I’ve got another installment of my Year Abroad tales. I was looking at my Switzerland map and there’s a lot of empty space on it. Where else have I been? I didn’t cover as much of Switzerland as I thought when I was living there, I didn’t go into much depth and I don’t remember as much I would like. But I think I can do St Gallen.
St Gallen is a good distance from Neuchâtel, where I was a language student between October 2005 and July 2006 – that’s why I don’t remember so many of the details. I moved to Switzerland eighteen years ago! If you haven’t read any of the Year Abroad series, I was studying French & Spanish which required me to spend my third year in a country that spoke my target language. I skipped the Spanish half of the year and spent the whole year in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where I was studying French grammar at 8am four days a week and when I had the time, I made good use of half-price rail pass to explore – well, not as much of Switzerland as I thought I did.
St Gallen was on my list because I had the sense, a term in, to buy a guidebook and I liked the sound of the library. Not that I had any real idea what a “fine Baroque secular interior” actually meant but the book made it sound like somewhere worth visiting and I hadn’t been to St Gallen. It takes about two and a half hours on the train but there is a direct train that runs every hour – or possibly every two hours. There are two lines that run the long white tilting trains. At the western end, they alternate going to Geneva and Lausanne and at the eastern end, they alternate going to St Gallen and Zurich. Eighteen years on, it seems the Zurich train is ultimately headed for Rorschach – I remember that journey as being particularly difficult the day I popped over the Austrian border to Bregenz. My old blog from the time says that I got the 9.24 out of Neuchâtel and that I changed at Zurich, lost my jumper at St Gallen, reclaimed it and got on the train to Appenzell.
Now, I can’t say much about the most Swiss of all Switzerland’s cantons. I just wandered for an hour or so. But I’ve taken the train before on the way to Austria on holiday. I can’t imagine why now – it takes three days to drive to Austria and we traditionally arrived quite late on the third day. The idea of stopping for a train ride in Switzerland is just… why would we do that? But I’m pretty sure we did. Anyway, I noted it at the time as being “a little red train” and it took around three-quarters of an hour to meander through rolling green fields, past chalets, along the side of country roads. In short, it was in itself a scenic ride worth making the effort if you’re in that region.
Appenzell itself is perhaps not wildly exciting, nor packed with important sights for tourists to cross off. This is what I wrote at the time:
It was as picture-perfect as I’d imagined. There wasn’t a lot there, just a very pretty village with some mountains in the background and some shops which sold anything vaguely Alpine that you could imagine, so I wandered around for a while, then went back to St Gallen on a little red train.
Two sentences! Let the older, wiser me try to expand. Appenzell joined the Swiss Confederation in 1513 and then split into two half-cantons. Switzerland has three pairs of half-cantons among its 26 cantons – Inner & Outer Appenzell, Basel Land & City and Nid- and Obwalden. I was in Inner Appenzell, in Appenzell town, which despite being the cantonal capital, remains essentially a village and a proper “quaint” old-fashioned Swiss one at that. The old-fashionedness is sometimes a good thing and sometimes not. For example, women didn’t get to vote here until 1991. That’s appallingly late for a country we tend to consider politically modern and tidy but actually, women didn’t get the vote in the rest of Switzerland until 1971. On the other hand, Inner Appenzell and Glarus are the only two cantons that still use a voting system called the Landsgemeinde where the people gather in public to raise their hands in answer to a series of yes and no questions. Yes, these days it’s just hands but it was previously a ceremonial sword, the mark of freemen who were allowed to vote. In Glarus, this method is used for cantonal and tax laws whereas in Appenzell, it can be used to cover governmental issues. Because this is an odd and picturesque event, it’s televised these days and my guidebook says “What the Eurocentric city slickers of Geneva and Basel think of it all is anyone’s guess”.
There was no Landsgemeinde the day I was there. In fact, there was nothing going on whatsoever. You’d have thought the whole place was closed, despite it being a Saturday in June. You’d think tourism would be all over a place like this, where old-fashioned chalets sit side-by-side with colourful painted chalet-style houses. The only note that it was 20th century and not still the 18th was the presence of a few cars and a small petrol station. If I was there today, I’d have taken at least 80 photos of the scenic train ride – I have two! – and filled my entire memory card in the village itself. I’m having a look on Google Street View right now and although the photos, from 2013, show more modern shops in the bottom floor of these pretty houses, the streets are just as quiet. That was ten years ago, so I don’t know what it’ll be like today but from my experience and from Google Maps, I’m going to say that if you want to see proper old-fashioned rural Switzerland and not from behind a crowd of tourists pointing their phones at everything, make a trip to Appenzell.
Then, yes, I took the train back to St Gallen. That was my real destination. I wanted to find the cathedral and I wanted to find the Abbey library. According to Google Maps, the cathedral is a ten-minute walk from the central station. I found it on the town map without a problem but there were no buses that went anywhere near it. Actually, it seems the 11 would take me to a two-minute walk but I didn’t know that at the time. My year abroad would have been transformed if I’d had a smartphone. As it was, I got cut off from the uni wifi so I couldn’t even prepare the evening before with what limited information was available in 2006. I was entirely dependent on the guidebook and on finding town maps and whatever I could pick up at the station.
It seems I got hopelessly lost in St Gallen. The guidebook said that the twin cathedral towers were visible from practically anywhere in the city but I couldn’t see them. I assume I was just too close and the pedestrianised shopping area was too narrow to give a view of anything but the sky directly above me. Anyway, by pure luck, I stumbled across it and went into the cathedral, which I described as “bright” and “very pretty”. I was apparently accustomed to cathedrals being dim and dark and being bare stone. I’ll give myself that – the medieval English cathedrals are bare stone but most of them are quite light – the Gothic style was adapted from the French partly because we were dedicated followers of fashion, even in ecclesiastical architecture but partly because the stronger yet more delicate stonework allowed for more and bigger windows, for more light!
St Gallen is Baroque-style. Today I’d say I’m not a fan – and I’m not – but this particular cathedral was well decorated, with frescos inside the domes and mint green frills everywhere, marble pillars, lots of gold, baby pink accents. My sister has apparently accidentally stolen St Gallen’s colour scheme for her bedroom. What wasn’t green or gold or pink was gleaming white and I agree, it was very bright inside.
Next up was the famous Abbey Library, which is effectively in the opposite side of the cloisters attached to the south side of the cathedral, although they’re very different cloisters from anything I’ve seen in Salisbury or Canterbury or York. It’s a four storey white building with another storey in its tiled roof and hidden somewhere within that is this magnificent Baroque library. Now, I arrived, peered in, deduced that I was supposed to put slippers on over my outdoor shoes to protect the precious floor, and went in. It wasn’t until I came out that I spotted the notice on the counter with the price list and the queue of people paying. Well, someone should surely have spotted me just striding into their big tourist attraction and stopped me and if they didn’t… Look, make sure you pay. And when I say “striding in”, I mean “shuffling in” wearing over-slippers that were far too big. I tried on two pairs in the hope of finding one I could walk in but they have to be oversized to fit over boots and I suppose if they’re all enormous, there’s no faffing around trying ten pairs on to get the perfect fit.
What was the library like? Well, I have no photos of my own – that rule I did notice – but it’s all dark wood, with a balcony running around the top, a precious patterned wooden floor and a spectacular ceiling. The main pictures were kind of shell-shaped and then there were smaller more triangular-shaped ones in between. The effect is kind of like walking into a cave, if a cave had double layers of windows and was stacked with bookcases. It’s the kind of library where you might expect to find a wizard feverishly leafing through an enormous cursed leather book, definitely not the kind of library where you’d take your six-year-old on a Saturday morning. And only that wizard would ever get to touch the books. I don’t know if they’re actually enclosed by chicken wire but books often are in old and valuable libraries. Wikipedia says that “most” of the 160,000 volumes are available for public use but anything published before 1900 is to be read in a special reading room. I’m going to guess there’s not a lot of 20th century material here but that implies that anything newer can be taken away, which feels unlikely. It also apparently has a manuscript of the Nibelungenlied, which is a Middle High German epic poem dating from around 1200 – it’s pretty much the German version of my beloved Volsung Saga and you’ll probably know it best as the basis for the Ring Cycle opera. I don’t think I’ve blogged about it but in September, I went to the Royal Opera House in London to see Das Rheingold, which is the first and shortest of the four operas and depending on how well the second goes, I might be in this for the long haul. Anyway, St Gallen has got a copy of that poem.
If you want to read the books without going to St Gallen and without going through the presumed admin of getting to take things to the reading room, a part of the collection has been digitised and you can see what’s been done so far here at e-codices.
There are two bits of my day in St Gallen that really stand out. The first is going outside and lying in the grass outside the cathedral, not doing anything. I’d apparently been watching Scrubs not too long ago and the first season episode My Old Lady was on my mind, the one where JD tries to persuade his patient, Mrs Tanner, to go on dialysis to prolong her life. She doesn’t want to and so JD makes a list of all the things she could do in her life, only she’s already done all of them. Then she says “So, with your precious free time, you’ve been sitting in a hospital room talking to an old lady. What about your list? How many of those things have you done? For that matter, how many times have you sat in the grass and done nothing, hmm?” And I thought about that and so I sat in the grass and did nothing. Well, I did one thing.
I held my camera up above myself and took a selfie. The third selfie I’d ever taken and I know that because the first two were on the train on the way back to St Gallen from Appenzell earlier in the day. Selfies weren’t a thing in 2006. They certainly weren’t called selfies. All the photos I have of myself in Switzerland were taken by my two best friends, my triplets, except the photos from that day. Then I made my way back to the station. You know those art trails you get in cities? There was a Wallace & Gromit one in Bristol, a Paddington one in London, I’ve seen Shaun the Sheep somewhere – where they take large shiny sculptures and get various artists and/or celebrities to decorate them, put them around a city for people to find and then auction them off for charity afterwards? Well, St Gallen had something like that with six-foot bears so I ticked off four of them on the way back to the station.
And then I got the train straight back to Neuchatel, taking 40 selfies along the way!
