Irgendwann werde ich fertig schreiben, was ich anfange!
Heute reise ich nach Lugano. Ich werde dort übernachten, und morgen entweder einine zweiten Tag in Lugano verbringen, oder weiter nach Locarno reisen. Mal sehen. Es kommt drauf an, was für eine Laune ich morgen habe. Es ist das erste Mal, ich endlich Mut habe, allein für mehr als einen Tag zu reisen. Ich bin entspannt, Lugano zu sehen, auch wenn es vielleicht besser ware, zu zweit zu reisen. Aber Lugano ist zu weit (d.h. zu teuer) für Olli, Sandra hat schon etwas vor, Odilo ist gerade von Copenhagen zurückgekommen, und Arley hat immer etwas vor. Na ja, mindestens kann ich hoffentlich viel skizzieren, vielleicht ein paar Aquarellen malen?
Das Wetter gestern war so herrlich, richtig Frühling. Leider habe ich den grösseren Teil des Tages drin verbracht, da ich endlich ETWAS mit dem Fotoalbum fertig haben möchtete. Ich wollte das gutes Gefühl haben, das Wissen, dass ich wirklich etwas geschafft habe, bevor ich wegfahre. Ich habe ein Panick bekommen, als ich bemerkt habe, wenig ich während der Ferien gemacht, gereist, gelesen habe. Gut, ich habe mich richtig gespannt, aber nicht viel mehr. Plötzlich fiel es mir an, dass ich (nur) zwei Wochen habe, in denen ich Schifahren mit Olli und Thomas, Sandra zu Hause besuchen, ein Portfolio und ein Fotoalbum machen, viel mehr lessen, UND ein Besuch von Taryn haben will! …und dazu mehr in der Schweiz reisen!
This morning it was SO foggy! I couldn’t see much more than white outside my window. As the train pulled out of the Hbf, I was thinking how the weather was so similar to the day we went hiking in October. But as we went along the sun burned most of the haze off. All the farmers were out spraying manure onto their fields. The soft rolling green hills were becoming striped with a dark rich brown.
I was thinking- does the grass in Switzerland need to be mowed? Granted, I moved here in the fall, but I don’t remember seeing anyone cutting the grass, and everything is the same plush green, very low to the ground, even over rolling meadows that I can’t imagine anyone bothering to mow.
Tessin is so much drier. Brown-grey stone, drier green, as more overall tones. It has such a raw beauty.
Such stark shadows on harsh angular stone
Funny trees- like they grow in corkscrews
So many walls like this
Just saw one like this
...like slabs of slate, stuck upright into the soil, shoulder-to-shoulder. Sometimes they were spaced further apart, with two holes drilled into each one, and old rusted and kinked wire strung between them, as it would be between wooden posts.
We rode through Bellinzona, and I tried to take a picture of Castel Grande, perched there upon its rocky cliff in the middle of the city... but it's tough to do from a moving train! :S
Farben in Bellinzona
Finally we arrived in Lugano. I took a few minutes to get my bearings, cross the street, then gasped. It was so beautiful!!
I was standing on the side of the hill, overlooking all the orange tile roofs that flowed down into the valley into the city of Lugano, right on a perfectly calm lake that wound through the valley, in front of me and to the right.
Mountains grew out of this lake to enclose the view all around me with peaks softened by the covering of trees.
These mountains weren't green and rolling like those in Zug, but they weren't jagged and rocky like those to the north. They were more like forms that someone had thrown a cloth over, creating distinct ridges and valleys in the creases and folds, but at the same time with a certain softness to them. The sky was blue but somewhat hazy, so that the mountains and the water had a purple hue to them.
Kastanienbäume, Lugano
I had to make an early evening, because the youth hostel was quite a ways outside the city and the last Postbus left at about dinner time. So much for seeing Lugano at night! That's ok, though, because I was kind of hesitant about wandering around by myself in a city where I didn't know the language too well anyway.
I arrived in Figino at about dusk, and got to walk along the narrow little road along the shore of Lago di Lugano as the water and the towering rolling mountains surrounding it took on the dead calm and the varying shades of periwinkle of twilight.
It was great except for the fact that I was a bit anxious to get to the hostel before it got completely dark: unlike in the US, this road was unlit, had no shoulder, and was often lined with tall stone walls around blind corners.
In the morning I got up early but then found out I had missed the last bus into Lugano until noon anyway! Postbuses are great, but they don't always run with the same frequency as city buses, especially in little out of the way places on Sundays!
On the other hand, there is certainly something to be said for the familiarity you get on these routes. The driver the night before knew most of his passengers by name, and chatted with them as they got on. He made sure he knew where everyone was going to as they got on, so he could announce the stops as they came up, make sure he stopped and wished everyone a pleasant evening as they got off, as opposed to the city bus method of pressing a button to alert the driver you want to get off at the next stop. There was a girl sitting in the front seat talking to the driver the whole way, and it seemed like it was simply her seat, and that's where she hung out.
Anyway, in the morning I didn't feel like hanging around Figino for another 4 hours, so I asked the woman at the front desk if there was a way for me to walk back instead. She gave me a photocopy of her hiking map and directed me to the sets of stairs leading up the steep cliff right behind the hostel. And so began my adventure for the day.
I headed up the hill and at some point came across a little shrine just sitting there in the woods. That's something I'd noticed all over in Italy and Ticino, and I don't remember if I saw them near Lausanne or in Graubuenden, but I certainly didn't see them around Zuerich. It's too Protestant there- it was the home of Zwingli, a Protestant reformer, and thus you just don't see these random little offerings to Mary, Jesus, or any given saint there like you do in the Italian-speaking world.
That path was really steep at the beginning, and as I climbed higher and higher the lake peeked out from the other side of the hostel and then became more and more visible.
It was only about 8:30 in the morning, so it still had that early morning stillness that I love so much, like the world hasn't woken up yet. There was one fisherman put-putting across the water in his little outboard, but that was it. The air was so clear and fresh, and silent except for a few birds chirping.
When I got to the top of the hill I emerged from the woods onto a rock outcropping with an aluminum railing and two red benches.
As I looked around, out of breath, my heart pounding, I understood right away why those benches were there. The world I was looking down at was so spectacularly beautiful I wanted to cry! The still lake with all its winding fingers was right below me, with dense little Italian (or Ticinese?) towns clustered at the fingertips. The lake was surrounded by high, rocky but wooded hills that rolled back forever until they were jagged snow-covered Alps in the not-so-distant background.
My little outcropping dropped off, then climbed again to support a villa with rolling, terraced greens and palm trees surrounding it. This fantastic juxtaposition has to be uniquely Ticinese.
I stood there for a while in complete awe. I felt like I was on top of the world, and felt so priveleged to have been able to experience this view. I don't quite know how to describe what it was like to stand there, other than it was just magical for me, like I had a hard time believing a place so beautiful could exist at all!
Eventually I continued on, and I had a great journey back to Lugano that lasted until early afternoon.
I wandered through all sorts of little towns and suburbs, and felt like I got a much better feel for the area than I would have had I simply headed straight back to Lugano by bus.
I got the impression that this was a wealthy area- lots of large single family houses, lots of nice cars.
At one point towards the end of my trek I happened upon a really snooty residential street. After passing the gardens of the ritzy hotel, the road was shaded with a majestic canopy and lined with the hedges and huge gates of the homes guarded by Dalmatians and Rottweilers.
At one point I came across this great little church set way back in a huge grassy yard with a cypress (?- the really tall skinny evergreen shrubby trees)- lined walk leading up to it. The bells on their big wheels were ringing in the tower as I got there, and people were walking out after the service.
No comments:
Post a Comment