Here’s a new variant on the theme… (Thanks to kung fu grippe for the link.)
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You occasionally run into strange cultural stuff when you’re up in the mountains in Switzerland. Cantonal -ethnic jokes, the foehn, Heaven knows what else. Some things are odder than others.
One of the bigger restaurant/hotels in Leukerbad is the Roemerhof. The name refers (as one might guess) to the Romans, who were the first ones up here (besides the local Celts) to notice the hot water coming out of the ground. They beat a lasting and ancient path to the water, one which is the basis for the modern road which winds its way up from Leuk in the Rhone valley.
The Roemerhof restaurant has a big outdoor terrace which seems to be frequented by most of the locals between lunch and dinner. (This means about 1500 people in a town that has about twenty hotels and at least a hundred apartment buildings offering “ferienwohnungen”, holiday apartments of the kind that UK users call “self-catering”: basic linens are usually included in the price, but you bring your own food and whatever else. ) Right now Leukerbad is in what can best be called “shoulder season”: not everything is shut, but most things are on “reduced hours” until the really serious summer season kicks in in July.
The Roemerhof has a guy who comes in to play keyboards and generally entertain the locals at the late lunch-early dinner-dinner periods. He’s pretty good. For one thing, he doesn’t let his keyboard do all the work. He makes his chords with his own hands (a tendency I honor, myself dating from a time when keyboards weren’t as smart as they are now, and a keyboard artist was expected to be able to execute a complete “round-the-clock” chromatic chord sequence with his/her own hands).
We had a weird cultural moment a little while ago. Our entertainment played a song which was clearly identifiable as “This Old House” (not the TV theme…). What brought my head up was the moment in which the words “Lucky Ducky” suddenly got into the song…thus turning a fairly cheerful musing on the nature of mortality into something completely un-parseable.
I have to look into this and find out What Happened To The Song. More reports as they become germane.
Meanwhile, the temperatures are unseasonably high (mid-80’s) and the sun
has been out pretty much costantly. My left arm is sunburnt (but not the right. Go figure.) It’s really a shame we have to go tomorrow.
Coolest piece of tech spotted: a little electric “hauler” that grapples onto a “trailer hitch” thing on the front of a wheelchair-user’s chair, and hauls them along the road at 10-20 kph. Very cool. It’s like being at the chariot races.
Nicest local cat: Iggi, who is a brown tabby with unusually tiny feet,
and very friendly.
And on a “German-speaking” keyboard, as well. Fascinating.
There hasn’t been a lot of blogging the past few days, possibly because the weather has been so spectacularly sunny and unseasonably hot for this part of the world — but we’re having a great time. The food has been super, and the pools and leisure facilities are out of this world. We’ve both picked up a little tan. Only today has the weather gotten a little less perfect, dropping a very small amount of rain this morning. But the cloud is breaking already. Nothing to do but gaze out at the mountains and relax…
The only thing marring the general perfection of life at the moment is that the Young Wizards website is down; the server seems to be having some kind of fit. Oh well…let’s see if it puts itself right in the next few hours.
Boy, do I hate packing. It’s bad enough getting the clothes sorted out: then there’s all the wiring for the office-on-the-road. Clie sync cables, the mike for Dragon Dictate, phone cables (not all hotels are wireless yet… mutter…) phone chargers, Bluetooth cards… Ack.
And just when you think it’s all handled, you find that one piece of clothing you wanted to bring with…the one that never made it into the laundry two days ago. ARGH!
Don’t mind me.
And everything’s fine now. (Knowing that a mood swing is a mood swing does take some of the thrill-ride quality away from it.)
So now I can pack, because starting tomorrow, right after the house-sitter arrives, we get a little time to ourselves. In some order or other, we will visit Peter’s mum (here represented by her justly famous soda bread recipe): see That Kickass Party Town, Z�rich: visit the sublime and hilarious J�rg and Bice in Bern: and soak our heads for a short period in Leukerbad the beautiful. And then, much too soon, come home and go back to work again. (See, there are these Romulans…)
I may still blog. I may not. Herself only knows what I’ll do. But I will think kindly of all of you in the Blogosphere while lying in the Alpentherme (or even the Burgerbad) and allowing 2 l/s of hot mineral water (not the stinky kind: Leukerbad’s water is like hot Perrier…) to pour on my head.
The copyedited MS for Wizard’s Holiday has come back, and I have a lot of work to do to get it handled before we go away for a few days off at the end of next week. Just so you all know not to expect any long articles… (I may republish a few things from other sources, though — writeups of this or that which people have requested.)
Every now and then I go through the user logs to see who’s come to see the blog, and where they came from. A lot of people arrive via Google. But some of the searches that bring them here…well, they’re a little weird.
Here’s today’s best one:
“free fonts pasture of muppets”
Hokay…..