Vacationing: Berne and Lungern
So, I'd taken the week off of work, due to planning to go see Round Tressym (hereafter Tressy) when she was in Switzerland during her Europe tour.
WARNING: BENEATH THE CUTS WILL BE MANY IMAGES OF SUPERHUGE SIZE. (GUARANTEED LARGER THAN YOUR SCREEN RESOLUTION ~[2600 × 1950])
I spent Monday doing some preliminary background work. I went and visited Gare Zimeysa (because I'd picked up on the fact that "Gare" was French for "Train Station") which was in Meyrin and a lot closer to my home than "Gare Cornavin", the main Geneva train station (at least as it is called in the bus system's stops). It turned out to be a tiny little station, and wholly unsuitable, as it was only a local stop on a small line. So I then turned around, went to the main station, grabbed a physical copy of the train schedules for departures/arrivals, checked up on the prices, and a few other things. Surprisingly enough, it turns out that it is much cheaper (monetarily) to make single day trips with a round-trip ticket than it would be to spend a night in a hotel and turn things into a two day affair. (In retrospect, I have since discovered that there is actually a train station at the airport, which may have been a better choice for me, as it's closer to home. I'd never been there, though, while I had been to Cornavin many times, because that's where I go to buy my bus passes.)
Tuesday saw me furiously going over some other last-minute planning details, and double-checking a few things, but mostly just worrying and being overly anxious. Tressy had originally said she was going to be in Lucerne (Luzern as it's called in German, and it is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland), but the address of the hotel she'd given me was in Lungern, which the Internet told me was a city ~45 minutes or so away, and I was trying to figure out just exactly what was what.
I probably should have taken care of all of this weeks ago, but I'm shit for planning, work was demanding, and I have no real good excuses. Unlike other visits, this one was forcing me to be the active party, and it threw me completely out of my element, and managed to inspire a surprising amount a dread. What if I screwed things up? By putting off the planning, it allowed me to delay thinking about it, or at least try to. The whole "if I don't look at it, maybe it will go away" sort of thing, but that never really works well, and even when you're trying to put something out of your mind it creeps in there and torments you. It's some pretty irrational stuff. I sort of cut myself off from much of the Internet, and immersed myself in work (which actually did pretty good as far as all that went, as I had to give a talk at an alignment meeting, which I'd never done before, and I think it ended up going well, so that's at least something, right?) But the time had come where it simply couldn't be put off any longer, so there I was, scrambling.
On Wednesday, I took a train to Berne. This was to be a dry test-run, to make sure I could work my way around the train system, etc., but also to have an excuse to be all touristy, and see some more of Switzerland while I'm over here, because in all reality, I haven't gotten out and seen as much of the sights as I would have liked to.
So, I woke up a bit later than I'd have liked (circa 8:30), perhaps partly due to the fact that I had trouble falling asleep the night before. Nerves, I guess. It must have been 3:30 before I finally nodded off. Anyway, after a quick breakfast, getting a few things together, and getting to the train station in downtown Geneva, I caught the 9:45 train to Berne. The trip took about two hours. Once I arrived, I wandered around sort of lost for a bit, trying to find the tourist info section, only to discover that it was right inside the train station, so I turned around and went back. When there I picked up a map, and an iPod-guided walking audio-tour of the old city, because those things are awesome, and it was relatively inexpensive. It was slightly after noon at this point, and I was told that the equipment needed to be returned by 16:00 (because I guess maybe that's when they close?), and since the walk claimed to be two hours each way, I immediately set off.
There was a whole bunch of really cool things along the walk, and I took a lot of pictures, but I'll only share a few of the highlights.
One of the first stops on the guided tour was the Bundeshaus, the Swiss Parliament building. Berne is the political capital of Geneva, and the building was pretty impressive to look at.
After a few more stops involving mostly some pretty interesting fountains and statues, came the next really impressive piece, the Zytglogge, a famous clock tower. Apparently this is the most photographed subject of Berne, so I did my part in contributing to that as well.
Since I arrived just minutes before the hour I waited around a bit longer to watch it strike. There was a pretty impressive display, that I botched recording, so I resolved to come back later in the evening to to to get it then. Unfortunately, by that point, I was dangerously low on camera memory. So, things are slightly less than satisfactory, but the below videos should give you an idea at the sort of display that goes on there.
Next up, as far as the really interesting sights go, is quite possibly one of my favorite parts of my Berne excursion: Einstein Haus. This was the apartment Einstein stayed in while working as a patent clerk in Berne, and where he penned his amazing 1905 papers. I am kind of rocked, when I realize that he was only as old as I am now when he wrote those, 26. Makes me feel kind of... pathetic. But I guess there's no shame in measuring up poorly against someone as great as Einstein.
The Münster, or Minster, is an impressive church in Berne, and its tower is, I believe, the highest point in the old city. While not really keen on religion, I can't deny that medieval churches usually boast some pretty awesome architecture, and that The Church tended to have all sorts of money, and was responsible for commissioning all kinds of great works of art. I went and climbed the tower, admission was only a couple of CHF, so it was worth it.
Finally, I'd made my way to the end of the first half of the tour, the Bärengraben (Bear pits).
There was a surprising lack of bears, so I looked around and found a sign explaining why.
"Well damn!", I thought. You can't go to Berne and not see the bears. I resolved to go to the zoo after finishing the walk back, which was actually fairly less impressive, and some of the features were reduplicated with a "If you already took the other walk, feel free to skip this stop and move on", which was actually pretty good for me, because with the extra time I'd spent at Einstein's house, the Zytglogge, and the Minster, I was cutting it pretty close to the 4 PM deadline. After dropping off the equipment and reclaiming my passport (collateral), I realized I hadn't eaten lunch, and was starving, so I grabbed a burger from a sidewalk stand. Since there were people at the train station who had been passing out small free samples of Coke Zero and Sprite Zero (must have been 20 cl cans I think?), I used one of those to wash it down with, before catching a bus to take me to the zoo.
The zoo was pretty neat, and I did a bunch of wandering around and caught a bunch of really neat shots.
Dwarf Crocodile:
Arctic Fox
Wild Cat
Seals (Seehund in German, looks like Sea Hound to me...)
Snake-necked Turtle
To my dismay, the first time I went to see the bears in the zoo, they were not there! However, I would not be deterred, I wandered around, caught all of the rest of the zoo, and upon my return, my patience was rewarded. Not only were the bears there, but it seemed to be feeding time!
Also, cage cleaning time. One of the zoo-workers was trying to clean the other side of the glass enclosure, using a ladder and leaning a long wiper-thing down the other side, but one of bear's was causing problems by being curious, and hanging around the area. It was very interested in what was going on and didn't want to leave, and needed to be distracted by have apples thrown in. This only worked some of the time though, and was only a very temporary solution at that. I was thoroughly amused by all of this, and was so engrossed I completely forgot to take pictures. Afterward though, I realized I should probably have recorded it, so I instead caught some footage which wasn't quite as good, but still neat, of when the worker was having some fun with the bear while washing the outside of the glass.
The zoo closed at 6:30, so I took the bus back to the Zytglogge and took the recordings seen previously when it was striking 7 PM, which in conjunction with my earlier botch from 1PM almost tells the complete picture, and then I caught the 7:34 train back to Geneva. Got back to the house at about 10ish, had dinner, and went to sleep at 11 or so.
Before she left for Europe we'd exchanged a few messages and settled on a meeting time and place. Due to the lack of any good ideas on my part she offered up the final choice of her hotel on the 11th in the morning (sometime between 9 and 10). Previously I was like, sure that's cool, but when my plans had shifted to just day trips, it suddenly dawned on me that I would have to get up at ridonkulously early to make that deadline. In addition, Thursday's train journey was much more complicated than the one to Berne, involving changing trains a couple of times, once at Berne, and again at Interlaken Ost, which meant I really couldn't afford to recoup some sleep on the journey, for fear of missing a switch. So what ended up happening was I woke up at 3, ran/walk the 6km or so to the station (because the buses don't run that early), bought my ticket from one of the automated machines at 4:28, grabbed the 4:56 train to Berne, switched to the 7:04 train to Interlaken Ost, switched to the 8:01 train to Lungern, and finally arrived a little after 9 AM.
It was raining and dreary that morning, so I got pretty wet on my trek to the station, and when wet my right sandal sort of chafed up one of my toes, which was unfortunate, but it wasn't anything major. I dried out over the course of the train rides, and when I arrived it was partly sunny, and not raining so much. The train station at Lungern was a small tiny thing, like the one at Zimeysa, which dashed my hopes of just asking an attendant directions to the hotel, and it also instilled a bit of a fear in me. On the most recent line out there had been a little map of the route with all the stops listed, and the train actually didn't stop at most of them. I theorized that the couple it did stop at were ones where the person who checked tickets had noted people were heading for, which made me nervous about the return trip. What if the train just sailed on past and stranded me there? (This turned out not to be the case.) At any rate, I need to find the hotel, so I started wandering down the nearest street, which turned out to the the right choice. It was a windy little road down a hill, and at the bottom it met up with what was apparently the main street of town, and the only one with any traffic to speak of. Still not having come across any maps, or landmarks, or the street sign I was looking for, I turned left, which did turn out to be the right direction, and actually the main street did turn out to be the street I wanted, as after a couple of minutes I saw the sign for Hotel Löwen, and getting closer I saw a girl sitting in a chair on the balcony. Assuming it was Tressy, I called out to her, and butchered the pronounciation of her real name, but it turned out to be her, and she was pretty cool about it, so all was well. The time was now probably approximately 9:30. Deadline achieved!
Despite having been, and still being pretty nervous about the whole thing, we swiftly got up and running, just conversing and chatting and having a grand old time. We went walking around, and found a nice bench near the lake to sit on, and we watched some fishermen in boats, and continued to chat. At or around noon, I was getting pretty hungry, because all I'd had to eat was a coffee and some sort of pastry in one of the dining cars on the train (I hadn't wanted to fix any breakfast at home for fear of waking up the couple I live with), so we wandered off in search of food. Apparently it was some sort of holiday, I have no idea which, because Tressy told me that pretty much everything was closed except for the hotel and the gas station, so we headed off looking for the gas station. We didn't end up finding it, which was fine, because we ended up going to something really, really cool. It was a path up to where we suspected this waterfall that we'd seen was, and we were right.
(Yes, that is a Tressy in the last picture. I wasn't sure how she'd feel about getting her photo taken, but since she snapped at least a couple of pictures of me, I'm thinking it's pretty much alright. Especially as all you see here is her back. Sadly, I completely zoned out later, and forgot to ask her friends to catch a picture of the two of us together. And for the most part I was more engrossed with talking and listening, that I forgot to take a lot of pictures. These four are all I really have, though I plan on asking her for copies of the ones she took when she's all done with her trip, and back online.)
We climbed up to the waterfall, and played around, and had a good time. We took off our sandals and kind of scamper-climbed all over the place. There was enough space beneath the waterfall that I thought it would be really cool to cross under it, and so I did, and she followed me. It was pretty neat, though it ended up getting us wet. Totally worth it though. There was a surprising lack of rainbows in the waterfall mist, I guess there either wasn't enough sun, or the angle was bad, or who knows, but even so that didn't really diminish the enjoyment more than the tiniest bit. After, I don't know, half an hour(?) we'd had our fill, and made our way to where we'd set down our stuff and geared back up. We continued walking along this road that we'd been travelling, and it turned out to circle the lake entirely, so we ended up taking a couple of hours and making a whole circuit. After we got back to the town we finally found the gas station; turns out it had been in the opposite direction of where we'd headed initially... Ah well. We grabbed some sandwiches and some bottled mineral water. I asked if she had some francs (because I assumed she'd probably stocked up on the more useful [for her] Euros), and she didn't and was going to pay with a credit card. I squashed that idea, and bought it for her, which she was pretty cool with after making sure I was serious. "If someone wants to buy me something, I'm not going to put up a fight," was pretty much her take on the matter.
We took our food to the hotel, and sat outside on the balcony, where I'd first saw her, to eat it. During the course of this we met a few of the other people from Tressy's tour group as they were either coming or going, and she introduced me, and I've promptly forgotten all of their names. After our lunch, we went up to her room, and she had me flip through one of her sketchbooks, and as I drooled over the various different arts, she explained what each of them was, and sometimes there were really neat stories. Certainly one of the best things to do, much better than just flipping through a gallery without any of the insightful commentary.
At around 6 PM we wrapped things up. I'd noted that the last train out left at 18:44, so we wandered back up to the train station, and chilled there until it arrived. After a hug, and an "It was awesome to meet you," we parted ways.
And that wraps up my summary. I'm sure I've forgotten, or left out, or have a different take on some of the things, but if you want to get the rest of the story, you'll have to ask Tressy for her take on things.
P.S. Oh, yeah, I twittered about it, but at some point during the conversations the topic of hair color somehow came up (maybe it had to do with her henna job? I honestly can't remember), but this reminded me of a discussion/arguement I had had with Mory about blondes who are no longer blonde but still call themselves blonde, so I decided to seek an outside opinion. I asked Tressy what she colour she'd describe my hair as, and after turning it over a bit she said "Probably Strawberry Blonde, or because I know some guys don't like that, maybe Ginger? Or perhaps gold streaked with red." (I don't remember exact words, but it should be very similar to that.) Because the last bit struck me as humorous, I played back by telling how I'd have to make an RP character and describe him like that, "He has azure eyes, and his hair is golden, streaked with the colour of blood flecks." We both got a good laugh out of that.
I do think that perhaps she was unduly influenced by the beard though, as that's really the only place red really makes any noticeable appearance, but then again, I'm not complaining. I kind of like how she described my hair... though to be perfectly honest, I would prefer Strawberry Blonde to Ginger. Ginger sounds a hell of a lot more feminine, to me at least.
WARNING: BENEATH THE CUTS WILL BE MANY IMAGES OF SUPERHUGE SIZE. (GUARANTEED LARGER THAN YOUR SCREEN RESOLUTION ~[2600 × 1950])
I spent Monday doing some preliminary background work. I went and visited Gare Zimeysa (because I'd picked up on the fact that "Gare" was French for "Train Station") which was in Meyrin and a lot closer to my home than "Gare Cornavin", the main Geneva train station (at least as it is called in the bus system's stops). It turned out to be a tiny little station, and wholly unsuitable, as it was only a local stop on a small line. So I then turned around, went to the main station, grabbed a physical copy of the train schedules for departures/arrivals, checked up on the prices, and a few other things. Surprisingly enough, it turns out that it is much cheaper (monetarily) to make single day trips with a round-trip ticket than it would be to spend a night in a hotel and turn things into a two day affair. (In retrospect, I have since discovered that there is actually a train station at the airport, which may have been a better choice for me, as it's closer to home. I'd never been there, though, while I had been to Cornavin many times, because that's where I go to buy my bus passes.)
Tuesday saw me furiously going over some other last-minute planning details, and double-checking a few things, but mostly just worrying and being overly anxious. Tressy had originally said she was going to be in Lucerne (Luzern as it's called in German, and it is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland), but the address of the hotel she'd given me was in Lungern, which the Internet told me was a city ~45 minutes or so away, and I was trying to figure out just exactly what was what.
I probably should have taken care of all of this weeks ago, but I'm shit for planning, work was demanding, and I have no real good excuses. Unlike other visits, this one was forcing me to be the active party, and it threw me completely out of my element, and managed to inspire a surprising amount a dread. What if I screwed things up? By putting off the planning, it allowed me to delay thinking about it, or at least try to. The whole "if I don't look at it, maybe it will go away" sort of thing, but that never really works well, and even when you're trying to put something out of your mind it creeps in there and torments you. It's some pretty irrational stuff. I sort of cut myself off from much of the Internet, and immersed myself in work (which actually did pretty good as far as all that went, as I had to give a talk at an alignment meeting, which I'd never done before, and I think it ended up going well, so that's at least something, right?) But the time had come where it simply couldn't be put off any longer, so there I was, scrambling.
On Wednesday, I took a train to Berne. This was to be a dry test-run, to make sure I could work my way around the train system, etc., but also to have an excuse to be all touristy, and see some more of Switzerland while I'm over here, because in all reality, I haven't gotten out and seen as much of the sights as I would have liked to.
So, I woke up a bit later than I'd have liked (circa 8:30), perhaps partly due to the fact that I had trouble falling asleep the night before. Nerves, I guess. It must have been 3:30 before I finally nodded off. Anyway, after a quick breakfast, getting a few things together, and getting to the train station in downtown Geneva, I caught the 9:45 train to Berne. The trip took about two hours. Once I arrived, I wandered around sort of lost for a bit, trying to find the tourist info section, only to discover that it was right inside the train station, so I turned around and went back. When there I picked up a map, and an iPod-guided walking audio-tour of the old city, because those things are awesome, and it was relatively inexpensive. It was slightly after noon at this point, and I was told that the equipment needed to be returned by 16:00 (because I guess maybe that's when they close?), and since the walk claimed to be two hours each way, I immediately set off.
There was a whole bunch of really cool things along the walk, and I took a lot of pictures, but I'll only share a few of the highlights.
One of the first stops on the guided tour was the Bundeshaus, the Swiss Parliament building. Berne is the political capital of Geneva, and the building was pretty impressive to look at.
After a few more stops involving mostly some pretty interesting fountains and statues, came the next really impressive piece, the Zytglogge, a famous clock tower. Apparently this is the most photographed subject of Berne, so I did my part in contributing to that as well.
Since I arrived just minutes before the hour I waited around a bit longer to watch it strike. There was a pretty impressive display, that I botched recording, so I resolved to come back later in the evening to to to get it then. Unfortunately, by that point, I was dangerously low on camera memory. So, things are slightly less than satisfactory, but the below videos should give you an idea at the sort of display that goes on there.
Click to viewNext up, as far as the really interesting sights go, is quite possibly one of my favorite parts of my Berne excursion: Einstein Haus. This was the apartment Einstein stayed in while working as a patent clerk in Berne, and where he penned his amazing 1905 papers. I am kind of rocked, when I realize that he was only as old as I am now when he wrote those, 26. Makes me feel kind of... pathetic. But I guess there's no shame in measuring up poorly against someone as great as Einstein.
The Münster, or Minster, is an impressive church in Berne, and its tower is, I believe, the highest point in the old city. While not really keen on religion, I can't deny that medieval churches usually boast some pretty awesome architecture, and that The Church tended to have all sorts of money, and was responsible for commissioning all kinds of great works of art. I went and climbed the tower, admission was only a couple of CHF, so it was worth it.
Finally, I'd made my way to the end of the first half of the tour, the Bärengraben (Bear pits).
There was a surprising lack of bears, so I looked around and found a sign explaining why.
"Well damn!", I thought. You can't go to Berne and not see the bears. I resolved to go to the zoo after finishing the walk back, which was actually fairly less impressive, and some of the features were reduplicated with a "If you already took the other walk, feel free to skip this stop and move on", which was actually pretty good for me, because with the extra time I'd spent at Einstein's house, the Zytglogge, and the Minster, I was cutting it pretty close to the 4 PM deadline. After dropping off the equipment and reclaiming my passport (collateral), I realized I hadn't eaten lunch, and was starving, so I grabbed a burger from a sidewalk stand. Since there were people at the train station who had been passing out small free samples of Coke Zero and Sprite Zero (must have been 20 cl cans I think?), I used one of those to wash it down with, before catching a bus to take me to the zoo.
The zoo was pretty neat, and I did a bunch of wandering around and caught a bunch of really neat shots.
Dwarf Crocodile:
Arctic Fox
Wild Cat
Seals (Seehund in German, looks like Sea Hound to me...)
Snake-necked Turtle
To my dismay, the first time I went to see the bears in the zoo, they were not there! However, I would not be deterred, I wandered around, caught all of the rest of the zoo, and upon my return, my patience was rewarded. Not only were the bears there, but it seemed to be feeding time!
Also, cage cleaning time. One of the zoo-workers was trying to clean the other side of the glass enclosure, using a ladder and leaning a long wiper-thing down the other side, but one of bear's was causing problems by being curious, and hanging around the area. It was very interested in what was going on and didn't want to leave, and needed to be distracted by have apples thrown in. This only worked some of the time though, and was only a very temporary solution at that. I was thoroughly amused by all of this, and was so engrossed I completely forgot to take pictures. Afterward though, I realized I should probably have recorded it, so I instead caught some footage which wasn't quite as good, but still neat, of when the worker was having some fun with the bear while washing the outside of the glass.
The zoo closed at 6:30, so I took the bus back to the Zytglogge and took the recordings seen previously when it was striking 7 PM, which in conjunction with my earlier botch from 1PM almost tells the complete picture, and then I caught the 7:34 train back to Geneva. Got back to the house at about 10ish, had dinner, and went to sleep at 11 or so.
Before she left for Europe we'd exchanged a few messages and settled on a meeting time and place. Due to the lack of any good ideas on my part she offered up the final choice of her hotel on the 11th in the morning (sometime between 9 and 10). Previously I was like, sure that's cool, but when my plans had shifted to just day trips, it suddenly dawned on me that I would have to get up at ridonkulously early to make that deadline. In addition, Thursday's train journey was much more complicated than the one to Berne, involving changing trains a couple of times, once at Berne, and again at Interlaken Ost, which meant I really couldn't afford to recoup some sleep on the journey, for fear of missing a switch. So what ended up happening was I woke up at 3, ran/walk the 6km or so to the station (because the buses don't run that early), bought my ticket from one of the automated machines at 4:28, grabbed the 4:56 train to Berne, switched to the 7:04 train to Interlaken Ost, switched to the 8:01 train to Lungern, and finally arrived a little after 9 AM.
It was raining and dreary that morning, so I got pretty wet on my trek to the station, and when wet my right sandal sort of chafed up one of my toes, which was unfortunate, but it wasn't anything major. I dried out over the course of the train rides, and when I arrived it was partly sunny, and not raining so much. The train station at Lungern was a small tiny thing, like the one at Zimeysa, which dashed my hopes of just asking an attendant directions to the hotel, and it also instilled a bit of a fear in me. On the most recent line out there had been a little map of the route with all the stops listed, and the train actually didn't stop at most of them. I theorized that the couple it did stop at were ones where the person who checked tickets had noted people were heading for, which made me nervous about the return trip. What if the train just sailed on past and stranded me there? (This turned out not to be the case.) At any rate, I need to find the hotel, so I started wandering down the nearest street, which turned out to the the right choice. It was a windy little road down a hill, and at the bottom it met up with what was apparently the main street of town, and the only one with any traffic to speak of. Still not having come across any maps, or landmarks, or the street sign I was looking for, I turned left, which did turn out to be the right direction, and actually the main street did turn out to be the street I wanted, as after a couple of minutes I saw the sign for Hotel Löwen, and getting closer I saw a girl sitting in a chair on the balcony. Assuming it was Tressy, I called out to her, and butchered the pronounciation of her real name, but it turned out to be her, and she was pretty cool about it, so all was well. The time was now probably approximately 9:30. Deadline achieved!
Despite having been, and still being pretty nervous about the whole thing, we swiftly got up and running, just conversing and chatting and having a grand old time. We went walking around, and found a nice bench near the lake to sit on, and we watched some fishermen in boats, and continued to chat. At or around noon, I was getting pretty hungry, because all I'd had to eat was a coffee and some sort of pastry in one of the dining cars on the train (I hadn't wanted to fix any breakfast at home for fear of waking up the couple I live with), so we wandered off in search of food. Apparently it was some sort of holiday, I have no idea which, because Tressy told me that pretty much everything was closed except for the hotel and the gas station, so we headed off looking for the gas station. We didn't end up finding it, which was fine, because we ended up going to something really, really cool. It was a path up to where we suspected this waterfall that we'd seen was, and we were right.
(Yes, that is a Tressy in the last picture. I wasn't sure how she'd feel about getting her photo taken, but since she snapped at least a couple of pictures of me, I'm thinking it's pretty much alright. Especially as all you see here is her back. Sadly, I completely zoned out later, and forgot to ask her friends to catch a picture of the two of us together. And for the most part I was more engrossed with talking and listening, that I forgot to take a lot of pictures. These four are all I really have, though I plan on asking her for copies of the ones she took when she's all done with her trip, and back online.)
We climbed up to the waterfall, and played around, and had a good time. We took off our sandals and kind of scamper-climbed all over the place. There was enough space beneath the waterfall that I thought it would be really cool to cross under it, and so I did, and she followed me. It was pretty neat, though it ended up getting us wet. Totally worth it though. There was a surprising lack of rainbows in the waterfall mist, I guess there either wasn't enough sun, or the angle was bad, or who knows, but even so that didn't really diminish the enjoyment more than the tiniest bit. After, I don't know, half an hour(?) we'd had our fill, and made our way to where we'd set down our stuff and geared back up. We continued walking along this road that we'd been travelling, and it turned out to circle the lake entirely, so we ended up taking a couple of hours and making a whole circuit. After we got back to the town we finally found the gas station; turns out it had been in the opposite direction of where we'd headed initially... Ah well. We grabbed some sandwiches and some bottled mineral water. I asked if she had some francs (because I assumed she'd probably stocked up on the more useful [for her] Euros), and she didn't and was going to pay with a credit card. I squashed that idea, and bought it for her, which she was pretty cool with after making sure I was serious. "If someone wants to buy me something, I'm not going to put up a fight," was pretty much her take on the matter.
We took our food to the hotel, and sat outside on the balcony, where I'd first saw her, to eat it. During the course of this we met a few of the other people from Tressy's tour group as they were either coming or going, and she introduced me, and I've promptly forgotten all of their names. After our lunch, we went up to her room, and she had me flip through one of her sketchbooks, and as I drooled over the various different arts, she explained what each of them was, and sometimes there were really neat stories. Certainly one of the best things to do, much better than just flipping through a gallery without any of the insightful commentary.
At around 6 PM we wrapped things up. I'd noted that the last train out left at 18:44, so we wandered back up to the train station, and chilled there until it arrived. After a hug, and an "It was awesome to meet you," we parted ways.
And that wraps up my summary. I'm sure I've forgotten, or left out, or have a different take on some of the things, but if you want to get the rest of the story, you'll have to ask Tressy for her take on things.
P.S. Oh, yeah, I twittered about it, but at some point during the conversations the topic of hair color somehow came up (maybe it had to do with her henna job? I honestly can't remember), but this reminded me of a discussion/arguement I had had with Mory about blondes who are no longer blonde but still call themselves blonde, so I decided to seek an outside opinion. I asked Tressy what she colour she'd describe my hair as, and after turning it over a bit she said "Probably Strawberry Blonde, or because I know some guys don't like that, maybe Ginger? Or perhaps gold streaked with red." (I don't remember exact words, but it should be very similar to that.) Because the last bit struck me as humorous, I played back by telling how I'd have to make an RP character and describe him like that, "He has azure eyes, and his hair is golden, streaked with the colour of blood flecks." We both got a good laugh out of that.
I do think that perhaps she was unduly influenced by the beard though, as that's really the only place red really makes any noticeable appearance, but then again, I'm not complaining. I kind of like how she described my hair... though to be perfectly honest, I would prefer Strawberry Blonde to Ginger. Ginger sounds a hell of a lot more feminine, to me at least.