Thursday, May 6, 2010

Alpine Adventure

JoeWell, there. The sun came out for long enough that the organizers decided lectures this afternoon were a losing battle, so they rescheduled the last one until after dinner—and given the amount of wine that gets drunk at dinner, I suspect the 8:30–9:30 lecture slot is going to be a rough one.



In the meanwhile, though, I have finally had my walk in the Alps. My roommate, D., (who is Sicilian by birth but has lived in Copenhagen for ten years) and I took advantage of the recess to walk up to the nearest mountain trail, which winds through something billed as an "Archeological park" on the basis of some pre-historic rock carvings which were discovered there in 1977, despite the fact that they all would have been in plain sight for centuries (is it wrong of me to assume that they are fakes, or have the "runestones" of Minnesota made me bitter and suspicious before my time?). Either way, we didn't see any rock carvings, but we did have a nice walk, and a bit of a cross country adventure to get back when our trail crapped out on us. One sheep farm and a number of donkeys later, we made it safely back into town, a fact which we celebrated by hitting the local fromagerie before it closed up again for the week. So I am now the proud owner of a block of Beaufort and a little bit of Tomme de Savoie, which (I think) are the two most notable local cheeses.

Incidentally: it's snowing now. The weather has been somewhat unpredictable all day—when I woke up, the sun was shining and there was not a cloud in the sky. By the time I made it to breakfast, you couldn't even see the village behind the wall of impenetrable cloud.

So tomorrow is the end of the class, and I'm scheduled to be up here from lunch until a few minutes before 4. If the weather is nice, I'll try to walk over to one of the local fortresses. If it's snowing like this, I'll probably have a nap, instead.

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