I haven't posted in a while, and the past week and a half are filled with at least three full posts. I will start now with my most recent adventure, then work my way back in time (if I feel like it?).
SO! Past week and a half are as follows: Cinqueterre...week-long field trip...Switzerland. Right now I am going to talk about Switzerland. In our wonderful second year of architecture, we took some basic architecture history classes and a few graduate students were assigned/hired as our TA's. One TA, Kent Brockman (yes, everyone gets the Simpsons reference, but that is actually his name and no he is not a news anchor), remembered our class would be in Rome this semester and sent an email to a classmate of mine notifying us that he lives and works in Switzerland and would love to have someone of us visit. Six of us - Blake, Jenny, Keihly, Nick, Zach, and myself, all plan a trip to Chur, Switzerland the weekend at the termination of our week long field trip (which I will get into later...) AND we also made reservations to visit the baths in Vals, Switzerland, designed by a famous architect, Peter Zumthor.
Uhmm... lets seee... do do dooo... what details, what details. Riding the train into Switzerland was complicated because each rail company cannot get exact details about another company's (or country's) routes so easily. For example, we had to book some trains in Italy using tranitalia, then some other trains and a bus using SBB CCF FFB (some crazy acronym like that). Turns out we made three unnecessary connections to get to the same place our original train would have taken us to. We arrive at the train/bus station and are greeted by a Minnesotan (Kevin) and a Spaniard (Bernardo) who was sent by Kent (old TA) to pick us up. We walked the interesting streets of Chur, with the stunning backdrop of the Swiss alps in every direction. The entrance/registration to our hostel was in a bar (...interesting...) and the most interesting stereo-typical german/swiss 'dude' was the bar tender. Think insanely ripped muscles, tiny-tiny but long shirt that barely covered his low-hanging pants - blond spiked hair and the silly german-american accent. The hostel was quite good - it was recently re-done with new furniture, lights, and wall graphics that were a nice touch.
A few hours and beers later, we end up taking a bus to a bowling alley. I made the mistake apparently EVERYONE makes when using the bus -- you can NOT put the coins into the slots, the bus driver must do it. He got pissy and started yelling at me in Swiss-German-Deutch something. I had to pay an extra .50 francs and I got to ride the bus. The bowling alley was fun- it was packed with the young, aspiring swiss teenagers with mo-hawks, cigarettes, etc (actually, it was fun and pretty cool).
I still feel like I am riding on a train/bus. Stupid delayed motion sickness.
Typical Italian becomes typical Switzerland: [almost?] any city you visit, it is located in a valley conveniently allowing said visitor to view the city from above via the ring of mountains surrounding. This was true for the cities I have been to in Italy (Rome, Vicenza, Verona, Florence, ....not Pisa..., the five cities of cinqueterre, need more?) and the same was true for Chur. I unexpectedly hiked forty-five minutes up this mountain to see a cloud-topped view of the city. In my wheezing, we found a small chapel built in the 1600's, and continued along many scary ledges, through trees, and around other stuff of the sort (like... mushrooms? deer? bambi?). The view was typical-above-the-city-exciting, but the mountains around had a bit of a different character to them. Switzerland is just beautiful.
Ever heard of Peter Zumthor? Now you have! This amazing architect constructed his first building in 1986-just after completing work for the city of Chur as part of the .... mmmm... restoration.. uhh... something? department (I might have my details wrong). The building is a somewhat open air structure that allowed viewing of some ancient Roman ruins (as if I haven't seen enough of that?). Two non-square rooms and a third sliver-shaped room is accessed through a cantilevered metal stair and creates a path by transforming to a light-weight steel cage with stairs accessing some standing areas. Windows allow complete transparency from the exterior to the interior. Three large skylights bring light in from above through black square-like tunnels. The larch wood on the interior (reminiscent of the larch wood floors originally part of the roman ruins) allow light in and add a golden glow to the interior palette. Big, fancy words, huh (I bet they made no sense and I am not going back to proofread, sorry). Very nice space, I wish I had visited earlier so I could have applied some of the ideas to a studio project I just did regarding aqueduct ruins.
Excitement. The only other 'spa' I went to was in Florida, and it did not involve natural water from the Swiss alps. This seemed a bit more high class (sorry Florida-you're just full of swamps, better luck next time). We arrive a bit early and are able to take some exterior shots of the building. As you can imagine, pictures of the inside are not welcome, and more practically, I would like NOT to drop my expensive DSLR camera into the water.I will explain the process of entry and the different rooms.
Find the ass-backwards weirdly located entry to the baths on the side of the hill that is below a service drive and near a hotel... (I think they're going to redesign that.........hopefully). Walk down a dark, black hallway and get to a confusing gate that says something in german speak. Figure out that you need to swipe your orange coin/token to magically open the gate. Walking down a narrow hallway, the first two doors are for women, the middle for families, and the last two are the locker rooms for the men. Along the opposite side of the hallway is a wall with copper pipes sliding through dripping (fresh?) water along the concrete wall causing natural rusting. The locker rooms are very red and small. Don't forget to use your orange coin/token to get the key off of the locker!
After putting on your speedo (yes, I was wearing a speedo. No joke. Stop laughing. I was wearing a speedo. Are you done laughing yet? Okay....... I'll wait. Done now? Speedo.) Through the locker rooms you can access the main 'atrium' (I like to use that word for big open spaces, because that's what the word means, right? Right?). Down a long staircase (a slow stair!) the composition of the main room becomes more clear. A large square is occupied by small square rooms in its corners and a cross-like pool fills the center. Each of these rooms are nooks and crannies that include different types of spas/hot-tubs etc. Every room and space has the same ceiling height creating consistently tall small rooms, but a comfortable atrium space.The first space is a shower. There are three of these, each having a different water diffuser, all mounted high in the ceiling- one with a shower head that makes heavy rain, another is a tube, and another the end of a pipe creating an even heavier flow of water.
Another space has cold, cold water -- around 14ºC. Across the hall is the hellishly-warm water, 56ºC (I think). Another room, my favorite, was the 'tea room'. It had warm water with yellow tea-leaves injected in the water. A small box on the side wall pushed a very pleasant lemony-mint smell. The beauty in this room was intensified with metal-panel clad walls which bounced any noise inside (and outside) for about 4 to 6 second. The magic was when everyone inside the room remained silent and the song of passing acoustics was consistently playing (does that make sense? 'Music' was made just by sitting in there).Against the main 'slow stair' was a pool that slowly lead people down and out of the building, to the outdoors. The spectacular view of the gorgeous building carefully carved to allow stunning views of the mountains was intense. Although it was about 50 to 60ºF outside, it was cold to remain outside of the water---the water, however, was perfectly warm. Three tubes stood at one end of the pool and bent over to create another stream of heavy flowing water. These were surprisingly relaxing against your neck and back. Sit against the building, look at the mountains, enjoy the sunshine, stay warm in the fresh water. Outside was one of my favorite locations.
Past the changing rooms were the toilets and showers, and even further were two saunas. Both saunas were similar, simply mirrored a bit so they would fit together like "L" shapes. First one walks into a shower - with low lying lights and steam flowing gently across the ceiling. Turning and passing through the first leather door is the first sauna room - mildly warm. The second and third, final rooms get increasing warm and increasingly cloudy. The third room has practically 2 feet of visibility. There are large black stone slabs and seats and hoses to cool off/make more comfortable. The interesting touch was the added scent -- hard to describe, I *think* it was ... uhmm... like lavender, or another type of tea, similar to the 'tea room'.
I discovered why there were two different saunas in a sort-of shocking way. I, obviously, cannot read German/Swiss-dutch/mix? and was at first confused at the signs outside the saunas. The first door has a sign that started with "durn....." and the second door has the same but an additional one that said "nadchel..." (or something similar, I do not remember exactly). The confusion was whether or not one was for male, the other for female---but that wasn't the case because those words were not similar to the ones for the changing rooms. I only stayed in the saunas for a short while only to return later to grab a friend of mine. This second visit was interesting (and thus the conclusion of what those words meant) - I was following a couple into the second sauna and noticed immediately a woman removing her swimsuit -- "Whoops!" I though ... but the couple continued to enter ... further, six more naked woman walk out of the sauna and into the initial shower -- "interesting........." I grabbed my friend to leave and noticed on the way out the couple, too, were missing their bathing suits.
The moral of the story is... the word "naked" sounds a little bit, some-what not really similar to the same word in German (or swiss or dutch or something?). I just think its funny how I found out.
We had a tight train schedule for the return trip, and we, in fact, didn't have tickets for the entire trip. As we got to one train station we hoped and prayed that we would be able to buy tickets at the late hour to the next. It luckily worked out (kind-of) and I remained incredibly relaxed thanks to the baths.
Here's the best part of the story (if the baths don't win it)-- Our ticket from Milano to Roma Termini were insanely cheap - 23.50 Euro for an 8 hour train ride. Keihly and I got our tickets in the Milan train station but somehow got separated from the other four. We walked towards the train and noticed many, many people standing outside the train waiting to get on... we continued to walk along the train further to the front only to notice that it was jam-packed with an insanely large amount of people. Apparently it is possible to purchase more tickets than seats available -- and how! Keihly and I camped out in the end of one car between the gangway (connection part between cars) and restroom door. As the eight hours passed, more stops were taken were more people attempted to get on. We even took two or three smoke breaks. It was pretty intense, but luckily everyone remained cool about it, and no one really acted like a jerk. We happen to be sitting next to an Italian teenager who spoke english and he wrote a sign "fuori servizio" and posted it on the door to keep people from treading through our floor-sitting to get to the bathroom. The conductor lady was pissed and removed the sign - but luckily didn't kick us off the train. We arrived in Rome. Finally. I probably slept 2 hours max.
What happened to the four others in our group? Apparently Jenny left her backpack on the last train, and as she attempted to search for it, the train started to depart for Zurich. She jumped off of the train and she and Blake stayed behind to file a police report, etc. Nick and Zach stayed with them for only a few minutes but got on the same train as Keihly and I and ironically had an identical experience regarding our restroom/floor seating situation.
Vacation is over.Shit. I just realized I lost my iPod on the train. This sucks.