| 01: Geneva Sucks - Interlaken ft. Lauterbrunnen (Neutrality Remix) |
| Written by Brendon Green |
| Saturday, 13 March 2010 11:17 |
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What do I know about Switzerland? 1: Roger Federer, 2: Political Neutrality, 3: Their army enjoys combining knives with bottle openers, screwdrivers and little saws that don’t cut through anything. I was looking forward to adding to this list, maybe throwing in some history or local customs. Perhaps, everyday they own a cat and every 2 weeks they have to trade their cat with a neighbour and so on and so forth, until everyone in Switzerland owned every cat in Switzerland. I didn’t know what was in store for me. The first thing I picked up on was that if you’re planning on spending 6 days in Geneva, don’t. If you must go there, you only need 1 day, maybe 2 if you really want to see the United Nations buildings. The 2nd thing I quickly learned was that, holy crap, this place is expensive. This was a rude awakening coming from idyllic Lisbon, and it made me angry like a rapper. It was a shame, too, because the guy I was CouchSurfing with was super kind and friendly. I felt bad for not really enjoying his city. The ‘old city’ is the main point of interest for tourists, and it is nice, but it stands in too stark a contrast with the rest of the city. The clean and crisp classical style of the old town is so at odds with the rest of the modern, bland, depressing city that it feels like a surreal cartoon instead of the pleasantly quaint experience it’s aiming for. I may be putting it too harshly, so to put it realistically: Geneva is boring. And that’s what hurts the most when paying grand amounts for food (because that’s all I wanted/could afford to pay for) that is, like the city, nothing special. Even the UN buildings which I toured were disappointingly average. So, faced with 4 more days of boredom, I decided to ask Facebook where I should go instead. And like all of life’s problems (e.g. desperately needing to know which 'Twilight' character I am), Facebook had an answer. Easy as you like, I booked a train to Interlaken, in the Jungfrau region (AKA a mountainy part of Swissland). 3 hours, and a short stop in Bern, later, I am standing at a train station in a town book ended by giant alpine mountains and placed neatly between two pristine lakes (the clue was in the name). This is touristic Switzerland like Queenstown is touristic New Zealand. It’s touristic because it shows off the best of the country and is a hub for adventure and expedition. If this was a rap battle, Interlaken is Jay-Z and Geneva is me rapping into a frankfurter at a family BBQ. But oh no! I get to my hostel and there’s a group of 50 English teenagers on a school trip in the reception! But don’t worry, they’re checking out. And February is for some reason off peak time, so I get an entire 6 bed hostel room and bathroom ALL TO MYSELF. Sweet. This is the place where my months of practice walking and Bata Boots pay off. The first 2 days I stay in and around Interlaken, walking through the fresh 5-10cm of snow by the river out to Lake Thun (where it’s just me and a couple of Swans). And an accidentally ambitious hike up a small mountain, always choosing the smaller, less travelled paths, fuelled by Budget Brand energy cola and a motivating knowledge that I had nothing else to do, so I should find the best panorama of the town to look down on. Any time I felt I was getting out of my element, I looked for horse tracks and told myself “if a horse can do it, so can I”. This has since become my life mantra. On my last full day I take a short train up to Lauterbrunnen, which is the ’base camp’ that skiers and snowboarders go to to get up the mountains. It’s a mere 800m high, but that’s still badass enough for me. The sun is beaming down and the blue sky and white ground are blinding, so on go the sunglasses-scarf combo, and off I go on the ’Nordic Trek’. I have to stay on the road though because either side of the fences is snow that comes up past my knees (I know this because I did try to go off track once, and only once. Ok twice.) Heading back to Geneva I stop again in Bern and have lunch with a friend from Edinburgh. Bern is kind of like the producer of a song, throwing in a little trademark to make it his own (like Timberland going ’eh-eh’). And similar to that end, you sometimes wish that the producer (Timberland = Bern) just did the entire song (The Fray = Geneva). Eh-eh indeed. To run this hip-hop analogy into the (under)ground, the colab of Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen and Bern was mad skillz and demolished Geneva. Now I am off to Berlin to start recording my German mix-tape. Peace. |
