fastnachts mulligan

Since my last post, I have made little or no progress on my paper for later this month. Its been a great week or so.

I pushed off to Switzerland on Friday morning for another fastnachts weekend. On Friday evening Chris and I went around to Fanny's flat for dinner with a couple of her friends, one Swiss-French and the other German, and her flatmate. It went off like a can of whipped cream, due largely to the going off of a can of whipped cream.

On Saturday evening we caught a train over to Murten, accompanied by Stefan and a trainload of crazy Swiss youth with smoke bombs. The fastnachts was smaller than Bern, but seemed to me more youth-oriented. We drank a lot, mainly beer but also absinthe, which was very good, and talked to a number of women, firstly some Swisslies from down near Italy, and later the Scott girls, whom I recognised much to Chris' surprise. There was a big tent full of school-age types drinking furiously in close quarters, but it wasn't overly pleasant, although we did chat to a German girl outside who believed I was French but didn't believe Chris was German. Very amusing. We wound things up in a bar overlooking the lake, where we ran into Nora's cousin again, before taking the 6:17am train home. I only got a couple of hours sleep before catching a 10:30am train to Basel for my trek home, so was a bit run-down by the time I arrived.

Just thinking about it now, the number of things in common with the last trip is scary. A meal with Fanny and her friends, almost identical conversations with the Scott girls, Nora's cousin and her boy, and finishing up in a bar in the early morning. Inside the bar was different, though. Last time I seem to remember being more or less occupied in conversation, but this time I went into fairly long spells of looking out through the snow over the lake and wondering exactly how I had come to be in a Swiss bar at 4am, and how far away it was, by so many metrics, from home.