Tue, 25 Jun 1996

So Friday night I went off to Milan. Angel dropped me off in Neuchatel, and I trotted up the hill to the train station, where I happily asked for a one-way ticket to Milan Central with half-price reduction, in French, which sentence the ticket-seller comprehended perfectly. There matters degraded, since his next question, still in French, was "Are you under 19?" to which I answered "Non" (obviously enough). However, I was sufficiently surprised by the question that I didn't manage to get the proper level of conviction into my answer, causing him to decide that I didn't understand the question, and it would be better to try it in some language I spoke better. He thus asked me, in German, whether I spoke German. Since I was trying to parse this as a French utterance, I couldn't understand a word of it, and he had to try again, at which point I told him, in German, that I only spoke English and French, and he asked me my age again in English. He clearly didn't believe me when I said I was 30 (and it's true, I realized later, I'm not 30 -- I'm 31), but he couldn't figure out why I'd be lying about it, so he gave up and we finished off in French.

The train to Milan was good; it was rainy and grey, but the net effect was gorgeous. I must admit that Lake Geneva is prettier than Lake Neuchatel, and with little clouds hanging about decoratively in the mountains rising out of the lake it was breathtaking. Italy was invisible; we went into a tunnel in the twilight in Switzerland, and I didn't realize we'd come out again until we stopped at a station. Between the fact that it was really a Swiss train, and the fact that it was late at night and there were therefore no Italian trains to get in its way, it even arrived on time. (Diana likes Italy, but the fact that Italian trains have only the vaguest connection to the timetable, and that their idea of indoor plumbing, while indoor, involves no plumbing, per se, both annoy her.)

Saturday we got up and it was raining. It went through a lot of variations on the theme; a light drizzle, a serious rain, a veritable downpour, a thunderstorm or two, and walls of water falling from the sky. It apparently made the Australian news, even.

We went to the Pinacoteca Brera and looked at paintings for a while (there were, as usually, no postcards of my favorites, which were the ascension of Mary Magdalen -- she is seated on a cloud dressed in only her hair and looking somewhat licensiously amused, while cherubs tumble around rather convincingly like winged small children and below her people unconcernedly drive cows around -- and a picture of Saint Luke painting the Madonna and child. Saint Luke is in his painting studio, at his easel. So that you know it's Saint Luke, his bull is sleeping composedly at his feet, rather like a cat that wants to be close to you but has finally given up trying to get into your lap. It is to scale, so it's quite large even lying down. The Madonna and child are posing for the picture, with a backdrop behind them rather like the ones they put behind your head when you have your picture taken for your driver's license, except those are not usually held up at the top by cherubs. You can see the painting he's doing, and the cherubs are not in it.)

We then contemplated the Duomo, which is quite impressive, and considered briefly going to a major exhibit entitled "From Monet to Picasso" with things from the Moscow museum, but by then it was early afternoon and no longer pouring, and there was a line a block and a half long, so we went to the Sforzezza instead. It's a castle. Our guidebook describes the gardens behind it as a place where the fun fair and the drug dealers compete for your attention, which may be, but the fun fair wasn't up on Saturday. (The drug dealers were, including two people apparently concluding a buy behind a bush who gave every appearance of having crouched behind the bush entirely so as to look as stereotypically like two people concluding a drug deal as possible. They weren't actually what you might call behind the bush, but more beside it -- I suppose it might have been the opposite side from the one they approached the bush from, but the bush was by no means between them and the path, and we were far from the only people watching, with some interest, the loose dog bounding up to them enthusiastically (they noted, with no apparent worry, the dog and its attendant spectators, and went back to skulking in their bush).)

The Sforzezza has Milan's civic museum in it, which has some lovely stuff, and it's a neat building. However, it is a classic European museum, meaning that it doesn't really feel the need to explain anything whatsoever. We're still not clear on exactly what it is, although one of its previous owners has a coat of arms on which the dragon is actually eating a person, whose head is still sticking out of its mouth. Also it has a nice collection of feral cats.

At this point we were all getting pretty tired, and it was 4 in the afternoon, so we decided to go back to Switzerland. Greg drove, since he had the rental car, and the rest of us had come on the train.

Despite the morning's rain (our Milan office called this afternoon, and Andrea said gloomily "It's raining here again. The weather here is very boring."), by the time we left it was sunny enough that we turned on the air-conditioning as we experienced the random glory of Italian highways. The driving is actually not nearly so random as in the city, where it reaches truly exciting heights (as does the parking, or, more properly, the car-leaving, since many of the things people do before getting out of their cars cannot really be considered parking). The road, however, was sometimes a toll road, and sometimes not. As a toll road, it sometimes gave you a ticket and then wanted money later, and sometimes there were just random tollbooths where they asked for random amounts of money.

The difficulty in driving from Milan to Neuchatel is that there are these mountains in the way. Not just any mountains; not some little mountain range you might go around or breeze over; but the Alps, in all their glory, right smack in the middle of the obvious way to get there. This is not an insurmountable problem, particularly since the Swiss have a somewhat freudian obsession with tunnels. However, it really narrows down your options. The train comes around the mostly flat way, which means a large westward detour. You can do that in a car too; in fact, there are two ways into Switzerland that would lead you that way, the tunnel at Grand-Saint-Bernard (where I went with Jim and Jennifer for a Sunday's drive once), and the pass at Simplon. Being as it was June, and Alps really amuse Greg, and I'd never been that way, we took the pass at Simplon.

Now, you have to realize here that Greg and Diana and I all grew up in pretty flat parts of the world. We've all lived in parts of the world that had mountains -- mostly the US East and West coasts -- but still, we're only so accustomed to the entire concept. The highest point in Australia is just a skosh over 2000 meters, and I'm not convinced that Ohio makes it that far up. The pass at Simplon is 2005 meters according to the sign, and 2007 according to the Swiss auto club map.

We stopped at the top of the pass; it was fairly clear and bright, and you could see glaciers on some of the mountains in the distance and it was spectacularly gorgeous and Swiss and everybody with a camera took pictures. It was also cold. Very cold. Really, bitterly, unpleasantly cold. And, as Diana pointed out, those little white things whipping through the air were genuine snowflakes. We thought this was hilarious, when our teeth stopped chattering, and we drove on down the other side of the pass until we got to Brig and had to decide how to go on.

At that point, you can take the lowland, westward loop around the next range of Alps, which I'm getting to be pretty familiar with, or you can take a slight westward detour and put the car on a train to go through the next range of Alps, or you can go eastward to get to a pass to go over the next range of Alps. The pass to go over is marked squiggly, and as I pointed out, the Swiss auto club is not kidding when it puts squiggles down. It's perfectly happy to indicate a single hairpin turn with a gentle bend; if there are squiggles, you're looking at a lot of back and forth. Greg had noted this piece on the map earlier -- "I like those bits," he said happily, pointing at this very location. What the hell, we thought, we were kinding of getting into the Alp thing, it was only 6 pm on the day after midsummers, so we had 4 more hours of light, none of us had ever been that way, Greg likes squiggles, long tunnels are boring -- let's take the high road.

This was cool. There were lots of Swiss-German ski towns. There were more glaciers. There were neat waterfalls. There were improbable Swiss-German town names. There were hairpin bends, but not too many. And then, unfortunately, it started to snow. Well, it started to rain, which turned imperceptibly into snow, and about the time we got to the bottom of the pass and went "Oh my god" as we stared up at the road, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth visible all the way up the mountain, it was really snowing noticeably, and we agreed that Greg wasn't going to come back that way the next day. But the road was perfectly clear, and it wasn't snowing hard, and there wasn't much any place else to go, and it was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. About a third of the way up there was a piece of a glacier next to the road, and we all made stunned noises about that.

About three quarters of the way up, the snow started to stick, but only at one end of the hairpins, and we started to realize that we were stupid flatlanders, but about that time a tourbus or so came down past us and waved us on cheerily (we had a stupid flatlander reluctance to occupy the tight bit of the hairpin at the same time as two large busses when it was covered in snow, which the bus drivers thought was very funny). At the top it was snowing enough to be really unpleasant and we were becoming tense. The sight of the restaurants at the top of the pass with their tables out broke the tension, for about 15 seconds. At the end of those 15 seconds, just after we had started to head down again, the windshield went white.

Flat, blank, excuse-me-but-someone-just-pasted-something-to-my-windshield white. Not even a swirl. Sensory-deprivation white. Oh-my-god-we're-going-to-fall-off-an-Alp white.

We came to a stop, very gently, and the world reappeared. There was a road in it. We were in a close relationship to the road. This was good. We didn't have any good choices but to keep going down the road. This was bad. I don't know about everybody else, but I could think of about 13 million things that I would rather have been doing than driving down that mountain, particularly in a white car. (Red is good. It shows up well in case anybody else happens to be driving down the mountain blindly in a snow storm.) I busied myself in thinking of them, having exhausted all practical responses to the situation almost instantaneously.

Greg apologized for going so slowly. Diana and I said, slightly over-enthusiastically, that it was just fine, he shouldn't hurry on account of us, we *liked* slow. We did not scream at any point, but I was beginning to sound just a trifle shrill by then; there had been a second whiteout, an exciting attempt to follow the edge-of-road markers (abruptly terminated when they proved to sometimes be edging something else not exactly even with the road), and a controlled skid or two, and when we could see off the edge of the road the view was all too often of a lovely alpine lake a good 100 meters below us. Mostly we were doing well to see the road, however.

By the clock, it took 15 minutes to get down to somewhere where the road was nice and black with colored stripes, and after that it was pretty uneventful. Greg perked right up, but he's more resilient than me and Diana. We did drive past the Reichenbach falls (very scenic), and we had dinner in Interlaken, which was still darn cold, and was occupied by the Swiss music festival, so we were pretty much the only people in the restaurant not wearing uniforms with excessive gold braid on them. We heard no music, but we admired the uniforms greatly.

Sunday, we sent Diana off home via a train to Zurich, and then Greg and I went into Neuchatel, where they turned out to be holding the annual motorcycle ride around the lake, so we watched every motorcycle in the canton and some visitors all gather up and take off with great fanfare. My, motorcycles come in a lot of sizes.

Greg says my descriptions of Neuchatel are entirely factually accurate, and completely misleading. I suppose you'll just all have to come see for yourself.