Day 9: In Which I Wish To Be Swiss

My first impression of Switzerland is that it must be where the myth about dwarves come from. Not because the people there are short and hairy (they're not), but because the entire country seems to be one long corridor of narrow fields with impossibly large mountains on either side, and a iceblue, snowfed river bisecting what little arable land there is. Because of the abundance of water, everything is green. Really, really green grass being eaten by those Swiss cows you see on cheese packaging everywhere, pockets of huge evergreens spring up from mountain ledges, but the most noticeable is me, being green with envy for not being born here.

While we're driving through the countryside (or extremely long tunnels that go through entire mountains), MJ gives us some background on Switzerland, which was pretty interesting stuff. In Switzerland, every male over the age of 18 is required by law to enlist in the military and serve for a minimum of 2 years. I'm not sure if you have to do it right at 18, but I'd bet it's within a few years. You are also given a submachine gun. This might account for the lack of home invasion style robberies there. Who in the hell is going to rob a house when you know for a fact that there's someone with a military grade gun inside? Once you're out of the military, you still have to go to target practice once a month, and do a month long refresher course every couple of years. Because it's required by law, this doesn't count as your vacation time, and you still get paid. As a result, the Swiss can raise it's military to full readiness in less than 36 hours. Pretty impressive. Due to how ridiculously rich the country is thanks to anonymous banking, apparently many of the mountains have been converted into giant bomb shelters (one of which can hold up to 20000 people for 2 years), weapons reserves, satellite monitoring stations, and so on. Oh, and all buildings are required to have bomb shelters. This might account for why Switzerland is so neutral--woe betide any country that decided to invade, because the entire population is essentially the military (women aren't required to join, but most do anyhow), and if they ever got bombed, you'd really only piss them off.

Now, this means that the cities are clean and that the citizens are for the most part law-abiding, but the large anti-authority part of me sort of worries about any government that has that sort of stranglehold on personal choice. Although on the other hand, the benefits from having an entire country on the same basic page seem worth it, at least on the surface. You could never do this with America though, we have a population that is far too large and too diverse to ever make it feasible.

Anyway, it took us forever to get to Lucerne, a small town in Switzerland, because the rain we had left behind in Germany had found us as soon as we got out of Italy, slowing traffic to a crawl on an already crowded road. The bus riding was becoming near-unbearable at this point, although it was mainly due to my skin being so dry (and thus so itchy I was scratching till I was literally bleeding) because of the nonstop recycled air, and my lack of even remotely clean clothes (read: I smelled awful and there was nothing I could do about it).

Once again, we had only a few short hours to wander around Lucerne, made shorter by the fact that every shop closes at around six o'clock. In retrospect I guess thats not that strange, but the city looked deserted by eight. Even still, there was ample time to peruse the Swiss chocolate shops...and then to go back again and again. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, which I think I've mentioned in an earlier post--not that i'm anti-chocolate, just that I'm not a fan of chocolate in the way the sad, lonely lady who has a cat calendar is. But this...this was something else. This wasn't chocolate. This was angel brains coated in children's dreams. The adorably old Swiss lady explained that the reason it was so different was because the cows ate grass that was watered with pure, mountain spring water, so their milk was correspondingly better, thus producing higher quality dairy products. After tasting about 15 different types of truffles, bon bons, and so on, I was inclined to agree with her.

MJ had neglected to mention that the hotel we'd be staying in that night was a refurbished prison. And it was themed, meaning that it still had bars on the windows, bare walls, and instead of room keys, you had a code you had to put into the door to unlock it. It didn't freak me out too bad, although I made it a point not to wonder about how many people had gotten shanked in my room. Given my impressions of Switzerland, though, I think that the majority of criminals were white collar. I hope.

We only had Paris left on our itinerary, and even though it's marked as 2 days, what that means in Contiki-speak is eight hours in a bus and about four or so in the actual city, minus check in time and dinner and all that. I'm not saying that it's bad, I just want to clarify for anyone who might be thinking of a Contiki tour.

After seeing as many cities as we did on the trip, I have to say that I prefer the northern part of Europe. Maybe its that the cities are slightly newer, but I've had my fill of streets so narrow that they can't accomodate a single person walking and a car driving at the same time. The cities we visited from the north seemed on the whole to be cleaner, safer, and more ascetically pleasing. Then again, maybe that's just my German blood bias talking.