tells me that it isn’t and then I try to believe her but I am secretly nauseous.

Sure enough, this is exactly what happened when she booked our place in Italy.

It was in Umbria, two hours from Firenze, four hours from Roma, and a scant forty minutes from Assisi. I don’t know if this means anything to you, but it should. If you are a good little Christian and you die saving a freshly baptized baby from being eaten by a Satan worshipping heavy metal band, you would be lucky to go to a Heaven as beautiful as this part of Italy.

I had been there before, so I knew that whatever my wife had booked was probably worth it, even if we had to leave our children there as payment. (Note to Children’s Aid: I am kidding. We followed the “pack in, pack out” principle with our children and they are both fine.)

That first time I went to Italy, I was accompanying a group of small town Ontario high school students on one of those rigidly structured school trip tours where you spend exactly twelve days on a bus seeing the most commonly agreed beautiful sights for perhaps one hour at a time, getting just enough of a look to realize that you aren’t ever going to see enough of anything to satisfy.

Chaperoning on one of those trips causes you to spend an inordinate amount of time staring out of a tour bus window at things that you wish you could stop and examine without motion blur. Then when you do finally stop, you have figure out how to have an amazing time at the exact same time that you are trying to stop a group of teenagers from having their own amazing time. Which could involve alcohol, bad decisions and lusty student travelers from foreign schools.

During that first trip, I kept telling myself “I’m going to come back here with my family and eat in that restaurant” or “my kids would love this gelato” or “how do I prevent Darryl from making out with everybody?” It was the kind of thing that you say to yourself idly and wish that it was true without ever believing yourself, but incredibly, this time it actually happened. I did go back to that area and my kids really had that gelato, although I was never able to stop Darryl from making out with anyone.

Umbria is a just a hop, skip and a sixteen hour jump from Dusseldorf.

That sixteen hour jump includes a great deal of time spent examining other vehicles in gridlock on the Autobahn, the ascent and subsequent descent that is Switzerland, a lot of mountain tunnels, and the northern part of Italy, which appeared to need a fresh coat of paint and perhaps a Vatican or something. I’m not trying to hurt Northern Italy’s feelings, but it would have been a lot more convenient for tourism if they’d put the south up close to the border instead. It would save a lot of time.

Moments after rolling off the motorway onto a rough, looping two lane stretch of plain old highway, I came face to face with the reason why so many tourists are afraid to drive in this country, and I mean that literally. Have you ever been able to look deep into the eyes of an oncoming driver? I have, and that is because he passed the car in front of him on a bridge. Right in front of me. Luckily for both his family and mine, I wasn’t trying to find The Appleseed Cast on my Ipod and so I was able to go up on two wheels and drive on the guardrail to give him enough room to hurry through without killing us all. I didn’t have time to be amazed at this insane disregard of safety, however, because there were hundreds of other drivers exactly like that guy all over every road.

Where were the police, you might ask?

Well, the closest we came to the police was in Sorrento as I drove the wrong way down a busy one way street looking for the beach. I wasn’t pulled over or anything, the officer just waved me over, smiled at my wife and told me to turn around and try the other way.

I didn’t realize that simply arriving at our destination without taking physical damage on the roads was a miracle of its own, but once I got a good look at the place we were going to be staying over our two weeks in Italy, it was obvious.

Every morning I woke up to look out my window in complete disbelief.

I remember being a kid and thinking that once I get to Grade 1, then everything will be perfect. It wasn’t.

Then it was all about being in the double digits. If I could just gut it out until there, I’d be right where I want to be. I wasn’t.

The same thing happened for Grade 8, Grade 9, getting a girlfriend, turning sixteen, getting into film school, graduating, getting a job, getting something published, etc, etc, etc.

Nothing is ever as good when you get there as it looked where you were impatiently waiting for it. Nothing.

Except for my wife, and now, Italy.

For only the second time in my life, I was doing something that was not only as good as I could have imagined, it was even better. I couldn’t seem to take the place for granted.

It was like when I had amnesia and kept forgetting what had just happened. Every few minutes I would look around in shock and wonder what was going on and someone would have to explain that I had fallen off my bike and I had amnesia and explain that I should read the paper I was holding that explained everything. I kept looking up at the low mountains around me, the clear sky, the olive trees, the golden fields, the stone houses, then looking over at my wife who was doing the same. Were we going to wake up from this? I hoped not.

And we didn’t.

Our bedroom windows faced the southwest, looking out over an intricate layering of rolling hills and valleys ringed with mountains. It was October, so everything was drenched in amber, glowing and perfectly composed no matter which way I looked.

Our apartment was stone, the front quarter of a very old farmhouse perfumed by fat purple grapes busting out of vines curled all over thick frames shading the patio and main door. Down a few steps there was a pool, set perfectly onto the hill with nothing to break the view.

Every day was sunny and warm, every night very cool and completely dark.

I haven’t mentioned the food.

The woman who owned the holiday farm house was German, obviously, and as such knew exactly where the best place was for everything.

“For pizza, you must go to Franco’s. It’s just down the road.”

Of course, that being our first night, we were ready to drive down the road. And down the road and down the road some more. There was no Franco’s. There was a Café Americain, So and So’s Pizza, Somebody’s Trattoria, Some Other Italian Guy’s Everything Else, but no Franco’s. We went up and down the highway a couple times and couldn’t see it.

“Let’s just go the closest place!” the kids whined.

“But we want the good stuff.”

“This is Italy. It’s all going to be good.”

My wife was on their side. Actually, my wife is usually on anyone’s side when they suggest we eat sooner rather than later. Me? I am much more discriminating. Which is very different from simply being picky.

Through sheer laziness combined with the process of elimination, we ended up just going to the restaurant closest to our place in the hills, the Café Americain.

It didn’t look very promising.

The parking lot was completely full (good sign), but there were a lot of rowdy local dudes hanging around out front smoking and making stereotypically broad hand gestures (bad sign, in no small part because my wife is blonde…), there were plastic beads in the doorway (I really don’t know if that’s a good sign or not, unless you’re going to get your palm read) and there was a hungry cluster of loud patrons waiting to get in and watching a soccer match on an impossibly loud, ancient TV (leaning towards good).

It was hard to believe that a highway pub exactly resembling the kind of roadhouse that would serve greasy chicken wings and forty nine cent draft to meth tweaking bike gangs back home served food that made you want to group hug the waitress and sing opera.

I had to stop myself from turning to people at other tables and shouting, “Holy shit! Can you believe this food? Why isn’t anybody else weeping?”

They weren’t weeping because they were locals. They ate in this place every night. You would too, if you lived in the area. You would be having pizza every day, just like my kids. You would be ordering veal scallopini with black truffles and gnocchi with a pomodor sauce that should have been in the dictionary under “delicious”, stewed wild boar shanks and porcini mushrooms, ten layer lasagna that cut itself when you held your fork over it and enough chocolate gelato to choke a polar bear.

I’m crying now trying to imagine how bad life must have been for some people to leave this country and go anywhere else. Can you envision the brutal forms of misery that Italian immigrants must have left behind in order to bring themselves to stomach sailing away from restaurants like that to come to a country where donuts count as a food group?

I can’t.

The closest town to us was called Gualdo Tadino.

It was a working town, with nothing big enough to pull a tour bus off the highway but I had to go there every day to work, plugging my laptop into a drop at a computer store carved into a medieval building that opened out onto to an ancient town square.

The shop didn’t open until four o’clock, and I would go early and sit on a bench in the square and feel like I might shiver with amazement. It was like I was living in a 1970s Chef Boyardee ad.

The streets were barely wide enough for a single vehicle, winding through town with no discernible plan or structure. Ancient widows in black kerchiefs stumped along with bags of perfect vegetables. Leathery faced men in Chico Marx hats sat in the sun, eternally arguing, stopping only to stare at every woman that walked by.

The sun angled down into the square and lit up the dusty old bricks, casting everything with into amber. The sounds were different, the light was different, I was different. I didn’t care if the computer shop never opened, didn’t care if I never left the bench again. In the wildest leap of my most insane exaggeration I couldn’t have imagined that I would be parked on a step in a place like this, in a moment of perfect peace, eating pizza that tasted better than dreaming about it and only cost one Euro a slice.

When you grow up in a place like Clinton, you can only read about this kind of thing. Actually, if you grow up in Clinton, there is a pretty good chance that you won’t read about this kind of thing. Or maybe any other kind of thing, either.

But I had grown up in Clinton and even that couldn’t stop me from walking through Roma and Pompei in the microwave heat.

It didn’t slow me down as we fought insane traffic all the way to Firenze or Perugia or Genova.

And it didn’t make me embarrassed when people stopped me in the street and asked for directions in Italian, assuming I was one of the locals.

Because, for two weeks, I was one of the locals and I never wanted to leave home.