The best part about being in the "Media Arts and Sciences" field is that our conferences are in great places around the world. Seattle, Sydney, New Orleans... we get it good. Every time I go to one of these conferences I thank my lucky stars I wasn't in automotive sciences. They get to go to Detroit every year.
This trip was for the Pervasive Computing conference put on by IBM and ETH Zurich. I was going both to keep up with the field and to teach a tutorial on wearable computing with Thad Starner, who as chance had it was also living in Zurich as a visiting professor and had a spare bedroom. Since this was the week Jill was planning on coming to visit from Boston (and her birthday to boot) I convinced her to come with me to Switzerland instead. Funny, it didn't take much convincing...
Zurich
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The first three days I was at the conference while Jill went exploring with Taverner, Thad's wife. We both took hundreds of pictures, but hers are pretty and mine are mostly of slides like The Untrusted Computer Problem & Camera-based Authentication. Those get their own trip-report web site. Zurich is apparently known for having the least interesting architecture in Switzerland. That says a lot for Switzerland, because some of it was breathtaking. |
Zurich Zoo
| The second day Jill and Taverner went to the Zoo. Thad and I went to the conference and heard such classics as INS/Twine: P2P Scalable Architecture For Intentional Resource Discovery. Actually, it was more interesting than it sounds... |
Stein am Rhine
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Day three Jill and Taverner went to Stein am Rhine, about an hour's train north of Zurich. Thad and I gave our tutorial and got to look at their pretty pictures when they got back. At this point I realized Jill was a much better photographer than I, so I made sure to have her take most of the pictures for the rest of the trip too. |
Pilatus
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The conference was over, and I was free! Taverner went to Italy (poor thing) and Thad, Jill and I went down to Lucerne as our new base of operations. We left Thad to work (he wasn't free) and took the "Golden Round Trip" to Mount Pilatus. In the Middle Ages Pilatus was legendary as a home for dragons, and with the morning mist over the cliffs I can see why. The round trip starts with a 45-minute boat ride across lake Lucerne. From there you take the steepest cog-train ride in the world up the mountain, and reach a 48% slope on your way to the top at 7000 feet. We hiked along the ridge for a ways, entertained the birds, then took a cable car, gondola and bus back to Lucerne. |
Meiringen, Reichenbach Falls and Glacier Gorge
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There was no way I was going to Switzerland without hiking in the Alps, so early the next morning Jill and I took the train to Meiringen, about an hour South of Lucerne and at the foot of the Swiss Alps. Meiringen is known for two things. First, Meringue is said to have been invented here as a treat for the visiting Emperor Napoleon. Second, the town is at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls. While impressive in their own right, the falls are most famous as the location where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunged to their deaths. As one might expect, there are several Sherlock Holmes museums and themed hotels in town. The falls are also a great jumping-off point (pun intended, sorry) for several great day hikes. Next time I come to Switzerland, this will probably be my hub. We took a cog car up to the foot of the falls, then started following the river through the Reichenbach Valley towards the Glacier that spawned it. As in all Switzerland, the path was beautiful and natural while still being well maintained. Switzerland is a tamed country. The people have had centuries of independence mostly free of war or natural disaster to make it so. There were signs pointing the way to the wanderweg at every intersection, color coding for difficulty of trail, steps for the steep parts, and even wooden gutters to allow snow run-off to cut across the path without erosion. In all, the area was better marked and maintained than many highways I've seen. Our path followed the river upstream as it slowly mellowed into a mountain stream. We cut through forest and farmland, and then to the end of the valley where the cliffs jut out and you can still see the glacier that created the whole area. It looked almost like a creature from a B movie that collapsed just before destroying the neighboring town. After resting our feet and buying some cheese at the little restaurant at the foot of the glacier (told you it was tamed) we started our six-mile hike back to Meiringen. A quick run to the point where Holmes and Moriarty supposedly fell still left us with about three minutes to catch the last cog car back down, which is good because otherwise our feet would have hated us even more the next day. |
Lucerne
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Now that our legs were good and stiff Jill and I played tourist for the day in Lucerne, a lovely if slightly touristy city. We followed the guidebook walking tour and admired the numerous town squares, churches and wooden bridges that cut across the place. Somehow Lucerne manages to mix old and modern seamlessly. Shops from the 1500's are still perfectly functional, as if they just never saw a reason to build anything else in that spot. When Walt Disney was designing the feel for Disney Land, Lucerne must have been his inspiration. |