Matterhorn

Well, since I'm alone for a few days, I decided to kill a Saturday by seeing as much of Switzerland as possible in 14 hours. I used a one-day unlimited train pass to travel to the very southern part of Switzerland to the town of Zermatt, which is at the foot of the Matterhorn. (The train pass was funded mostly by the several thousands of Swiss francs that Stace had left behind in her hoarded loose change. I'm going to get rid of all of those coins while she's gone.) I'd heard that the Matterhorn could be tricky to see because it's so often shrouded in clouds. I got lucky and was able to get a pretty good view. (Stace has the camera, so I didn't take any pictures, but you can see plenty on the web.)

The funny thing is that the Matterhorn seems to create its own clouds. As I looked at the clouds on the Matterhorn, they were moving quickly from west to east. The skies were clear to the west, so I figured that the Matterhorn would clear up in just a couple of minutes. But I realized after a few minutes that the eastern face of the Matterhorn keeps creating its own clouds, so they never go away. It was an interesting weather phenomenon. Oh--I just got some info about this on Wikipedia. It's called a "banner cloud." Interesting.

One sobering feature in Zermatt is the graveyard memorializing many of the people who have died climbing the Matterhorn. Over 500 have died. I've got a couple of colleagues who are going to climb it this summer. I'll have to make sure they know about the graveyard.

Then, I took the train to Geneva. I know almost nothing about Geneva besides the fact that it sits on the shore of a huge lake, but based on my experience in other European cities, I decided to make four assumptions as I got off the train: 1) the city must have been built on a river; 2) that river must be near the main train station; 3) the riverfront would be where all the interesting stuff was going on; and 4) there would be ice cream along the riverfront.

All four assumptions turned out to be correct. The ice cream was really good. It was interesting to be in my adopted home country while understanding even less of the language than usual. It was a bit of a relief to get back to the German part.

So, all in all, a good day. I spent fourteen hours gazing at the Alps, relaxing on a train rather than driving, reading a book, and wandering around a couple of interesting towns. Could be worse.