In my email, landscape porn from the Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland

No worries on slow response to my last email, especially since it’s now my turn to apologize for the same thing. How was the rest of your trip? And coming home? Is it weird to be surrounded by people speaking English? Did the American grocery store blow your mind?

Oh man, I was indeed nutty busy those last few days before coming over here for tour guide training, a feeling that has only intensified since. I am mostly loving it, with sinusoidal swells of fear that I won’t be able to manage the 7,000 ongoing tasks of a solo guide. Also, what the hell am I going to say on the bus tomorrow? I’m supposed to talk about what it was like to live in Belgium. Do I talk about European racism? Tone it down and say “xenophobia” instead?

It seems preposterous and wonderful that people might trust me with all this, as well as ponderously primed for disaster. I take notes on paper and in gray matter all day, then get back to my room when the clocks have started over, with every intention of reviewing my scribbles, do research, and prep for tomorrow, but my eyelids have a way of punctuating all that.

Oh, and my new shoes? They stink. Swamp breath. Paris was l’inferno, and when I wasn’t walking with the group, I was hoofing it to the sights people are going to ask me about. Speaking of which, did you know art is actually pretty cool? My dominant memory from our previous trip to the Louvre was where to sit and wait it out. Turns out it’s much more fun when you’re not 7. Of course I’m super glad mom took us there, but now I can enjoy it in the present tense as well.

And how did I make it so many years without every really looking at the time? How long does it take to walk from here to there? No idea. To buy tickets? Nope. To take a metro across town? Not the foggiest.

But today at “work” I took a series of gondola/cable car/flying thingies up into the clouds of the Swiss Alps, and walked along an alpine ridge between old drifts of sliding snow and boisterous clusters of the season’s first cleansing flowers, while somewhere off in the godlike shadows of glacial blue and limestone gray, the rumble of falling snow reminded us that we are insignificant here. So there’s that.

Descending from Schilthorn, in the Lauterbrunnen valley, Switzerland

Hey…I think that just wrote a blog for me, more or less. Thank you. Because these days are far too full of Doing, and empty of Sleeping, to leave me time or wavelength to write. Say hi to your lady for me, we’re headed for Germany next.

Ascending from Stechelberg to Gimmelwald

Walking from Mannlichen to Kleine Scheidegg

Somewhere above and between Gimmelwald, Murren, and Birg, on the way to Schilthorn

Cable car way up, from Wengen to Mannlichen