Bartonia: September 2010

Our hotel, boys room top right (ours out the back)

First taste of Venice, looking for a ~~bus~~ ferry

Making sure the canals are navigable

The lion of Venice, outside Duke's palace on Piazza di San Marco

Beautiful

And I thought it was hard to capture Switzerland! Ha!

Venice is the most visited city in the world (the Italians say) and it is easy to hear many different languages. So many people, everywhere: very tourist oriented. But it is so delightful, beautiful, charming, extraordinary!

At the fall of the Roman Empire, as the Huns Vandals and other violent teenagers swept down from the north, some people moved out onto an island to stay safe. Then, 600 years later, as the island city had grown, it became the maritime capital of the Mediterranean, the centre of commerce, trade and civilisation.

There are so many churches, so little open land. And the water is the road, enchanting.

A variety of sausages to have with potato dish below

Mashed potato with eggs cooked into it

How to capture it all? All the little impressions? The vignette of two people talking on the street that seems to capture some small and essential quality of a culture or a time and place, how to encapsulate that into a photograph, a paragraph, a blog? Impossible? Certainly difficult and I don’t think it will happen here.

Switzerland has a seamless integration geographically from function to function. There is no wasted space. At the bottom of the garden, often planted with vegetables as well as flowers, the fields start. Either corn or pasture. Electric fences border the ‘wanderweg’ and other paths and roads to pen the cows from harm so they can feed on every available pasture space. The cities give way to villages and it is either field or forest between the villages. The forests are a source of food and fuel. There is no ‘wild country’, no empty space; with the possible exception of the high valleys and steep slopes of the alps. Where there is still forest, but it is too steep for pasture.

The boys found it difficult to understand at first that the small patches of green between the groups of houses was actually farming land between villages. They were waiting for the towns to finish and the country to start. But it all flows together in small parcels and increments. The schoolchildren and workers from a village will cycle through the farms to spend the day at school or office 10 minutes away, in another village.

We went to a lake with the Stauffers’ new kayak, and hired a couple of row boats as well. Gotti joined us for a few hours and it was all quite lovely. Again, the sun was shining and it did not feel cold.

That night we had dinner with Madlaina, Felix and Claudia’s middle daughter, as well as Flurin (their youngest and only son) and Laura his girlfriend. I can’t remember what we ate.

The lake called Greifensee

Boys in the boat

Boys out of the boat. They said the water was very cold, colder than the 'leech lake' of the day before.

I believe this is meant to be taken seriously

Friday we drove over to Bubikon and dropped Gotti’s Felix’s car back at Gotti’s. They had both left for Sardinia to visit Felix’s daughter so we left the car there and took the keys over the hill to Groesli’s. She walked us down to the station and we said goodbye to her and we trained it to Zurich.

Walking through forest between Gotti and Groesli's

Forest mushroom

It was a tradition to have a doll especially made at a child's birth. They are too expensive to do now. They use real hair. Dani is holding the doll made for her mother, Verana's, birth

Verana on left, Gotti (Marianne) on right

We were met here by Flurin and together had lunch at the vegetarian restaurant Rasi (Dani’s sister Sara) used to work at last year: very nice food, excellent. We sight saw a bit around the old city. Finally resting at the old hill the Romans had first fortified. Here there were no less than three chessboards, and Peter and Flurin each played one game with Barney, who hopefully learned a little more from the experience.

We picked up our hire car in Zurich and drove back to Hinteregg for cheese fondue dinner with the Stauffers.

We found, but did not dine, at this "outback" restaurant in Zurich

There is even a 'typical' Magnetic Island dish on the menu

Zurich cathedral down by the lake

A Zurich street drain grate

Yay


The chess masters contemplate ... ...	There was a dentist in one of the building behind, and we could see in at someone getting drilled and filled

Madeleine and Felix

Dani, Flurin and Laura

Fondue

Claudia and Felix

Saturday we did this:

Breakfast in Switzerland; coffee pastry and berries in Lichtenstein; lunch in Austria, dinner in Venezia (Venice). It was overcast and rainy for most of the drive, but still spectacular scenery. Lichtenstein and Austria are both very similar to Switzerland. Austria had some distinguishing features, apparent even from the road. Innsbruck was a pretty city, nestled by a river in a valley.
From Innsbruck we turned south, through the Italian Alps and then down through the Dolomite mountains to the plains around Milano, Verona and out to the coast and across the Laguna to Venezia.