Welcome to Wil

After Venice, I headed back into Switzerland and to Wil, a small town located near St. Gallen, in Switzerland's northeast corner. Our friend Judith is from Wil and her family still resides there - I was going to stay with Vreni, her sister, her husband Iwald, and her niece Maria. While there, I intended to get some sort of feel for everyday life in Switzerland (it is orderly) and consume lots of cheese (a given) while taking brisk semi-mountain air (of course). Wil is not on the tourist track but is an eminently pleasant place to live - located in the "semi flat" part of Switzerland, it does not possess chamois, ski lifts, and funincular railways but does have much in the way of natural trails, wooded tracts, and a very old and very German downtown. It is worth a visit.

I took the train from Venice to Arth Goldau to Zurich to Wil, which was a haul thank you very much but at least a scenic one. The weather was a bit cloudy and rainy, which actually led to tumbling mists and one helluva rainbow around Zug. After a mad dash in the Zurich railway station (where I was assisted by a friendly guy from Frankfurt with the steep stairs,) I was on the train to Wil, zipping through Switzerlands aforementioned Relatively Flat part. I arrived in Wil an hour late due to a hold-up in Milan - Italian's inability to run trains on time generally fills the Swiss with a sense of superiority. They deserve to feel superior - some of the delays up on the board at Milan's fascist old pile of a station were about three hours long.

I stumbled out of the station into a slight drizzle in Wil and was met by the lovely Maria, Judith's 18 year old cousin. She's just graduated from Swiss high school and will be visiting the USA soon. In any case, we hopped in the car and headed up the hill to their house, which is located on the side of the hill. Their house was designed by a friend of theirs and is incredibly modern and attractive looking - it's almost vertical and covered in interesting artifacts from Vreni's and Iwald's travels. They have been almost everywhere.

We had dinner - Vreni is an excellent cook - which featured meatballs in tomato sauce, couscous, and a great salad made out of lettuces from their own garden. (By the by, the German word for lettuce is salat which leads to various comical misunderstandings). Maria and I would be heading to St. Gallen the next day.