You know how this goes. I was a language student; I had a compulsory year abroad immersed in my target language and I lived in Switzerland and attended a French language school. I lived in Neuchâtel, an hour or so from the French border in western Switzerland which is why I only made it to Ticino, Switzerland’s Italian canton once – it’s about as far as you can get from Neuchâtel.
I went there because it was near the end of my year and Renee had come to stay. I had two great friends during my year abroad, Jemma from my home uni and Angela from the USA. Angela’s mom had come to spend a month or two interrailing before they both flew back and they decided that before we all left Switzerland we should go to Lugano.
It’s a simple enough journey. It takes about three and a half hours and you change trains at either Zürich or Olten. That meant an early start and a late return in order to have enough time in Lugano to make it worth spending seven hours on trains in one day. In hindsight I should have made a weekend of it but it never occurred to me to stay overnight anywhere. I don’t know what time we set off. This was July 2006. I don’t remember the details. If we got the 7.30 train, we’d have arrived by 11am and I can’t see Angela being any earlier, especially as she didn’t actually live in Neuchâtel and had to get two trams before the adventure could begin.
The one thing I clearly remember is drinking a bottle of chocolate milk on the second train. Switzerland has this chocolate milk that I can see so clearly, which they sell in the little convenience stores at stations, brown with orange writing on and I can’t find it – aha! Comella! See, fifteen and a half years later and I can still recall the brand of chocolate milk I drank on the train that meant our entry into Lugano was just slightly delayed. I love chocolate milk but it doesn’t love me so much.
Anyway. Lugano is so like being in Italy. Or at least, it is by the standards of three people who’ve lived in the north-west corner where the snow is wet and slushy and not-pretty and who’ve spent their weekends going to Germanic places where the snow is thick and the architecture is heavy and the beer is plentiful. Am I stereotyping the country I lived in? Yeah, a bit. But the fact is that Lugano is immediately noticeably different from the bits of Switzerland I’d visited throughout my year. In my mind’s eye, there were vast verdant trees and colourful birds the size of peacocks and the sound of soaring music. I know that’s not what actually happened. In reality, we merely arrived in a town that’s much warmer than our adopted home city and on the edge of a lake that isn’t surrounded by massive crags and that felt pretty exotic.
The first thing we did was a boat trip and the evidence suggests that the lake was surrounded by pretty big mountains. But I stand by this being different: the mountains around Lakes Zurich and Lucerne and Geneva are prone to being steep things with bare grey sides and sharp tops whereas these ones were a lot greener and a lot more rounded. Even the water was a lot greener. Swiss lakes have a bit of a tendency to be bright opaque turquoise if they’re a colour worthy of comment but this was noticeably green. The rest of the group, in these photos, were all down to vests and sleeveless tops and that sort of thing. I had a red sleeveless top with orange blanket stitch which I should have worn but I opted for an oversized fairly thick light blue t-shirt. Renee had brought us all matching t-shirts – Jemma’s was bright pink, Angela’s was blue and mine was orange and that might have been more suitable for the weather but there wasn’t really anywhere to change. Anyway, there was probably enough breeze on the boat that I was grateful for a t-shirt with a little more coverage. I love a boat trip but it does tend to be cooler on the water than in town.
When we got back, we took the local train down to Caslano and went to the Alprose chocolate factory. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a chocolate factory in my life. I’ve only ever seen the 1971 Willy Wonka factory once and that was back in the depths of time but what little I remembered of it didn’t match with the reality of a chocolate factory. Actually, the reality was that we didn’t see much of the factory at all. I guess it’s not very hygienic to have tourists walking among it all and probably not very safe either. We saw a museum of old adverts and old packaging, we saw some demo machines stirring up some ancient-looking chocolate safely behind glass, we apparently sat in a mini cinema and watched a film about the place and most excitingly, we got to have a sample of chocolate-dipped biscuit stick and go into the factory shop. Angela has a photo of what looks like a coolbag stuffed with chocolate and I probably got at least a few bars. I don’t recognise anything on the Alprose website but we have to remember that this was more than fifteen years ago and undoubtedly the packaging would have been updated by now.
Oh, Switzerland’s good at chocolate! We all know and love Lindt but my opinion while I was living there was that no-name supermarket chocolate was just as good as Lindt. Next time I’m in Switzerland, I’ll have to re-test that theory. I used to buy a lot of Coop chocolate but if I was going for branded, I’d tend to pick Cailler Air, which I guess is like a big 100g slab of chocolate with bubbles in the bottom layer but not in the top where the chunks are separated, if you follow me. I thought I’d get Milka too but the Coop website doesn’t have any so maybe that’s my imagination. Anyway, today was Alprose.
I don’t think we did much else. We still had three and a half hours to get home. I know I caused a minor chaos by mentioning that in the UK, the trains are powered by an electric rail rather than overhead lines. I’ve since discovered that I live on an electrified line – well, the nearest station is 13 miles away and the nearest station I’d actually use is nearly 16 miles away but that’s still the local line I’d use to get to and from London – but actually a lot of the UK is still, to this day, on diesel locos. Anyway, Renee lived in Salt Lake City at the time where I gather trains are few and far between and my casual comment terrified her – what if she stood on the electric rail when crossing the track at a level crossing? First, there’s no electric rail at points where pedestrians are likely to stand on it for obvious reasons. Second, that’s not the Swiss system. If you were a giraffe, maybe you’d have to mind your head as you crossed but you’re not, so no need to worry.
I remember this conversation so clearly that I was sure we just walked from Lugano but no, I’ve looked at the map and it’s a good distance away. Clearly Angela or Renee had done their research before we arrived. I hadn’t. I had a guidebook but back then I rarely opened it. I arrived at stations and looked at the boards to see where I fancied going today or I looked at the map on my wall and stuck a metaphorical dart in it. There was rarely, if ever, a moment of “there’s a thing here, I want to go to it”. The one occasion I did do that was the Swiss caving museum – not worth a blog post of its own; it’s in a sleepy vineyard village in Vaud or Valais and only open for fairly limited hours. I went, I waited, I saw the museum, I waited for the bus, I went home.
Did we really travel seven hours by train just to do a boat trip and visit a chocolate factory? From the photos, I think we did. I imagine we probably had a proper sit-down lunch outside a cafe but I don’t remember it and I don’t have any photos of it.
Every time I write a Swiss blog post I add two or three new places to my Swiss to-do list. I lived there for a year and I thought I used that year well. I didn’t learn as much French as I should; I didn’t pass my exams and I didn’t even pass my resits but I travelled, I saw Switzerland, I experienced and I learned. And now I realise that I didn’t see or do nearly as much as I thought I did. I went to Geneva once and because it was so cold, all I did was linger in the humid domes of the botanical gardens. I’ve still not really seen Basel. I’ve got most of Graubunden still to cover and I need to go back and spend a few days in Ticino. Do Lugano again but better, see Locarno and Bellinzona. Finish off the week by hopping over to Como too.
Well, as usual, it’s been a pleasure and a frustration to look back at my student days. Next time, I’ll show you the scrapbook I made in the evenings but it’ll be in the New Year now – Vlogmas is almost upon me!