Thursday, September 11, 2008

129 sq. km Slip-n-Slide

I am off to visit the Aletsch Glacier and the town of Bettmeralp.

In the spirit of last-minuteness that so easily besets some of us, Aubrey and Josh and I got around to booking our accomodations today. We leave tomorrow. :) Although we considered a great many exciting options for activities (horseback riding and hang-gliding not excluded), and several intriguing sleeping options, from teepees to mountain huts that list "rain or snow (all year)" as the only advertised amenity,in the end we booked two nights at a fancy pants place which I shall tell you more about after I go.

Since we're not staying in a teepee or roughing it up in the snow, the most exciting activity of the weekend looks like it will probably prove to be this nifty Suspension Bridge.

In case you didn't know, the Aletsch Glacier is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, but you can google it yourself and read all about it (be prepared to also find photos of whole crowds of people in their birthday suits: Green Peace did a nakie photo shoot on the glacier). Unfortunately, it's supposed to rain and be rather chilly this weekend. Not that rain itself is a huge show-stopper for people from Oregon, where to go hiking almost any time Sept.-May is to hike in the rain.


That's basically all the news I have. School starts Monday. Work has been going fine. M2 and I baked some steller cookies this morning using my great-grandma's recipe. An interesting thing about the girls: boys exist in a sphere almost totally off their radar. Any time they play house, all the babies are named girls names, always. There are princesses and queens, but never kings. And when M2 looks at my family picture in my room, she says "Look! There's your mommy, and your daddy, and you." And I say, "yeah! and who are those other people?" and even though I have told her lots of times that those are my brothers and what their names are, she still says she doesn't know who they are. It's like it's a relationship she doesn't quite make sense of because she doesn't have one that's similar herself. But THEN! the one time I DO hear about boys is when we're at the playground where there is a bit of graffiti nearby. Then she asks "why did some boys write on that wall?" !! Interesting, hmmm?

Ok, I'm off to finish getting ready to go. Y'all have a good weekend now, and I'll post some pictures when I get back.

1 comment:

  1. Well, everyone knows that Graffiti are made by "Nachtbuben" - there is no equivalent term to describe putative female vandals. So language itself only allows for boys getting their head full of dumb ideas and implementing them.

    ReplyDelete