Ok…these posts are going to e a bit jumbled as I have limited amount of time and am writing most everything in word and getting it up as I can.
Starting with the most recent —-
The bells in the church next door to me ring at every quarter hour. It is 11:45pm. I hear at 7:00am they ring and ring and ring, much like they did today at noon…and that’s incessantly, for a good long while.
I missed today’s performance while making my way from the airport via rail and had the extreme misfortune of arriving here when everything was shutting down for lunch.
It’s been a good long time since I’ve caught a train in Switzerland, but I remembered enough to get to where I needed to go.
I managed to get to the hotel and check in and the rest of the gang showed up not too long after. We drove into Luzern to sightsee and get omiyage, went on a mostly fruitless search to try to find someplace to get dinner and ended up back at the hotel in Zofingen.
The bells are chiming midnight.
Heyyy…they don’t ring from midnight to 7:00am! Whew!
I can’t sleep anyway. Jetlag, I think.
There are birds singing but that’s about the only sound from the Kirchplatz with the occasional sound of a car going by further off on what I guess is the main road through this area.
I am channel surfing a bit, watching Aliens3 and the Natsu Basho on the Eurosports channel and anything I can find in English (which means a few British comedies and occasionally CNN).
Now I am listening to the classical radio station piped in over cable, I’m guessing, through the TV audio.
It’s surreal in a way, to one minute be walking amidst architecture and artwork clearly and frequently dated back to the 1500’s, only to turn around and get into a car, stop at the local strip mall and head back to the refurbished hotel room with all the modern amenities including cable TV and WiFi.
It’s not so much the timeline that’s getting me today, because I can stand in a valley that shows a record of geologic history that goes back hundreds of thousands of years, or look up at the sky and see millions of years more.
It’s more the efforts of so many people and how people haven’t changed much over the centuries and yet we are so different, too…and how fragile it all is. The 800 year old bridge that I saw maybe 7 or 8 years ago has since burned down and been rebuilt with many of the historic illustrations gone in a blaze of smoke and glory.
They made a post card out of a picture of the fire. It’s a fairly stunning picture, but I didn’t get a copy to send to anyone. There’s enough destruction going on these days without reminders of recent tragedies.
Heck…they had baseball-sized hailstones falling today, somewhere not too far away from here, that smashed up a bunch of peoples cars.
Right now it’s blissfully calm outside…and I wonder if the birds here have always sung like this throughout the night…or if they used to always ring the bells. Show tomorrow and then I get to start trying to get home. I hope the storms have cleared up enough I can get home.
It’s almost 5am. I have turned off the radio and am just listening to the quiet…and the birds singing over it.