After two weeks waking up to an Alpine landscape, waking up to dirty, slush-covered Kiel this morning was a bit of a disappointment. I spent the last two weeks in the Swiss resort town of Lenzerheide, up in the Alps and a couple hours from Zurich. I was there with the Ebner family, old family friends from Palo Alto that I’ve not seen for years. Susi and Manuel, their daughters Kati (my best friend when we were both three years old and running around graduate student family housing in Stanford), Kira (the same age as my brother) and Kristin (named after me by a distraught Kati after the family moved to Switzerland), as well as Roswitha, Manuel’s mother.
I took the night train down from Kiel after a very short and snowy day at school and had to stand around the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof for an extra hour because the heavy snowfall delayed my train. Eventually, it showed up and everyone on the train was simply glad that it was finally there because it was quite cold outside. At Hannover, the train stopped again and filled up with travelers heading south for Christmas. I woke up just in time to see that we were in Basel, where I needed to transfer, so I jumped up, gathered my backpack, camera bag and presents and then no one ahead of me got off the train. And then the train left again. Apparently there are two Basel train stations and I needed to get off at the second one. From Basel, I went to Chur, through Zurich and caught my first glimpses of mountains, towering over serene lakes, everything much less snow-covered than Kiel. Oddly enough.
Susi picked me up in Chur, and we drove up to Lenzerheide. Apparently, Chur is the oldest city in Europe, though the parts I was in weren’t the old part of town. Up in Lenzerheide, we ate some lunch and then, almost first thing, started scavenging the snowboarding bits and pieces left around the house by various boyfriends, guests and family members to find a suitable amount of gear for me. I ended up with a pair of snowboard boots and a board with the bindings set backwards for me. We walked across the backyard to the mountain and Susi went to actually ski while I attempted to go down a very small hill without falling down too much, despite the backwards bindings.
The rest of the family started to trickle in, Kati and Manuel that night, Kristin the next morning, and then Manuel’s brother, Stefan, and his fiancée, his son and her daughter. We had dinner, fondue chinois, with a number of people that pushed the table to its limits and then went and opened presents. Stefan’s son, Manuel(ito), as the youngest, got to sit under the tree and pass out presents. With two “Christine/Kristin”s and two “Manuel”s, he got a little confused, but it all worked out.
The next was actually Christmas, but we’d already opened all the presents, so there was no real reason for me to wake up. But Kristin gave me a bit of a snowboard lesson, showing me how the kiddie lift works and the basics of braking and boarding. She took a couple runs on her own on the real mountain and left me to wrangle the bunny slope. In true personal fashion, I landed rather hard on my head once or twice and definitely knocked the wind out of myself once.
At this point, I sort of lost track of the days. But Stefan and family came back at some point and we went to a fondue dinner up on a mountain. This meant, of course, that we had to hike up the mountain slope to get to the restaurant. Having lived very literally at sea level for a very long time, all of a sudden hiking the Alps was not an easy transition for me, but we got up there and had a very delicious fondue dinner. After I had then accidentally ordered a much too large ice cream dessert and eaten the entire thing, we rented sleds outside of the restaurant and tobogganed back down the slope.
Growing up in a combination of California, Kansas and Missouri, my sledding experience was approximately nothing. Kristin told me the basics of steering (dragging your feet in the snow) and Susi gave me a push off, telling me to follow Manuel down the slope. Unfortunately, at one point, Manuel went right into a snowdrift, and I followed him, but neither of us wiped out. At the point of the mountain, someone was shooting off fireworks.
The next day, Kati gave me a quick snowboard lesson, helping me to graduate from the bunny slope to the big kid slope. It was very helpful to have someone telling me what I was doing wrong and how to do things better. We got back to the house, and Susi decided I was ready for an early birthday present: a private snowboard lesson the next day. That evening, Kati, Roswitha and I went to a classical music concert in a neighboring town. I had no idea what to expect, except maybe a violin or two. It was in a small little Protestant church built in the 1600s. The chamber orchestra shared the very small performance space with a very large Christmas tree to their left and a nativity scene to their right. The director was a funny old man so old he could barely sit at his electronic keyboard. He was wearing a very formal and old-fashioned coat which went to his knees, dark grey tights and black shoes with buckles. My favorite moment of the concert was very possibly when he announced that he was going to take a short break and simply walked out of the church while the cellists played a duet. Or simply watching the very expressive faces of the first violinist and first cellists, letting everyone know what they were thinking.
We came back and managed to get my worst injury of the season: I slipped and fell down the stone steps inside the house. A terrible bruise, a bit of blood and a tear in my jeans later, I just decided to go to sleep. I woke up the next morning, sore all over as usual, and we went to secure a snowboard lesson. Despite some confusion and a lot of Swiss German, I ended up with a lesson with a girl named Vivi. She was short but enthusiastic, with dreadlocks and sunglasses that matched a fresh scar on her cheek. She taught me to use the Bugellift, and heel-edge and toe-edge and turning and all of it in German. So much in German, that while I was practicing after the lesson, I was continually muttering to myself in German about snowboarding.
I continued to practice on the big kid slope for the rest of my time there, getting fairly confident at descending it without falling down. Of course, Susi had found me a helmet after I tumbled onto my head a few times and then I didn’t fall on my head anymore. I had great fun muttering to myself in German or cursing the small children who were much better than me and cutting in line at the lift.
Eventually, Kira came up for a day to celebrate Christmas with the family, and then she and Kristin headed back to Zuirch for New Year’s. So Kati and I got to accompany her parents and grandmother to a relatively fancy dinner at a friends’ place. Friends with whom the Ebners are going to build a hotel. We were served yet another traditional Swiss dish. Very focused on cheese, potatoes and meat, Swiss cuisine.
For New Year’s Eve, Kati and I took the bus to Davos, another neighboring city, apparently with the highest elevation in Europe. We were picked up by a couple of her friends and then I stopped being able to understand most of what was going on, because they were speaking Swiss German. When they switched to High German or English, I was fine, but not Swiss. But they were all nice and we played an entertaining game of musical chairs in the car, dropping off and picking up new people all the way to the mountain. At the mountain, we once again climbed the slope (this one steeper and icier than the last) to the restaurant, though this time trailing our own sleds. I thought this was a rarity but It is apparently a thing. Halfway up the slope, we were given free Gluehwein and optional torches. Climbing with a cup of Gluehwein in one hand and the sled reigns in the other, I couldn’t also carry a torch, which made me very sad.
As we walked up, Kati said something about how she imagined I was going to explain my experience. “All the Swiss do is climb mountains to eat cheese and sled down!” Well, yes. It’s a winter thing, I guess. Those Swiss. Crazy. Even better, we were far enough away from town that I could see nearly as many stars as on transit. Amazing.
At the top, we had expected fondue, but it turns out we were getting a four course meal. It was delicious, and Kati’s friends kept ordering rounds of drinks, so we were all quite happy. Just before midnight, everyone in the restaurant went outside, picked up a glass of champagne and watched the fireworks start to go off in the alpine valley below us, the flashing lights reflecting off the snow and the explosions richocheting up to us. Someone set off a set off five roman candle like fireworks about fifteen feet in front of us, down a slight hill. Roy and Ollie decided to jump into the New Year and ended up jumping off the ledge, rolling down the hell and Ollie put out a firework with his face. Somehow they emerged unharmed, though I’m not sure how. We went back inside to avoid the rush of sledders “rutsch”ing into the New Year. Germans wish a happy New Year by wishing a good “rutsch” or slide into the New Year. So, naturally, we were all going to literally slide into the New Year and sled down the mountain.
Kati was a little terrified at sledding down the slope, it was very icy and steep and very intimidating. We only had the one sled, so we were going together, and her negative attitude was making me a little nervous. Luckily, my awesome new pink hat and our celebratory drinks bolstered my confidence and we made it down the piste with minimal screaming and only falling off once. There were no lights, except for someone stopping every few hundred feet and waving a flashlight while shouting “Checkpoint!”
We headed back to Roy’s grandmother’s apartment where we were staying and Kati and I decided to go to bed. She was kind of sick and I thought I was getting sick. We stayed up talking for a bit, and then as soon as we laid down on our respective couches, people started coming home loudly. The next morning, we all started to rally around noon, watched a couple episodes of Scrubs and then bought some food and walked over to Roy’s parents’ apartment, where we breakfasted until 4, complete with champagne and a magnificent view over Davos.
Later, we raced back to the grandparents’ to pack our sled so that I could catch a bus back to Lenzerheide. Kati and her friends were going skiing/snowboarding the next day, and I was not quite up to that challenge yet. We packed the sleeping bags and mats back into the sled and I rode it part of the way to the bus, and I headed back to Lenzerheide. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a night time bus ride through the Alps on thin winding roads, but it’s quite the experience. The next day dawned extremely foggy on the slopes and I was glad that I hadn’t attempted to snowboard. Instead, I bought and wrote postcards.
My birthday a couple days later was marked by the return of Kristin to the house with a friend as well as two German friends of Susi, Nicola and Frank. I went snowboarding for several hours and then celebrated with champagne and a traditional Swiss dinner for my birthday. It was pretty low-key and there was no R2-D2 cake, but it was still a great birthday.
On the fifth, Susi, Nicola, Frank, Kristin and I went to this special sledding slope. You have to take a train up the mountain. The train actually goes up inside the mountain in several parts and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Then, the sledding slope is a good fifteen minutes. This being the third time I’d ever been on a sled, I was a little clumsy the first time, falling off on the first couple of icy curves. Luckily, Susi was babysitting my camera so that I could do silly things like try to go fast and then crash. Then, an ambulance came up the slope, seriously slowing us down. So, we decided to go up again. This is the sort of sled slope that has a speed radar to tell you how fast you’re going. I topped out at 30 km/h but Frank won with 46. The second run, I made it all the way without falling. Kristin passed me, but then her sled inexplicably spun around so she was going backwards and then spun around again, which slowed her down a bit so that I could catch up.
I left the next day, after being provided the means to make myself multiple sandwiches for my long train ride, taking several hours for my last snowboarding runs, and discovering that Kristin was going to travel with me as far as Zurich. We parted ways and I passed out on the train from Zurich to Hamburg as soon as possible. I bought some breakfast in Hamburg and made it back to Kiel to discover Christmas and birthday cards and packages in my mail, from cousins, friends, grandparents and secret santas. It was a marvelous second celebration, especially since I got wonderful pictures of upstate New York, a jar of peanut butter and a print of a polar bear in addition to lovely cards.
Of course, I actually had to go grocery shopping and do other responsible things as well, but I’ve settled back into my weird little Kiel routine. I’ve gotten both New Year’s and birthday wishes from my roommates and I think my New Year’s resolution is going to be to quit being so anxious about running into people and just be less awkward. That should make things better all around, if I can manage it.
I'll try to get some pictures up soon, but I think we all know how good I am at that sort of thing. No promises.
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