The rest of the night is a little hazy; fortunately, I hooked up with a couple of kindly Swiss guys who watched my backpack while I was wandering around drunk. One of them, Patrick, even put me up for the night. He mentioned that he would be touring the US later this year, and I offered to reciprocate. We shall see. It’s understandable, then, that I devoted a lot of Tuesday to hangover maintenance. Yuri and I narrowly missed each other in Zurich, and I killed a couple of hours (Yuri: “Time isn’t for killing, it’s for enjoying.”) at the Kunsthaus (art museum). I was there, primarily, to see one of my favorite paintings: Mondrian’s Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue. Checking the directory for the collection, I saw that it was in a room with the likes of Warhol and Klee – my kind of guys. It turned out, though, that it had been replaced temporarily by some German’s self-aggrandizing room installation – plaster casts of himself in various poses, amateur footage of his friends hanging out projected on a dozen screens; utter dreck.

Tuesday night, though, was amazing. We met back up in Bern, and had dinner with Ronny’s parents. Think fruit and cheese by their backyard pond, with fields and mountains on the horizon. As the weather cooled off, we retreated inside for drinks and an amazingly wide-ranging, trilingual conversation. Libor lit up the grill, and returned brandishing something like 2 kg of bacon-wrapped pork loin – “Americans eat lots of meat, right?” Long story short, Ronny’s parents were incredible hosts, and I wished we never had to leave, but we needed to get an early start with Ronny in the morning, so with parting gifts of Swiss chocolates and desserts, we bid farewell to Switzerland, though probably not for the last time.

Swiss snack

National champs!

Môtiers is very much in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. It was refreshing to be able to communicate, and (according to Ronny) the Francophone Swiss are too proud to speak anything else, so we actually got to get in some French practice. When we got into town, all the stores were closed and everyone at lunch at the local café, so we joined in. Lunch was escargots, chevre salad, and the local absinthe, which is very good. We picked up a liter, just in case. On the whole, it seems to be a pleasant place; the tourism is low-key enough so as to be unobtrusive. Definitely a small town though, and apparently without that notorious Swiss reserve – lots of the people we passed said a cheerful “Bonjour!”

Saturday Ronny needed to study, so we poked around Bern for a few hours, found a giant chess set, and (predictably, with Yuri involved) wasted 90 minutes. Yuri won, albeit with a couple mulligans. Otherwise, we spent a lot of the time walking along the Aare River, which is fast-moving and unbelievably clear for someone accustomed to the Mississippi and Wabash. Swimming would be a hoot. If we come back later in the summer it will definitely be on the agenda. Later that night we went to a “barbecue” with some friends of Ronny’s husband Urs. The wine and beer were flowing pretty freely, and on top of it being a generally good time I think that Yuri and I were able to at least somewhat improve their opinions of Americans as we practiced our French and Spanish while picking up the odd word or two of German. I suppose it stands to reason that the fiercely neutral Swiss would balk at the concept of preemptive war, but the truth is that Bush and Iraq come up all the time. It’s as if Europeans feel the need to tell me personally that no, this is not OK, and would I please go home and tell my friends.

On the way home we drunk-dialed Yuri’s mom.

Môtiers town square

Swiss graffiti is erudite

On the banks of the Aare

Eating raclette

Any minute now...

Ronny and Urs

Anyway, Kilkenny seems like a nice enough place. We stayed in a campsite south of town and the owner never showed up to collect, which was nice because Ireland has put me way over budget. It’s also supposed to have a good nightlife, but Tuesday night was pretty much dead, and we walked back to the campsite in the dark, sharing a bottle of Paddy and singing. Wednesday we got a late start, but I still wanted to see Kells’ Priory. Yuri decided we didn’t have time and went back into Kilkenny to write or some shit. Which turned out to be a good thing, because I (after a 5 km – walking – false start) got a ride with a farmer who had been born and lived his entire life in Kells. In an Irish brogue so thick I could barely understand, he insisted that I tell him everything I knew about American Indians, and confided that though he had always wanted to travel the world, the farthest he had made it was England. The Priory was nice, he said, but the real attraction was an abandoned monastery further up the road, where the Kind and Queen of Ireland were buried. And then we arrived in Kells, and he gave me one last piece of advice before I left. “If ye’re oot after dark,” he said, “beware the Banshee. She’s the curse o’ the O’s and Mc’s.”

“Nice” doesn’t begin to describe Kells’ Priory, which, even in ruins, is easily the largest castle I’ve ever seen. Sheep still graze in the courtyard, and with no other human being in sight, it’s easy to imagine Irish warriors rushing around to defend themselves from attack. Truly another one of those sights words cannot do justice. And now I faced a difficult decision: if I continued on to the monastery, I would have to hitch at least some of the 17 km back to Kilkenny in order to catch my train. What the hell.

There’s something moving about graveyards, especially when you’re alone in one, let alone when it’s in the middle of a crumbling 12th-century monastery. I could have stayed for hours, the only sounds the crunch of my own footsteps and the bleating of sheep. But as it was I hardly had time to take it all in before retracing my steps to Kells. Fortunately, I had only walked a short distance back towards Kilkenny before I was picked up, and by a wealthy woman on her own no less. She shared a few stories of her own fantastically far-ranging travels and was even nice enough to drop me at the campsite.

By the time I caught up with Yuri at the train station I had walked about 16 km anyway, though. We even had time to grab a pint in a beer garden before our train to Dublin. Then we took a bus to the airport, where Yuri set up his Thermarest for some chemically-induced sleep while I watched the bags all night. I have trouble sleeping in airports, planes, trains, and beds anyway, so by the time we flew into Frankfurt and got to Bern (56 hours after leaving Doolin), I was exhausted. Ronny met us at the train station, and we had dinner and walked around Bern for a while, so I went to bed at a reasonable hour and got a good night’s sleep. Now we’re on a train to Môtiers, absinthe capital of the world – or something like that.

Train-ing in

Kells' Priory

Ronny!