(My experience with land in Switzerland, what about the land and landscape shapes the culture of Switzerland?)
Mountains-
When I think of Switzerland, I think of cheese, chocolate, and the snowy Alps. The dramatic beauty of the Swiss Alps is incomparable. Everywhere you look, you see mountains, and it always looks so majestic that it seems fake, like a movie backdrop. The city of Lausanne itself is up on a hill, climbing up a mountain. The streets are woven together in a complex of levels and staircases, tunnels that lead to other levels and streets, plazas that open up onto a church or central palace. There are a lot of hiding places and secret passageways in Lausanne. There are also a lot of ways to get lost and turned around, and it seemed that I was always trying to find the least-uphill way of getting someplace, even if it meant taking an indirect route. It quite reminded me of San Francisco in that way.
I also spent a weekend in Grindelwald, which is the land of serious mountains. Everyone goes to this Jungfrau region to do some kind of extreme sport- hiking, biking, snowboarding, skiing, sky diving. I took a big hike up a mountain for about 4 hours, the most strenuous and steep hike I have ever done. It was exhausting and exhilarating, and dramatically beautiful. Hopefully I’ll have photos soon.
Lac Leman- “Lutry Plage”
On a hot summer day, what’s the only thing anyone would ever want to do? Go to the Plage. You go to Lutry Plage any day of the week on one of those horribly hot days, and it is PACKED. People come in droves, teenagers, families. They sunbathe, they plunge into the lake, they jump off the dock into the rocky water (in a very dangerous manner that always made me really nervous, especially when I had to be responsible for the two children jumping in) It’s beautiful to swim in the clear water with the mountains surrounding you, but I always felt a little stressed out at Lutry Plage with the chaotic nature of the swimmers, rambunctious teenagers and little kids there.
Old Land-
There’s something about Europe that always draws me to the actual, physical land. Especially in the old parts of cities, where a church had been built in 1080 or something. I just love to sit, and be, just exist and feel the energy of the land that had been loved, taken care of, lived in, prayed in, worked in, created in, died in, for so many hundreds of years. It’s very sacred and spiritual for me, as mentioned in the SACRED entry about La Cite and the Cathedral. I certainly felt this old land energy in some places in Lausanne and Switzerland, but not nearly as strong as it was in places like England and Ireland.
I have to wonder if Switzerland’s organized, detailed, rule-bound culture has anything to do with it’s landscape. Perhaps the mountains presented a problem in building its civilization, and called for skilled engineering and design. Maybe the peaceful nature of the mountains gave people the time and space to think, and therefore could make scientific and medical advancements, whereas other places had too many distractions and variables.
