i suppose i did wish for a little more excitement

last weekend was pretty action-packed.

friday night we went to geneva to celebrate katja's birthday in the park. strangely, nearly half the people there were somehow from the states, canada or great britan. it was a little odd, but a lot of fun. and it was the day after the full moon, and it reflected on the lake; very pretty.

we then stayed at antoine's parents's house for the night, and in the morning headed for montana. what i didn't think of until then was that from geneva, the best route to montana actually goes south of the lake. know what else is south of the lake? yep, you guessed it---france. guess who didn't bring his passport? anyway, they were all convinced that we wouldn't get stopped, so we went anyway, and either we got lucky or they were right, since we didn't get stopped. (which is actually a *very* good thing, seeing as georgette is from trinidad, and is not allowed to visit the EU, so she would have been even worse off than me.)

in sion, we met up with walter and a few others who would be joining us for the via ferrata.

short side-story: it wasn't until the previous day that i finally figured out who "walter" was, despite the fact that i had spent plenty of time talking to him at all the different events we go to. why? well, because when i originally asked him what his name was (months and months ago at daniel's thesis defense party), i was certain that he told me it was "voltaire" (say it with a swiss german accent, and then add lots of drunken background noise, and i think you'll understand). this revelation was simultaneously incredibly hilarious and embarrasing. what made matters worse though, was that i was dumb enough to tell markus about this, since i thought it was amusing. well, he thought it was amusing too---amusing enough to tell everybody else about as well. including walter himself. with the addition of a siren, some flashing lights, and a telescoping ladder, i'm quite certain i could have passed for a fire engine at that moment.

okay, so we grabbed the rest of the group and headed up the mountain to the starting point. now "via ferrata" is neat, because it's basically where there's a rock face that you would expect hardcore rock climbers to go up over several days, and they put metal bars and things into the rock, so that ordinary humans (like me, for instance) can climb up it with only moderate effort and risk. and you clip your harness into a steel cable that's running up the rock, so that just on the off chance that you do fall, you don't die (a nice plus, you know, that 'not-dying' thing).

at the top, we had lunch overlooking the valley, which was gorgeous, and then walked down the back side.

then, adding a few more people to the group (some other valaisians that grew up with antoine/jcz/jerome/gracien/walter/etc) we went paintballing. this was, of course, my first such experience, but it sounded like it could be fun, so i decided to give it a try. well, i stand by my stance of "try most things once," but there are some things for which once is more than enough. :) this was not my thing at all. (probably this comes as no surprise as all to anyone who knows me.) it was waaaaaay too realistic. a royal mind-fuck. i mean, i knew it was fake, and that i was surrounded by my friends, but all of the sensory input around me was war, danger, and inevitable death. it hardly required any physical exertion whatsoever, but i could hardly breathe, just because my body was fully convinced that i was going to die, and every part of it was utterly terrified. it was a very strange, visceral response. mentally, i really don't think i'm afraid of dying, but physically, my body turned itself into a nervous wreck totally beyond my control. we had three teams of five, two of which would be playing at a time. i played three rounds, and then passed my gun to someone from the off-team for my fourth. i just couldn't do it anymore---it wasn't fun, it was freaky. anyway, experience gained; lesson learned.

collecting even more people (must be up to like 25 by now) we went to pichus's house for a raclette. he lives up on the side of the valley, and has a stunning panorama off the balcony. amazing. the food was tasty too. you know, standard swiss faire; lots of cheese and no nutrients. hahaha.

somewhere in here it came to light that markus had neglected to mention to me that the ascent planned for sunday was going above the treeline and would undoubtedly require crampons, which of course i didn't have, since i wasn't expecting anything of the kind. i would have been more than happy to rent or buy them, but naturally, being in switzerland, such a thing is not a possibility on saturday evening or sunday morning... as it turned out, i hear the weather was pretty terrible anyway, so they told me i didn't miss out on much.

but that kinda fed into the next crazy turn in this messed up story; trying to find a place to stay the night. which would have been fine and easy under other circumstances, but with all the locals having already achieved their customary blissful state of inebriation, having a coherent conversation about logistical or organizational details is a recipe for disaster (as i learned). i thought we had discussed and arranged everything properly, and was told to jump in a car, which i thought was headed for gracien's house. instead, it showed up at a bar, and we stayed there for another two hours. then the details start to get fuzzy (from being dog tired; i had stopped drinking hours ago after about a grand total of 3 glasses of wine), but somehow i found myself standing back in pichus's driveway with pichus, yannick, and nicolas (yannick's friend from paris). just to recap, that makes one person with a house, and three people standing there looking some combination of lost and dumb. for whatever reason (he was still quite drunk), he thought it would be a bad idea to take us back into the house, so the four of us ended up in the separated barn, which they have recently converted into a music/recording studio (by the way, it was a really awesome setup, and i was very jealous). once there, more drinks were doled out, and we continued to "party" until about 5:30am, at which point someone finally determined that it would be acceptable for us to stay on the floor there in the studio (fine by me, i just needed sleep, anywhere).

about two and a half hours later, nicolas and i woke up (yannick was still basically dead to the world) and went out in search of a bakery to get something to eat. after wandering a bit, we came across a gentleman vacuuming his car, and asked him for directions. he looked at us strangely, but did tell us which direction to go in, and that there was a village about 300 metres down the path. aparently, "300 metres" in valais translates into about 2 kilometres in the real world. :) but we eventually located the bakery, bought a nice large tresse (braided egg bread), and climbed back up the hill to wake yannick, who by this time was slightly more civil. :)

while sitting by the side of the road, looking down over the valley and enjoying our breakfast mixed with the sounds of some kid with a rice rocket joyriding around a mountain somewhere in the valley (the echo made for an interesting dynamic), who should drive up but gracien (apparently he forgot his mobile phone the previous evening). this allowed us to follow him back to his house, where we reclaimed stephanie and georgette, and then piled into yannick's car and headed back to lausanne, where a nice long afternoon nap was to be necessary for me.

and, as if that wasn't enough excitement already, i got woken from my nap by a phone call from sandra, who was finally getting around to contacting me about the tandem arrangement we had discussed. so i really quick-like cleaned up the apartment and invited her over for dinner, where i helped her with her french, and tried to get her to help me a bit with my german. it took me a while to convince her that i am actually serious about learning german (why does no one ever believe me?), but eventually i got a few words out of her. we'll see how it goes next time.

clearly, after that, work this week has been somewhat of a nightmare on wheels (and it's not over yet), but i'm hanging in there, at least for the time being.

oh, and i don't know if i mentioned it before, but here at work we've been having problems with the capacitors on the motherboards of the dell computers spontaneously exploding and causing the computer to overheat and shutdown. those ones are under warranty, and dell has been sending people out to fix them, but yesterday, the same thing happened to my motherboard in my computer at home, which irritates the hell out of me, obviously. must be something in the cosmic background radiation here in switzerland... weird...