stuff i should have figured out by now

I have a nemesis while traveling.  That nemesis is contact lens solution.  I’ve had many a scavenger hunt for contact lens solution while wandering mainland Europe, and my findings are puzzling.  It is truly hard to hunt down those buggers!  Pretty much the only place that always carries it is the pharmacy- which is no CVS.  You’ve gotta go in and talk to the pharmacist, and hit the open hours, which are usually limited and DEFINITELY closed outside of conference working hours, which is when the situation usually becomes dire. 

The worst is Sunday, when almost everything is closed- I spent one memorable Sunday morning wandering around Venice asking café owners for help (literally I will give you money for your contact lens solution, why does no one wear contacts) and finally located a nifty vending machine outside one of the closed pharmacies.  Maybe my favorite experience was in Portugal, where after consuming a slightly too large glass of wine I remembered the usual lack of contact lens solution.  This time I had no problem locating a pharmacy, but the staff were utterly mystified by my usual acting out of the process of putting in a contact to get around the language barrier and I could not stop giggling.

I also routinely forget that Swiss plugs, much like everything else about Switzerland, are not quite compatible with the rest of the EU, but that on the other hand is no problem- almost every hotel has a stock of converters handy.  But contact lens solution?  That is apparently a problem that stumps every concierge, much as I suspect that I am not the only person with this problem.  Are you other vision challenged travelers just much better than me at this?  In my defense, it’s really hard for me to find the travel sized ones even in Switzerland.  Help me fellow Euros.

Huge digression aside, my latest contact lens solution pilgrimage was last week in Belgium, after realizing around 10pm as going to bed that I either needed to locate some under the counter contact lens solution pronto or spend the weekend blindly feeling my way around the conference.  I approached the concierge with trepidation (earlier on handing over my passport he had commented acidly, “Oh, Trumpland,” as has become a normal experience in Europe in the last couple months), and he very kindly took me on an engaging tour of late night stores in Brussels after the usual look of mystification.

Luckily, our tour was successful (and educational!  There are a lot of Middle Eastern owned late night stores in Brussels, just FYI).

The conference was also really successful.  It was the first feedback I’d gotten from the research community outside my institute on the latest paper that I’ve submitted, and it was really outstanding, I thought.  I even ran into the editor in chief of the journal that I submitted the paper to in the elevator, and he not only remembered me but complimented me on the work I’ve done.  It’s hard to convey how satisfying that is to those outside the research community- a normal paper might take more than a year from conception to submission, and the peer review even longer, so long periods of time in a scientist’s life are spent laboring alone with only our ideas.  In addition, this particular study was met with a lot of skepticism in this group when I initially presented the idea and enrollment statistics, so it was great to see how many people we won over with the final result.

And Belgium is beautiful and very interesting in terms of history!  It seems like almost every other country in Europe has conquered Belgium at some point, which leads to an interesting mishmash of language and culture.  At one point the Spanish kicked all the non-Catholics out of Belgium, which is when the Dutch all moved to the Netherlands en masse and still seems to lead to a lot of wink wink jokes about the differences between the 2 cultures. Unlike Switzerland, which is like a patchwork quilt of regions with different languages, Belgium is just one big swirl of everything everywhere.  Brussels is not my favorite, although the Grand Place is one of the most impressive squares I’ve seen in Europe, but both Antwerp and Bruges are beautiful, manageable little canal cities on the water with gorgeous gothic architecture.  How’s that for a 4 sentence summary of a country?  Please do not inspect my history claims too closely :X

And with that I think I’ve tracked all of western Europe except for the microcountries! Woot woot travel.

the sometimes weird cult of travel

I found myself thinking a lot today about cultural differences around travel.  I was chatting with a friend during the coffee break at a course, and she was giving me some advice about an upcoming trip.  I was amazed by all the places she had been, and asked her when she had fit it all in.  Turned out that for every winter and summer break from late high school on, she had saved up at her job and bought a plane ticket somewhere new.  Especially when traveling in Asia, she said, living there was so cheap that virtually the only expense was the plane ticket, so she could stay for months on end.

Why hadn’t I or most of my friends done anything like that?  It’s not like the stuff I was up to on my high school and college breaks was anything earth shattering for my career.  The best I could come up with was that I just hadn’t thought about it.

Frequent travel and long interludes abroad are the norm for the Swiss and even most Europeans I meet, to the point that I am embarrassed frequently by how little of this wide world I’ve seen.  And trust me, I’ve tried my best to see all I can in my surroundings, no matter where I’ve lived.  Hang around in the vicinity of some of these avid travelers and you will inevitably be asked your “country number,” aka the number of countries you’ve visited (normally with the caveat that it just can’t be the airport).  I’ve even heard challenges around this like “30 before 30,” or the quest to visit 30 countries before hitting 30.

All of this reeks of a certain type of box checking approach to life, and I get sometimes annoyed because anyone with this sort of attitude is likely missing the point of traveling entirely.  (And maybe because I can hardly ever come close to the person asking me :p)  And while I’ve had some pretty great adventures living in different places, sometimes I am envious of the people who put down roots in one place, and wonder if the people with such strong family and friendship ties in one place end up the happiest overall. I’m also uncomfortable with the simple fact that except for my tourist dollars (and sometimes even with them), I am undeniably making a place worse with my swarmlike tourist presence (we rarely roam alone), and with all my carbon spewing plane rides to get there.

However, when I think of what has shaped me as a person, I have to admit that a lot of it has been travel, most especially long term stays where I truly got beneath the surface of a new culture.  My short months in the Dominican Republic I remember specifically as an often uncomfortable period personally that helped me to grow hugely as a person and also brought me to the understanding of how completely and totally privileged my upbringing has been.  Perhaps that is when travel goes from being an enjoyable hobby to something that is really worthwhile.

Finally, of course, you never know what is lurking behind the glossy instagram photos that can make the jetset life seem so appealing.  This weekend, while drinking wine on a lovely terrace in Corniglia overlooking the Mediterranean, I struck up a conversation with a French Canadian woman sitting at the table next to us.  She and her partner were retired Air Force and traveling all over the world together, drawing the next wonderful destination out of a hat.  I thought, awed, that I would love to have that life when I reach that age.  Later I found out that she had cancer, and likely wouldn’t have much longer.  A lot of pain was sitting on that idyllic terrace.

For now, I definitely would describe myself as someone with the travel bug, even if as I get older I get more thoughtful about what that means.  And I guess I do think, high handed as it seems, that travel in general is a good thing for the human race, if not for its health or the environment.  Like eating meat, it is kind of one of those things that I feel uneasy about now and then, but squash down under the corner of my brain that says “BUT I REALLY LIKE IT.”  Perhaps one of these days I will take a principled stand, but that day is not today.

 

getting nerdy in the netherlands

Most days I really love my job, but this past week was a particular highlight.  It combined three of my most favorite things: traveling, smart people, and cool science.  Even the sad world news of late can’t kill my happy buzz completely.

To back up a step: a few months ago I applied to be University of Zürich’s representative to the LERU Summer School in the Netherlands.  Basically, it’s a “league of 21 leading European research universities” that have met certain criteria, and they put on a different summer training at one of the member schools every summer.

I was super interested because this year’s theme was Data Stewardship. I’ve been working with a really novel data source in my latest research, and am really increasingly working with “Big Data,” another buzz word that I won’t torture you by unpacking now.  But it suffices to say that I find myself working closely with specialists from all fields, from computer scientists to statisticians to ethicists to psychologists to other epidemiologists, and I am increasingly convinced that this type of interdisciplinary collaboration on data analyses is the future of science.  And I feel like I’m making a lot of stuff up as I go along, which I guess is the foundation of science anyway.  But it would be nice to at least have a conversation with a bunch of other scientists going through the same stuff with their data.

The week totally blew away my expectations.  There were so many prestigious speakers, from an IBM scientist working on Watson to legal experts on licensing in Open Science in the EU.  And the editor of Nature Genetics (Nature is like the bible of scientists, for those who aren’t familiar) took the time to spend an ENTIRE week just hanging out with us and even coaching us along on a publication when one started to take shape by the end of the week, which totally blew my mind.  I somehow ended up taking the lead on said publication, and spent quite a chunk of today setting up an Open Science Framework open source project so we can all collaborate on said publication in the upcoming weeks.  Fingers crossed, it would be amazing have something concrete to show for our discussions, and I think it’s important to widen this discussion to all scientists.

The best part, though, was meeting so many brilliant and passionate people from all over the world.  The organizer is so passionate about the topic that he rented a room in our hotel one night just so he could stay late and continue discussing the many issues that had come up that day in the hotel bar.  The other PhDs were smart, but also incredibly fun and outgoing.  I went running with a new Finnish friend.  There were many, many science talks over a good Belgian (or occasionally Dutch) beer.  One night we went from a canal boat ride to late night Happy Meals, and just couldn’t stop laughing.  Another night I stayed up till 4am talking about life, the universe, and everything with a new Dutch friend.  (On another note, this week did not feature much sleep, as seems to be my life these days).

And that’s not even touching on all the cool things I learned about the Dutch.  I really love the country.  It’s on the short list of potential countries I would consider for my postdoc, so I came with a particularly critical eye.  I do think I would have some troubles adjusting to the chilly temps, but everything else I just LOVED, from the active culture to the water everywhere to the handsome men towering tall into the sky.  AHEM.

I have a feeling this is not my last brush with the Netherlands.

 

 

How not to road trip to Italy

This whole blog thing is a little strange for me- sometimes I go whole months without even remembering I have one, and then sometimes while something is happening to me I think I HAVE to write a blog post about this.  Last week’s Italian road trip definitely fell into that category.  Even though I’ve been living abroad now for almost 2 years, there are still moments when I am totally staggered by how strange a certain moment is, and how odd it is in the context of human history that I am standing in this random spot on the globe, thousands of miles of ocean and land from the spot where I was born, a situation that before the past century or so only happened to the conquistadors and Marco Polo, or something.  This whole epic road trip made enough of an impression that I am still sitting here laughing about it on the train home from Venice, all of a week later.

Philosophy aside, let me set the scene.

the views from smalltown, Italy

SCENE: The society that my supervisor is head of has an annual meeting that this year will be held in the member hospital in a tiny town in northern Italy.  It is so tiny that I do not want to mention the name in case the hosts google their own town and this comes up.  My supervisor, like many Europeans, is very ecofriendly and decides that the best option for the 4 of us coming from Zürich is to carpool, and he offers to drive us all down.  I am intrigued by the idea of 6 hours (so I thought) in the car with 3 colleagues and agree.

CAST (pseudonyms of course):

Rolf: Swiss version of the absent-minded professor.  Prone to opinionated outbursts and dreamy ideas.  Mysterious ability to cause any form of electronic to malfunction on approach.  And I know this is a German German name and not a Swiss German name, but I couldn’t think of any Swiss names off the top of my head.

Katya: German doctor researcher.

Sarah: Very serious Swiss doctor researcher.

Verona Castle

ACTION:

The drama begins before we even start as we wake up to a blizzard in Zürich.  In almost May.  This is significant because to cross into Italy from Switzerland you must pass over the Alps, and in snow this can become impossible.  Dun dun.  We decide to set out earlier than expected to avoid iciness, around 2pm, and hope that the passes are not snowed in.  This actually turns out to be the only thing that goes right about the day, as we sail into the Alps in picture postcard weather, tasty confisierie gifts from Sprüngli balanced on our laps.  This is great, I think.

Rolf is an incredible tour guide, pointing out all sorts of valleys with peculiar Swiss history and proposing stops at amazing hidden sites like an old Roman style church from the 12^th century.  And of course we stop in the beautiful town of Lugano in the Italian lakes region (ya know, Lake Como and all those George Clooney type places) for an espresso with a view of Lake Lugano.  This is all very fun, but I am noticing that the time is getting later and the skies are getting darker.  I decide not to mention anything, as I am the most junior member of the party and also these directions conversations are taking place in German, and I get a bit timid about speaking German in front of my supervisor.  I prefer him to think of me as a genius at all times.  My nefarious plan is to wait until I am completely fluent in German and then trot it out at an after work apero, effortlessly dropping witty bon mots in Swiss German.

These are the things I fantasize about when I have too much time in a car.

Wandering through old Roman arches in the springtime

After we cross the border into Italy, several things become clear.  First, there is no navigation system in the car.  Second, there are no maps in the car.  Third, the only other person with a functioning smartphone is hopelessly confused.  Fourth, it is dark and we are increasingly far away from Milan or any sort of large city with shops that might be open.  Fifth, street signage in Italy is not what it is in Switzerland. Sixth, I did not download travel data before leaving and my phone is useless for anything but very expensive calls.  Seventh, none of us speak Italian and none of the people we are encountering speak anything but.  This is the first time I call my hotel, in what was an attempt to let them know I’d be very late, but turned instead into a game of verbal charades as I realized that we didn’t have any languages in common, either.

After doing circles in the general vicinity of Verona for some time, a local makes a valiant attempt to give us directions in slow, clear Italian.  We at least know the words for left and right, so attempt to follow them in what turns out to be clearly the wrong direction, as we are spat out onto a superhighway back to Milan.  We get off at the next exit, turn around, and miracle of miracles finally spot the tiniest of tiny signposts with the name of the town that we are searching for!  Much joy ensues, and the next 45 minutes are spent in a treasure hunt for a series of these tiny signs, with much ducking under of bridges and circling of roundabouts.

We finally pull into our destination close to midnight (so just 4 hours later than planned), where with the aid of two other coworkers who had spent several hours lost trying to find the hotel earlier that day, we pull into the agriturismo where my coworkers are staying.  No one knows where my hotel is (the one they are staying in was booked out by the time I got to it), and everyone is too exhausted to continue the search.

One of my coworkers offered very kindly to share her bed with me, and we all retreated indoors to our separate rooms.  However, I was not best pleased.  Sharing a bed is fine on vacation, but on a business trip?!  I had not one, but two presentations the next day, and wanted to do things like wake up early and work out, practice my talks loudly in my underwear, and prepare myself to socialize with important Europeans 30+ years older than me for the next couple days.  In a final, desperate attempt, I call my hotel again and restart the verbal charades.  Eventually, I was able to make him understand where I was, and he said he would come pick me up outside the agriturismo “een five minute.”  This is where my previous post from last week begins.

Fifteen minutes later, I am still waiting for said man and realize that maybe this was not my best laid plan.  I’m waiting alone, in the dark, in the middle of what I’m guessing are vineyards (this turned out to be true in the morning, and quite beautiful may I add!), with a massive, very friendly stray cat I had managed to pick up in my adventures, locked out of the agriturismo where all my coworkers were by now probably sleeping, and I couldn’t remember how much credit I had left on my phone to call any of them if this guy didn’t turn up after all.

Roman Verona amphitheater, where they still stage operas!

Long story short, the guy eventually turned up and I certainly made his evening.  “An American!” he said disbelievingly.  “What you do here?”

I don’t know, my friend, I don’t know.

Apparently it made enough of an impression that some of the Spaniards whom I met later at the conference exclaimed, “oh, it’s the American!  You must be in our hotel” on introducing myself.  Turns out my hotel friend of the midnight hour told them all the story of the American he tracked down in a vineyard when they checked in.

Sighing under the Bridge of Sighs, Venice

My favorite part of this whole debacle is that for some reason my refusal to accept no for an answer and give up on my hotel seems to have impressed my supervisor way more than any of my actual work, based on the frequency of him bringing it up at cocktail hour in the days afterward.  “I see now how clever you really are,” are I believe the exact words he used, which is the most effusive compliment I’ve received yet.  I’ll take it!  Call me the Marco Polo of the 21^st century.

The conference itself went quite well- I gave three presentations over the three days that were well received and generated some interesting discussion.  More importantly, we ate DELICIOUS food and drank DELICIOUS wine, including fresh truffles as our visit was lucky enough to coincide with the start of truffle season!  And then topped it all off with further adventures through northern Italy, but that is definitely a story for another day.

Happy travels, my friends, and remember- make sure there is a GPS involved.

The Joys of the Revisit

Slapping myself in the face with my hair in Piazza Navona

This past weekend I returned from Rome, the eternal city.  It fit with a theme of my past few trips- I actually haven’t visited a new country for a while, now that I think about it!  But recently I’m loving plotting returns to places I’ve been before.  Just don’t tell my travel-greedy 21 year old self, please.

this Colosseum shot is stolen from Max and his supernice camera, apologies for mild duckface

Part of it is just the freedom to delve deep into whatever aspect of the city took your fancy the first time.  The first time you go to a city, you have to hit up the big tourist destinations and check off the same itinerary as every other person with a Lonely Planet in tow.  And of course!  If you go to Rome and miss the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and St. Peter’s, you’re kinda a dummy.

I made him smile like that, it’s true

BUT on the second visit, you don’t have to do any of those things.  So what did I want to focus on during my second visit???  Hints below:

Delicious delicious burrata with sundried tomatoes at Roscioli

For whatever reason, I don’t really remember having great Italian food in Rome the first go-around, although I definitely did elsewhere in Italy.  The tourist trap restaurants along the main drags abound in lukewarm microwave pizza.  I just knew there were some delicious meals awaiting me, though, so this time I decided to do a little research beforehand.  That research paid off in one of the most amazing food weekends of my life.

this was our view as we strolled home to our nice airBnB each night

By FAR my best research find was this app by a local food blogger: Katie Parla’s Rome.  So nifty.  She created a curated list of her favorite authentic places for delicious food in Rome, and they’re all on a handy little map that you can use offline.  Great for spontaneous food finding when trudging through the Vatican museums, simply perishing for a good slice.

we also trudged up to the top of St. Peter’s dome.  We earned that pizza!  PS did you know that obelisk came from Egypt and prior to the whole church thing was the center for a racing track for gladiators?  It’s seen a whole lotta things.

Speaking of, that good slice that we found was probably the BEST SLICE of pizza I’ve had in my whole life, although “slab where you tell them how much you want” seems to be the more common way to go in Rome.  It was so good that we went for one round, and then went back for more, prompting some amused eyebrow raising from the man behind the counter.  Check out Pizzarium for heaven on a plate.  They also have some pretty sweet boxed wine for 1 euro.

First round, except I already ate one piece (eeeek)

Second round, pizza with suppli, fried noodle mozzarella balls

Also on the most incredible list: the cappuccino we had in another place she steered us to…the name now escapes me.  I’ve had my share of cappuccinos in my life, but this one rocketed up to number 1 immediately, no joke.  You typically pay for the drink first and then take the receipt up to the barista and drink your coffee standing up in these Italian morning joints.  Max and I embarrassed ourselves by taking about 1,000 photos of the creamy delightfulness that was this cappuccino.  They add a quick shot of dark chocolate to the bottom for extra richness.

We’re not standing, and we’re taking photos.  Also Max’s hair is wet #localblendinfail

But for me the big kahuna of meals was at the incredible Roscioli.  I didn’t realize this until afterwards, but Rome is really a reservation town.  We just happened to stumble in here at lunchtime and get a seat, but I highly recommend going out of your way to eat here.  The carbonara, the home baked bread, the Cacio e Pepe, the ricotta starter, the biscotti to finish….yeah.  I’ve been thinking of that meal a lot.

admiring the cheese selection

see that happy face?

And that last photo brings me to another aspect of traveling that I love.  Re-experiencing places you’ve been with awesome people.  Especially awesome little brothers that haven’t traveled outside the US before.  (“Wait, that’s a plug??  That’s what they look like here??”)

deep thoughts with Julius Caesar

He sure is one cool kid, even if he does need a haircut.

To many more return visits.

P.S. Can I use your photos in this post, Max??  😀

A Lycian Wander

We stared at the view of the endless blue Mediterranean over our plates of olives, tomatoes, and feta, the sun already beating a relentless march at our backs. I was on my second cup of coffee. Why couldn’t I plan a relaxing vacation for once, one where I sleep till noon and lie about on the beach with a book?

 

I suppose some people can complain about anything, even alarm clocks on vacation

Twenty minutes after these ponderings we were all sleepily piled into the rental car and speeding around the curves that wound over the cliffs, watching the waves lap the coastline below.

https://instagram.com/p/8D-xzeirtQ/?taken-by=mfish_24

 

“See that island? That belongs to Greece.” Said island was maybe 2 miles off shore, looking no different than the islands around it. It was apparently a relic of the pre-WWII era, populated with Greek retirees, younger generations long since fled elsewhere. So intriguing, an island lost outside time.

boats on boats

We arrived in the tiny, dusty fishing town of Üçağız about an hour after setting out from Kas. The sky was cloudless and the water in the harbor completely clear and and placid. The boats were lined side to side in an impossible jumble that seemed impossible in numbers to relate to the handful of buildings dotting the shoreline. Later we would be told that there were indeed more boats than houses in this unique village.

I have no pictures of the town, but here is a photo of where we ate another day.  We did a lot of eating.

Suddenly a flurry of activity seemed to surround us. Our Turkish friend and guide had spent years coming back to this stretch of coastline, and it was clear that she was well beloved. There had been a tragedy the night before, I gathered, a death in the family, and a stream of heartfelt Turkish condolences and long hugs followed.

https://instagram.com/p/8JiCMeCrv-/?taken-by=mfish_24

 

We were sheparded up to a terrace at the top of the hotel that was part of the family business. As always in Turkey, food, tea, and leisurely conversation followed as we watched the boats bob on gentle Mediterranean swells and admired the ancient Lycian ruins dotting the hillsides around the town. After I made the mistake of praising their garden, a dozen apples from their garden mysteriously appeared on the table, along with a beautiful fresh pomegranate that was so ripe it was splitting open.

https://instagram.com/p/8GiKmQirjP/?taken-by=mfish_24

 

As was the general theme of the trip, mysterious exchanges and negotiations in Turkish took place for a longish period of time, at the end of which we were ushered onto our very own chartered boat. What followed was the most incredible daylong tour of the Turquoise Coast, as the tourism agents have dubbed it.

A man, a dog, a sea

It was just the four of us, the boat captain, and the endless blue water.  And a few other boats that had the same idea, but all in all I felt alone on one of the most beautiful expanses of ocean I’d ever seen.  We stopped in a few places to snorkel and admire sea caves.

https://instagram.com/p/8LykueCrqj/?taken-by=mfish_24

 

Luckily we had this dashing fellow to keep us on course

At midday we put down anchor and were cooked up yet another sumptuous Turkish feast.  The food in Turkey is incredible and wonderfully diverse!  A typical meal starts with several mezzes, or smaller dishes, which usually involves some wonderful vegetables and delicious cheese, and then moves onto a main course that usually involved fresh fish in this part of the world.

https://instagram.com/p/8Ob0QYCrjw/?taken-by=mfish_24

 

The really incredible thing about this part of the world is that are seemingly endless ancient ruins- cities, even!- lying unmolested and free to visit, with the march of civilization continuing around them.  It was hard to believe we could just sail or snorkel right up to them, without a museum guard kicking us out or an alarm setting off.

https://instagram.com/p/8JfKNairqG/?taken-by=mfish_24

 

Our final stop of the day was at the most special of these, a tiny bay tucked away in a beautifully preserved little outpost, seemingly a trading post, but there were no touristy placards to guide the way.  The day was on the wane, and I thought twice before jumping into the water in the gathering dusk, but the broken Roman arches were too beguiling and atmospheric.  I couldn’t pass up a chance to wander ancient ruins at the sunset hour, wondering at old fire pits and imagining the long past lives of those who spent their days here.

source: hikeast.com.  My handy iphone did not go swimming with me.

A photo from the boat, some of the ruins in the gathering dusk

Ancient Roman arch entering the city/trading post

I flopped ashore and poked around the remnants of ancient lives barefoot and in my bathing suit, alone with the whistle of the wind in the tiny inlet.  I think the right word to use for the atmosphere is haunting.

Truthfully, when I spontaneously booked this trip to Turkey, I had no idea that sunken cities, such generous and giving people, delicious food, and incredible views galore would be awaiting, and I am so grateful to have been invited on this special adventure. This day was just one of many, but this post is quite long enough now, I believe.

And I am so glad that none of my vacations turn out to be relaxing.

 

(Below: a few bonus shots from other days of the trip)

Weekend Trip: Appenzell

Whew, what a whirlwind of a month.  So many exciting things!  I am freshly returned from my first Oktoberfest experience, am looking forward to various other travels incoming, and am feeling half dead, but I have wanted for a while to write up one of the loveliest weekends I’ve had yet in Switzerland.  So I’m just gonna do that, sleep be cursed.

I think I’ve mentioned this a few times, but Switzerland is a patchwork of different cantons with their own very special personalities.  Appenzell in the east of Switzerland is an especially special case.

Just a couple hours from Zürich, a whole different Appenzeller world

It is pretty old school Swiss in a very cool way- it is famous for the fact that voting takes place in open air assembly where all voting citizens are required to congregate in the central square of their local town and vote by yelling “ay” or “nay.”  (I think it’s actually some form of hand raising, not entirely clear on that point.)  Other fun factoids include the fact that women only got the right to vote in the 1990s (and only because the national government stepped in), and all the locals seem to be teeny tiny.

Appenzellers voting

One of my very good friends here in Zürich is an Appenzeller, and would always send me tantalizing pictures of her weekend trail runs in the mountains.  When she invited me on a guided tour of the region, complete with hike, hut stop, and dinner with her parents, I could not say yes fast enough.

So a couple Sundays ago several friends and I hopped out of bed in the early AM and headed to Wasserauen in the heart of the Appenzell, a two hour train ride from Zürich.  It was the most beautiful and perfect of days, the kind of day you dream about in the depths of February.  After a morning coffee in the train station, we got hiking!

Beautiful Appenzell

The hike Sarah took us on is one of the most iconic in Switzerland, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a combination of beautiful scenery with cultural history.  We started out with a gentle uphill to a sweeping lake view forever iconicized by the popular Appenzeller beer Quöllfrisch:

https://instagram.com/p/7FCSbWiruB/?taken-by=mfish_24

I’ve done quite a variety of Swiss hikes by now, and on a sunny warm summer Sunday, this hike is the outdoorsy equivalent of a stroll down Fifth Avenue.  You are not gonna be solo communing with the wood spirits.  But actually, I think this is part of what makes it such an awesome cultural experience.  We saw a million Swiss families on their weekly wandern, some alphorn players jamming together, befriended some cows, and bought several enormous wheels of fresh Swiss Alp cheese.

Making new trail buddies

We stopped for a picnic lunch in front of the famous view, and then the braver among us went for a swim.  Let me tell you, that mountain water temperature is not for the weak of heart or the slow of circulation.

After our trip to the north pole, we resumed hiking.  It was steeper now and the day was hot, but we had a reward awaiting us: saft in one of the most famous huts in Switzerland!

https://instagram.com/p/7BQyP1CrgY/?taken-by=mfish_24

I had been informed that saft was less alcoholic than beer (it is a bit like hard cider), but I think after a big mug of it I beg to disagree.  Maybe it was the heat or the exertion, but our saft fueled discussion and subsequent hiking was definitely a bit more…spirited.

Anyway, there are a series of caves behind the Aescher hut, with a long and storied history written in German that has now evaporated in a haze of saft impeded memory. Ah well, I shall have to return!  After that we returned to the valley by another delightful Swiss cablecar ride, but not before watching a veritable flock of paragliders taking off.

https://instagram.com/p/7TTygTCrli/?taken-by=mfish_24

Sarah continued her tour of Appenzell with a quick swoop through the town, and then it was on to her parents’ house, where we were TOTALLY UNPREPARED for the incredible feast that her parents had prepared for us.  They have a beautiful mountain view home, and we sat around the table to be served heaping plates of three different types of meat, vegetables, salad, homemade falafel, and a million other things I am forgetting from this far remove.  All from their own garden, and the meat from their son’s farm!  It was truly an incredible meal, one for the ages.

Complete with hollowed out pumpkin serving dish

I finished the weekend contemplating the fact that the mountains are nice and all, but really it’s the people you spend time in them with that make it the most wonderful.  I am so so lucky to have met the people I have since moving to Switzerland!

Haute Route: the Logistics

I’m sure everything is sick of me nattering on for so long about this trip, but I accomplished a lot of the planning through hunting through the blogs of others, and feel obliged to give back a little.  So this post will be a straight up if you wanna do it, here’s how.  Smattered in are a random selection of photos from the trip, basically from only the first half of the trip.  I’m thinking of doing a photo only post soon 🙂

Why should I do this hike?  

The views are straight up consistently the best I’ve seen in a whole lot of hiking experience in both the USA and Switzerland, and it seems like there is a consensus that this is one of the most beautiful hikes in the world (Lonely Planet Top Ten Treks in the World).  It has a little bit of everything: glaciers, mountain climbs, woodsy paths, (some) valley walks through quaint towns that haven’t changed in centuries, ladders straight up rock faces, ibix, cows, chamois, marmots, colorful locals, rock climbing, tons of items of geological interest.  It is 13-14 days depending on whether you do the full Europaweg at the end (there are some options for shortening, but I would advise not missing too much, as I loved the experience of really walking all of it).  It starts and ends in two of the most iconic mountaineering towns in the world, and I love love the atmosphere of both places.  I have gotten into a lot of reading about famous mountaineers and climbs and got such a kick out of seeing Chamonix and revisiting Zermatt again, one of my favorite places in this whole world.  I went to the museum there this time and got such a kick out of it!

Start Point: Chamonix

It is also appealing in that it offers the intense “trekking” experience, but minimizes the amount of planning needed, since you go through a town (perhaps better defined as “a cluster of houses that also offers food for sale”) at least every few days.  This means that you don’t need to take kilos and kilos of food on your back.  You can also avoid taking tents and sleeping bags, significantly cutting down on weight on your back.  We did not do this, but probably should have.  Which brings us to…

Straddling the border of France and Switzerland on day 2

Where do you sleep?  

getting comfy in a mountain hut

As an American, I automatically associate backpacking with tent camping, and that is how all of my previous backpacking trips have gone.  However, the thing in Europe is hut hiking.  Most nights we either ended up in a tiny mountain town or in an isolated mountain cabane.  Some of these cabanes were incredible and a destination in themselves (Mont Fort, Moiry), some were literally a place to sleep (Prafleuri).  Almost all of them involved a whole lot of people sleeping in one room.  It gets warm.  Bring ear plugs.  Overall I really enjoyed the experience, and slept quite well, the odd snorer aside.

Straight up the pass!

We camped several times in the towns and saved ourselves a fair amount of money doing so, in Zermatt especially.  It is unclear whether wild camping is actually legal in Switzerland (like so many things, it “varies from canton to canton”), and I don’t think we had the appropriate cold weather gear to camp at altitude.  Almost everything was very exposed and rocky higher up.  Honestly we did a great deal less camping than expected and it would have been easier on our backs to leave the full tent and sleeping bag behind, and just bring a liner for the hut beds.  However, I loved our camping nights, so there’s that.

An advantage of less wild camping is that most everywhere we stayed, including campsites, had a nice shower.  The Swiss appear to take their showering very seriously, even though I consider it a requisite to be a little dirty during a trek.

get used to snow in yer boots

Did you book these places ahead of time?

For the most part.  I would recommend booking the isolated cabanes ahead, as they can fill up quickly, especially on weekends.  I was told on the trail that they basically won’t turn you away in the evening at these isolated places, as that is simply dangerous, but then the option would be sleeping on the floor, which is not super appealing after a long day of hiking.  I planned somewhat haphazardly other than that and there were a few nights we decided to just march into town and ask some locals and/or the tourist bureau where we should stay.  Or, ahem, I had booked a hotel in the wrong country and we had to nose around to find a replacement.  It worked like a charm, but I felt much more comfortable with it once we entered the Swiss German area where I could converse a bit more.  We stayed in such a lovely woman’s home our second to last night there- much nicer than almost anywhere else we had stayed, and she was so kind (but only spoke German, I believe).

taking a break in town

How expensive are these huts?

Well, this is Switzerland.  Do not automatically think that because this is a trekking trip, it will be cheap.  Our housing averaged between 30-45 francs a night per person, which is really quite reasonable, but adds up over 14 days.  The huts offer something called “half board,” which means they feed you dinner and breakfast the next morning (you don’t get any choice on food, by the way- it’s whatever’s cookin in the kitchen that night).  You usually have to book this ahead of time so they can transport enough food up the mountain, although one place we showed up without booking and they automatically had added us to the half board list because there was literally no place else to eat in “town.”  Whoops.  Half board usually adds another 40 francs.  So if you do that every night, which most hikers did, it would be around 980 francs for the two weeks, plus the cost of food during your hiking day (probably 10-15 francs per person for a sandwich and apple from the hut).  Note that this is a standard cost of eating in Switzerland.  You will not get cheaper food at a restaurant, if it is available, and probably not even at the grocery store if you want to buy meat.

baguette=life

Did Roxana and I do this?  Bahahaha.  If you know us at all, you know we are cheap (and I am a poor PhD student), and we looked for ways to lessen the costs wherever possible.  We loaded up on food at the grocery stores, and ate a constantly repeating cycle of baguette, cheese, cured meats, fruit, peanut butter, chocolate, digestive cookies, and nuts.   Oh, and weird things like tuna in tubes.  We splurged on half board I think three times, and treated ourselves to restaurant meals I think two times more on the trek (including one burger+fries that I still think about sometimes).  Very roughly after some quick math, I think we spent 585CHF each on lodging and half board for the two weeks (maybe less, I rounded up), and maybe an additional couple hundred francs on meals, snacks, Rivella, and beer.  Since I live in Switzerland and this is kind of the cost of living here, it didn’t feel so bad, but perhaps Roxana feels differently.

Of course, you can also stay in nicer places and spend way more than this.  The sky is the limit.  There is also the cost of the train ride to get there and back, and of course the flight if you are coming to Europe.

heaven

How difficult is the hike?

This is going to vary completely based on your individual fitness, and, perhaps more importantly, stubbornness and pain tolerance.  I’m kind of a newb on treks, but have done the 4 day Inca trail trek, a 4 day backwoods backpacking trip in Colorado, and many many more tough day trips and overnight trips all over the Alps and the western US.  Each individual day hike on the Haute Route was tough but doable as a reasonably fit person.  The X factor for me was how my body would react over days and days of this in a row.  For me at least, there were definitely a few days I went to bed completely exhausted and dubious about continuing the next day, but woke in the morning again ready to go.  Roxana and I both got some pretty killer colds, which I think also made it more challenging than it needed to be.  We encountered people unprepared for this who gave up, so this is definitely something to think over before signing up.  Your experience will be SO.MUCH.BETTER if you take the time to do a little training, either by stair climbing or actual uphill hiking if you can.  Just be mentally prepared for at least 6-8 hours of strenuous physical activity in a day (we had a couple days of up to 11 hour hikes…) and lots of blisters.

werkin

For what it’s worth, one of our trail friends has lived in Nepal among other places, and has done treks all over the world, including multi-month treks through high altitude.  He said the Haute Route is about as tough as it gets.  He recommended the Tour de Mount Blanc, another popular Alpine trek, as an easier intro to Alpine trekking.  It’s also slightly shorter, so maybe more appealing to those with limited vacation time.  The first four days or so went over the same path, so I can vouch it is pretty gorgeous as well (he still gives the Haute Route the edge for better views).

One of the things that makes an Alps trek easier, though, is that your pack is relatively light compared to most of the other trekking trips I’ve done.  If your pack for this type of trip is more than 20-25 lbs, you are doing it wrong and will regret it dearly.

So what should I pack for a trip like this?

As little as possible.  No, seriously.  For 14 days I packed:

• 1 dri-fit t shirts and 1 dri-fit tank top
• a pair of dri-fit running spandex and a pair of shorts
• 1 long sleeve dri-fit t shirt to throw on top on mountain passes
• a heavy duty fleece
• 1 clean shirt and 1 pair of yoga pants to sleep in
• 7 pairs of underwear
• 2 pairs hiking socks (get good ones!)
• a cap for shade (SO IMPORTANT)
• sunscreen
• travel size sport detergent (we washed stuff in sinks every few days)
• quick dry packable towel (Towel)
• camelbak or other lightweight water bladder
• hiking boots (duh)
• flip flops to change into during the evening
• headlamp
• handy dandy guidebook (click here for book)
• MINIMAL toiletries (travel size shampoo, deodorant, tiny folding hairbrush)
• I brought a kindle but Roxana said she wouldn’t bring again
• sleeping bag or sleeping bag liner
• a poncho
• Swiss army knife
• tent (optional)

So basically I had only 2 outfits and then a clean outfit to wear at night.  This ended up working out really well.  Roxana had more heavy duty rain gear but we really lucked out with weather- I don’t know whether it’s worth the weight or not because I’ve had the good fortune to never get caught out.  Remember food will need to fit in there as well.

OK, you’ve convinced me.  What should I do next?

You gotta get the guide book that everyone uses (link above in packing list).  It’s not ideal.  In fact, I have some words for you Kev, if you ever read this.  Particularly about that final day walk into Zermatt.  It’s like you just gave up!  And what do you have against downhill skiing?  However, one of our trail friends told us he gave our feedback to Kev and it will be included in the next edition of the book.  So look out for Andrea and Rox in the acknowledgments 😀

Next, book your flights.  It’s probably best to fly in and out of Geneva, although Zurich works too.  The season really starts in mid July and goes until end of September, when enough snow has melted to make the passes crossable, but this can be unpredictable.  Check conditions before you go.

Whew, what a handful of a post.  I hope someone finds this useful.  Below I’ve included a link to my handy dandy spreadsheet for help in booking huts and sussing out the toughest days (highlighted in red).

HAPPY HIKING!!

HauteRoute

Mission: Scandinavia

Adventures ahoy!  This past week marked my second foray into the Great White North of Europe: Scandinavia.  (Potentially third if you count Iceland.  Does Iceland count??)  Where the hair is blond, the snowmobiles fast, and the sweaters woolly.

The road there was a bit bumpy, however.  I believe I’ve mentioned before that expat life involves a good deal more paperwork than I would like, and the long and the short of it is that I bungled picking up my new visa in a timely manner due to too closely adjoining vacations.  I ended up at immigrations the morning of my flight, begging for a temporary return visa, being denied due to not enough blank pages in my passport, and being “strongly advised” by a stern Swiss German woman not to get on my flight.

I got on my flight, deportations be damned!!  Luckily Miguel was able to overnight me my visa to my friend’s house in Sweden the day I left, saving the vacation and enabling me to write this blog post from my comfy bed in Switzerland and not an immigrations holding cell.  Thanks, Miguel!!

Here’s how happy I was to arrive in Bergen to a glass of wine, courtesy of Alex

Needless to say, I needed a big glass of wine when I arrived in Bergen, Norway.  Luckily we all had the same idea, and all showed up with bottles of wine courtesy of duty-free.

Arrived at the port of Bergen after a bus ride from the airport. Ready to start harassing locals for directions.

But first I had to find the place.  I have to say, this might win the prize for my most unprepared vacation ever.  In contrast to the spreadsheet planning for the Haute Route hike, I showed up in Bergen without even knowing where our airbnb was located or how to get into town.  After wandering a bit based on the screenshot that my friend Alex had sent out, I launched myself starfish style in front of a Norwegian jogger to ask for directions.  To her credit, she stopped and gave me excellent directions, telling me she had a friend who lived on this street.  Thumbs up for friendly locals.

Bergen from the water

Intriguing street art abounded

We awoke the next day with one thing on the brain: FJORDS.  Bergen is basically an old fishing town that is hipster around the edges, with surprisingly cool street art and trendy boutiques.  But the main reason to come here in my view is as a jumping off point for fjords.  Most tourists seem to do this Norway in a Nutshell thing that shows the highlights of the local fjords, but we opted for a cheaper route and did a more local boat.  It was gorgeous, but if I had a do-over on the trip I would probably have opted for a faster boat that saw more things.

boat babes

fjording on

After a couple more days featuring nice hikes up the local mountains, much discussion of the difference between funicular and cable car, the acquisition of Norwegian sweaters, and whale steak, we boarded a 7 hour sightseeing train for Oslo, which was just stunning.  No photos, though, because I have a no photos on the train policy.

whale steak #whalesteak

group photo above Bergen, courtesy of Alex

I went to Norway and ruined all my friends’ pictures with weird poses, photo courtesy of Melissa

OK, fine, one train photo

Oslo was super fun and definitely NOT a fishing village.  I had a great time drinking cocktails and eating trendy fusion food and doing all those things I can’t afford to do in Switzerland.  The art museum there has a killer collection of Munch, so we indulged our dark artsy side there for a while, then checked out the gorgeous opera house and the Viking Museum.  It was somewhere around this time that I discovered my superpower of the trip: all I had to do was inquire out loud about some touristy question I had and someone would helpfully chime in to answer me.  It was really convenient.  I also continued on my one woman tour of Scandinavian seafood.

Oslo rocking our socks

This kind of sums up the trip. I ate a whole bucket of these buggers. Photo courtesy of Alex.

Practicing our euro photo glare, photo courtesy of Alex

I was also helpfully informed by Alex and Melissa that I have acquired a lot of weird and uninterpretable noises in my year abroad.

The Viking Museum, that’s a real 2000 year old Viking ship in the background! Photo courtesy of Alex.

My favorite photo of the trip! Atop the Oslo Opera House with my ladies.

We ended the night jamming to an awesome band that had a seemingly infinite number of bandmates, musical instruments, and genres.  Oslo was an awesome city that I would be very interested in staging a return to.  We left so much still to do!

Gorgeous Oslo sculpture park on a gorgeous day. Gorgeous.

Finally it was onward to Gothenburg, Sweden, my friend Alex’s ancestral and current home while she does her PhD.  I had visited her in northern Sweden this past winter to see the Northern Lights and hop around the Arctic Circle in wintertime, and was eager to see how more urban and warm southern Sweden compared.  I truly loved her town!  Gothenburg is trendy and boutique-y and full of delicious (and cheap!) food, and I did some damage in a couple local stores.  There’s an edge to Scandinavia that is different from the rest of Europe to me.  It seems there is a bit of a rivalry between Gothenburg and Stockholm, the two largest Swedish cities, and Gothenburg is the more laidback of the two.  Just my style.

Welcome to Gothenburg!

Visiting the archipelago from Gothenburg via Ferry, photo courtesy of someone not me

Of course, I was told that we were unusually lucky with the weather, and normally all of the places we visited are normally a bit rainy and gray.  But the view we got was practically idyllic.

Strawberry drinks in the sun, photo courtesy of Alex

Lunch stop at a lovely veggie restaurant, photo courtesy of Alex

can’t stop won’t stop with that seafood

All in all a wonderful, relaxing vacation with good food, good wine, and best of all, good friends.

a day in the life of a haute route hiker (r&m style)

5:58AM: Crack open one eye to see the rest of the hikers already exiting the hut.  Hit snooze button.

6:15AM: Hit snooze again.

6:36AM: Finally roll out of sleeping bag and use smell test to determine most clean clothing options from pack.

6:58AM: Finish packing up our stuff into our packs of doom.  Enter breakfast room where hut proprietor is shocked that we are still dallying around.  Scrounge up bread and coffee scraps.  Refill water bottles from “non-potable” water spigot (no giardia in Europe, I don’t buy into such gimmicks).

7:15AM: Tape together feet with Moleskin.

7:30AM: On the trail.  Hot damn, this trail goes straight up!

8AM: Took a wrong turn.  Curse out Kev Reynolds, the writer of our guidebook.  Briefly ponder throwing book in river.  Decide instead to backtrack.

9AM: Well, that was an hour of straight stair climbing.

10AM: Whoops, another hour of straight stair climbing.  The backsweat situation under my pack is getting dire.  Also, I am STARVING.  Lunch break number 1!  Chocolate, salami, cheese, and baguette.  I chop it up with my Swiss Army Knife and feel extra badass.

10:30AM: Is that a pain in my hamstring?  Am I losing sensation in my toes?  Need to google on next lunch break (note: not a good idea).

11AM: Top of first pass of the day!  Jump around and force other hikers to take photos of us.  Then remember it is freezing and my lips are turning blue.  Time to keep going.

11:15AM: Ooh, we get to slide down a snow patch!

11:45AM: SKDJFLDKLHJ, when will this snow end??

12:16PM: Ooh, wild animals!  Time to take photos, videos, and selfies!

12:37PM: I appear to have used up all the storage capacity on my phone and we are only halfway through the day.  Oops.

1:02PM: Time to rock climb!  We pull ourselves up and down rocks like enormous turtles.

1:34PM: Woof, this got steep again.  Also, I’m starving.

1:47PM: WE HAVE TO CROSS THIS RAGING GLACIER STREAM??  It’s a bit scary, so I’m just gonna forge on through, unlike our hiking friends who decided to strip down to their undies and tiptoe across barefoot.

1:54PM: coldcoldcoldcoldwetwetwetwet

2:49PM: Second pass of the day achieved!  Time for second lunch, which is whatever is left from first lunch and definitely involves baguette.

3:02PM: Holy crap, look at that glacier!  Time for more panoramas.  I feel totally in touch with nature, the universe, and everything.

4:16PM: This downhill is lasting a long time.  My knees kind of feel like someone has been using them for a trampoline.

4:47PM: Deep thoughts about crickets.  I wonder what crickets eat?  If humans could jump like crickets, I could just hop to the top of this mountain!

5:03PM: Should we camp tonight at altitude, or stay in the warm mountain hut and splurge on a hot meal? *eye baguette scraps and half-gnawed salami*

5:04PM: Definitely mountain hut tonight.

5:29PM: Uh oh, we’re definitely going to miss dinner again, aren’t we.

5:47PM: Have forded sixth river of day.  Officially conquered my fear of river crossings.

6:02PM: Seriously now, I didn’t know my feet could feel this way.  Also, I think my pack has gained weight during the day.

6:33PM: Are you serious??  The hut is on top of this mini-mountain??

6:48PM: We have definitely missed dinner.  How good are our sweet talking in French skills?

7:06PM: Averagely good, as it turns out.  We are eyed pityingly by more timely hikers as we hopefully await what remains in the kitchen.  It turns out to be potatoes and some sort of meat and olives concoction.  It tastes like the nectar of the gods in our current condition.

7:56PM: Attempt to wash some of most sweaty and grungy clothes in the bathroom sink covertly using travel detergent.  Debate spending 4 francs on a shower, and then settle for using sink water to rinse ourselves off.  Another hiker pityingly gives us a shower token, and we reach glorious cleanliness in 2.5 minutes of freedom each.

8:18PM: Sit outside watching the mountains and gossiping with and about the other hikers.  Avoid boots and poles room at all costs.  The smell there is not to be described.  Read about route for next day and complain about Kev’s forgetting to put in simple directionals but leaving in long diatribes about the evils of downhill skiing.  Note with dread that he describes next day as “challenging,” which means we may be crying like little babies shortly.

9:00PM: In bed, listening to other hikers snore, despite the fact that the sun will still not go down for at least another half an hour.  Looking forward to doing it all again tomorrow 🙂