All In Thun
Because life is chock full of disappointments I feel I should skip ahead from Oct.30th to Nov.4th. I will gloss over the very inadequate Halloween (let’s just say they Europeans don’t go as crazy as we North Americans do) and a sickly 30th birthday for myself two days later complete with cake from my awesome band mates and a horrible case of sniffles and pink eye to the 4th of November. This brings us to Thun in Switzerland. Honestly, one of my favourite European cities nestled in a valley of the Alps with a lovely lake running along it’s floor and enchanting canals throughout the town proper. It even has gorgeous (if nasty tempered) swans that paddle through it’s waterways. Be wary in your approach though: despite their charming appearance they are nasty piece of work and I have had my share of them hiss at me when offering them parts of my foodstuffs. So as far as avians go, I say fuck ‘em.
Thun is between the Swiss and German parts so many folks speak both., So if you find yourself stumbling over your words in your tourist German gibberish as I do, you can have someone like Calamity Kate step in and explain in flawless Parisian French what you are looking for. You can then watch the shopkeeper’s features melt from a polite incomprehension to a relieved expression that of the two strangely painted creatures presented before them, one of them can communicate to them about something other than sending for the hall porter because of the frog in the bidet. They will then jocularly retrieve the item you asked for and say something conspirator to Kate in regards to it’s lucky she was there, or else he would have given me all the laxatives in the store or something equally nonsensical.
Disappointed that after our show at Café Mokka, that we wouldn’t be staying in our usual lux accommodations that overlooked the lake, we were instead put up each with our rooms in a lovely hotel in town. The hotel room I had for a single night on my own was larger than my bedroom and living room in Vancouver. It was because of this that I felt the need to run through my yoga moves and practice my backbends and one very clumsy walk over. If anyone had seen me do it, it may have brought to mind a crab being tossed backwards into a pot of boiling water with it’s legs akimbo. Needless to say, it was not the most graceful move I have performed – but I did it.
I went for my run that morning and ran over 8K. Not bad and pretty impressive considering I had to keep stopping to expel mucus from my nose and throat and occasionally pet a cow, but with two and a half hours I ran a few towns over along the floor of the valley. I recall thinking how pretty it was – it looked like the town on the Wutherers wrapper if you care to look closely with all the small nestled rooftops in between domed green mountains. As pretty as it was it made me eager to return to town, shower and walk around and enjoy this rather well laid out town that put me in mind of the Whistler mountain of the late eighties and early nineties before it because such an exclusive resort and people routinely escaped there to ski and snowboard and not quaff ridiculous sums of cash drinking wine and playing golf and doing other soft pursuits that befit rich complacent assholes and the town had some character. So, um yeah. Visit Thun.
But don’t tell the Olympics commitee about it, okay?
LMR
