Diving in the Donau: Skifahren in der Schweiz

People at Harvard are always saying that the connections you make there last a lifetime. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of Harvard students in my little corner of the deutschsprachigen Raum, so I haven't been able to extend the Harvard bubble for another year here. Which makes me even more happy that I made friends with the VUSers (Visiting Undergraduate Students), who are mostly Germans attending the University of St. Gallen in der Schweiz, during my last year of college. I already went to Oktoberfest with some of them, and this weekend, I was invited to a tiny village in Switzerland for skiing, sledding, eating, and other winter activities.

We were about an hour away from Zürich, right in the heart of the Alps.

Even when it was cloudy, the vistas were stunning.

Gabriel's family's cabin

The view from the balcony

I wasn't sure how the weekend would go, because my closest friends among the VUSers weren't able to come. But I needn't have worried, I had an awesome time talking and hanging out with the people who were there, and getting to know them better:

Oliver (TU-München), Ramona (Uni Zürich), Marie (St. Gallen), Gabriel (St. Gallen), Severin (St. Gallen), Ines (Uni Göttingen), and me (Harvard, of course!)

I think my favorite part of the weekend was the food, or rather, the meals. Sitting for hours around the long wooden table, heater on my back, eating heaping quantities of Swiss specialties:

Breakfast of (Swiss) cheese, Schinken and sausage, Eierspeis, Bratkartoffeln, and fruits.

Oliver and Gabriel even made a traditional Fondü for dinner on Saturday night. With white wine or Kirschenbrand, as you will.

There was no need to be self-conscious about my American style of eating, where you shovel food into your mouth at an ungodly pace. We all finished off the Fondü within minutes.

Hanging out in the hut in the evenings, drinking (Bayrisches) beer and Austrian / Californian wine, chatting, and playing board games was also a lot of fun:

Gabriel's father produced Big Brother Schweiz, so he had this promotional copy of the associated board game lying around.

Yet more proof that Germans take beer super seriously: We had no Weißbier glass, and so instead of drinking his beer out of the Flasche, Oliver der Bayer decided to use a vase.

But we also made time for actual winter pursuits, like skiing / snowboarding. I had kind of guessed this from the way Austrians talk about skiing, but Skigebiete in the Alps are totally different from the types of ski resorts we have in Pennsylvania. The language itself gives a clue to the difference -- while we in the United States most often speak of ski resorts, where a company takes it upon itself to turn a mountain into a series of slopes you can ride up and down, German speakers typically talk about a ski area, a whole mountain range, often encompassing multiple villages, that has had some Pisten (slopes) built on it. But the ski area, the mountain itself, has always existed, albeit in less accessible form, and a favorite Austrian activity is to go on a Skitour, where you clamber around the mountains doing a mixture of cross country and downhill skiing. (Interestingly, a concept I had never heard of in the US -- it took me almost a full winter to figure out what a "ski tour" was, because understanding both words doesn't help you figure out what you do on one.) Everything feels less commercial, more natural -- you're skiing on this portion of the mountain, but you can also take a turn and head into Tiefschnee, the deep powder, that just happens to exist.

All of this means that Alpenkinder (children of the Alps) have a very special, respectful relationship within the mountains. Almost everyone I saw on the slopes wore a helmet, and there's a greater appreciation for knowing and understanding your limits and avoiding danger. Avalanches are an ever-present concern, and so following "Do Not Enter" signs is selbstverständlich -- ducking under a barrier to get to some sick powder could kill you. (Yes, people do die every year in the Alps while skiing.)

I had a chance to experience this concern firsthand. The first slopes I went down with Ramona, Gabriel, Severin, and Oliver (two Schweizers and two Bavarians, born and raised in the Alps) went fine. "Oh, she's one of us," they must have thought, and without any warning, we ducked over to the other side of the mountain away from what were for them warm-up slopes. I was not one of them. I fell down on a particularly steep portion of the slope and twisted my knee. I tried to ski on, but they eventually convinced me that that was a stupid idea, and I spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday hanging out with the other Flachlandtirolerinnen, two girls from the flatlands of Northern Germany.