Gruyères and Lausanne

Getting off the train in the small village of Gruyères, (yes, where the cheese was named), I didn't expect to see a robot picking cheese. I also didn't expect to see sexually explicit cartoons. But I was in for a treat.

In my terrible French I asked the train conductor "Do you have Gruyères?" A brief, quizzical look overcame his face until he was able to affirmatively identify me as a tourist and say "Oui!". Our small train rolled through the quiet Swiss landscape until we came to Gruyères, a small blip of a town near the edge of the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.

Tourist mecca beckoned. A small electric train (Disneyland-esque) advertised rides around town. The menu for the restaurant outside of the station had the word "fondue" and "cheese" splashed on it like an overzealous Jackson Pollack. We walked past the restaurant and gazed at what appeared to be the Matrix on dairy. Robotic arms loaded and unloaded gigantic wheels of cheese onto racks in an enormous warehouse that stretched the length of half a football field.

We jumped on a bus in the attempt at making it to a gondola that we had seen in some tourist literature. Being the only people on a gigantic commuter bus, it must have seemed odd to the driver that my friend and I had chosen to sit knee-knockedly on the same bus bench together, Brokeback Mountain-style. He took us the 2 miles uphill until we came to the cog railway that was out of service for the winter. Defeatedly, we walked back to the bus and took it back to the main village.

If you've never had double cream with coffee in your life, try this experiment: dunk your head in a vat of butter. Remove head, pour coffee in cup and sip. Good, eh? Coffee was served with double cream in tiny thimbles that did not pour, but rather had to be scooped out. We saw people around us having double cream with strawberries. Decadent. We sat and watched the Ricola-esque horns and walked over to the HR Giger museum.

Having not seen the movie Aliens since my 8th grade birthday party, (which ROCKED by the way), I was ill-prepared for the HR Giger museum. The Swiss-born artist was the mastermind behind the scary aliens in the Aliens movies and was apparently a sufferer of night terrors: something that he had initially turned to art therapy to help relieve. His dark, sexual imagery was completely misplaced in this land of dairy, cows, and rolling hills.

We finished up Gruyères by doing a 30-minute breeze through of the chateau of the village. At this point, however, I'm beginning to get all chateau-ed out.

On the way home we stopped in Lausanne, grabbed dinner, walked through a street festival, got caught in a rainstorm we had heard coming across the lake (cool), and eventually found ourselves trapped in an all-too-small traincar with about 400 Spanish schoolgirls who apparently had found a new frequency to communicate on: somewhere between where dog's hearing begins and human eardrums rupture. We were glad to stumble back into Geneva with only minor injuries.