Realizations; Meditations and Movement

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well lots of things to say now. First off we are back in France and I am sitting in a little cafe in a village called sisteron halfway between Grenoble and Nice in the Provence region. Last I blogged, we were in Geneva, which turned out to be a very bad representative of switwerland. The night of the last blog we decided to watch the match in the fanvillage where many campsites remained empty even up to the day of the match. While in town though we saw a lot of Portuguese supporters roaming the streets and the fanzone in town was pretty packed. The fan village was eerily empty and we sat on the grass in front of a huge outdoor screen with maybe 50 other people, lots of kids. I decided to give up the dream of getting tickets when I realized scalpers were nowhere to be seen near the stadium 2 hours before Kick off. Nonetheless it was a pretty nice relaxed way to watch Portugal v Turkey, and we still got to watch drunk portuguese teenagers run around with flags when Portugal scored.

The next morning we left for Bern, where the dutch would play italy the following day. The orange hordes of the dutch were out in full force with drums and trumpets all over town, and many dressed in bright orange overalls. I didnt realize how nuts they were about football, but the radio said that there were something like 30,000 dutch in Bern, a town of ~150,000. Bern turned out to be a lovely hilly city with a fast flowing turqouise river flowing through its centre and right past our campsite which was flooded with crazy orange people. April was probably one of 3 girls on the campsite with about 300 orange men. Even the womens bathroom constantly swarmed with orange men. When the game started, the fanzone designed to hold 40,000 was full and turning away thousands of people including us, and we were forced to watch it on one of the many TVs scattered throughout the streets in temp pubs and stands. When the dutch scored each goal, the whole city shook.

Also went to the Einstein museum which was actually the apartment that he lived in while working at the patent office and wrote his most influential works in 1905. The museum housed a twenty minute film that read more like the directions for baking a flan or a weird episode of where in the world is Albert Einstein than a biography.

After Bern we decided to flee the city scene qnd escape to Interlaken which as Matt and Anna suggested was a beautiful mountainy and alpy place. We stayed in the little village of Lauterbrunnen nestled up the valley, and enclosed by giant cliffs and waterfalls on either side. It really was a hiker paradise and still had a quaint feeling to it, even though it was quite aware of its tourism industry (aaaa travel writing cliches are seeping into my consciousness). It seems that every morning we would wake up to beautiful sunshine, but by afternoon the mountains got socked in and rain clouds would cover the mountains above, so many evenings were spent inside watching football with the constant flow of Aussies who were being brought in by busabout tours. One mega day of hiking ensued, which left our legs, now conditioned to the automobile lifestyle, in shambles. So next day was paragliding, a pretty cool experience floating above this valley and for whatever reason being entirely comfortable despite the only thing between you and a 1000m fall was some cloth and some nylon straps. April (who is unscathed before anybody gets worried) will gladly share her paragliding experience at request as it had a partially traumatizing moment which is her story to tell. Just ask her how Benny is doing and she'll know what you mean.

Woke up the next morning in rain that had lasted since the previous afternoon, imagined the sunny beaches of France and promptly removed ourselves from the mountains. Spent last night in Grenoble after a long day of driving and watched france v nederlands with the french loyal. Best game of eurocup so far, but lots of depressed french people after robbens heart crushing goal to take ned up 3-1. Now in Sisteron, and we can almost taste the beaches probably in the same way you can taste them when you are driving the fraser canyon (so not very much yet)

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Photos

paragliding
what is my pant leg doing there

Comments

[RobA]

good stuff
good post daniel. and good pics too. i read the first paragraph aloud to sandra - she laughed about the drunk teenagers. we're going to commercial drive in the morning to watch portugal play the swiss.