nawl

Imagine, if you will, an ancient house, in the center of a tiny village of haphazard roofs, perched above a river flowing through a valley, carpeted with lush green terraced pastures that become, as the viewer's gaze rises upwards, the imposing rocky cliffs and spiky peaks of the Alps.

In order to get there, you board a plane in whatever horrid uncivilized country you were coming from (really, every country is uncivilized in comparison to Switzerland) and disembark in Geneva's charmingly retro airport, where you proceed to walk right through the terminal to the train station that is conveniently right where you need it, and board a swift, silent, and shiny train into the countryside. Somewhere you change trains to a smaller one covered with pictures of cuddly St. Bernards, and ride that one into the mountains to the end of the line at Le Chable. At this point, you could walk right out of the train station and into the telepherique that would take you right up to a glacier at 3000 meters of elevation, but instead you want to board the postcar bus, which is just barely narrow enough to fit between the stone and darkened wood walls of the villages that it winds through on your way up the valley. (Unless, of course, someone's father has decided to drive his shiny right-hand-drive Jaguar into town just in time to meet your train, and then you'd take a slightly different road.

The house has a new number attached to it, but old letters in the basement are addressed to "la maison en face du four".

The milk is fresh every day from the laiterie in the next village over, collected that morning from the cows on the high pastures for the summer. We asked how they got it down: they used to have pipes, but now they just use milk trucks. Each village has its own distinctive cheese--all somewhere in the spectrum of Gruyere to Raclette--and the artisanal butter comes imprinted with a flower. Water is fresh and cold from the fountain running across the street. Many houses in the village have impeccable vegetable gardens laid out in front of them.

The house comes equipped with a lovely Swiss mother who cooks simple yet fabulous meals for lunch and dinner for you every day from scratch, raclette and fondue and fried potato patties and lentil salad with local farmer cheese and salad from an enormous head of lettuce from a neighbor's garden that she dropped by to deliver just because. While walking through the village, an old friend of the mother's wordlessly gives you a handful of the raspberries she has been snacking on while walking.

We hike up a nearby trail. The scenery passes from grassy meadow to pine forest to wide expanses of many-colored wildflowers to a sort of short-grassed rocky wilderness by the time we're finally in view of the cloud-shrouded white peaks and glaciers.

At 2000m we find a herd of cows grazing above a lodge overlooking a perilous drop to the valley far, far below. The lodge won't let us sit on their benches to eat our lunch, so we walk further up and eat our lunch underneath an enormous wooden cross where the view of the glacier and the valley is even better, and listen to the many-toned cow-bells clinking.

Another day we take the cable cars up to the top of Mont Fort, over a herd of grazing goats with musical bells, over the barren wasteland of short grass and piles of dirt that is the ski resort in the summer, a change of cars as the attendant tells us they're still having electrical problems as the cable cars were hit by lightning the day before and out for the entire morning, and finally to the very spiky pile of rocks and snow that is the peak. It's a long, rocky, snowy fall in any direction. Only one other couple is at the top, and they leave before us. It's desolate and deserted, and there are huge billboards on the wall of the cable car lodge for watches.

The next day we go on a long drive to the German part of the country to spend a day at some famous baths, which are more of a water fun park than a therapeutic bath. The most fun is the current pool, which at full speed is honestly dangerous, but we had a blast being pulled around the rapids. I was a bit surprised the first time a teenage boy rudely threw me off of an overhanging rock I was hanging on, and it quickly turned into an afternoon-long battle for king of the hill, with dozens of strangers jumping up to attack the current rock occupants as they were pushed by by the water.

The last day spent in Geneva, I decided to recreate my first Geneva experience and buy chocolate from as many chocolatiers as I could find walking around in an afternoon. This time I ended up with 19 truffles from six different stores for about 25 Swiss francs, of which 15 are currently still waiting for the taste test I promised myself.