Church of the Holy Introvert: Lausanne

In which Maya, Bruce, Caroline, Daniel and I take a morning walk to the impressive wooden Tour de Sauvabelin, from which you can look down and see all of Lausanne.

In the last two weeks of July, Daniel's mom Monika, sister Maya, and nephew Bruce came to visit us. They were travelling for the whole two weeks, of course, so we were doing touristy or at least visitor-y things even on the days we were all in Zurich, but for the purposes of this little travel series I'm going to post about our trips to Lausanne and Nesslau.

Part of my bitching about the Swiss is in fact jealousy. See also: living 40 years in the past. Life - if you're lucky enough to be in the system - is quite a bit simpler here. You grow up in one place, train for one job, work the same one or two places for your entire career, retire at 65, and then enjoy your newly-free time and your strong retirement savings to travel, maybe babysit the grandkids a couple days a week, volunteer, and accompany your own parents in their last years of life.

I know - this is a normal human thing. People in the U.S. do it too. But truly, not as often as here. Or in any case, it's far from my own experience. Would I enjoy the security of multi-generational living in a close-knit community? Or find it stifling? I'll probably never know.

Anyway. As a young woman, Monika's sister Trudy moved to Lausanne for love, and when she died this year she had four children, three (?) grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren living less than two hours away, most far closer than that. We generally don't see this group unless Monika comes to visit, and this time we specially made the trip to attend the committing of Trudy's ashes. Monika's brother Kurt - the other of the five siblings still alive - and Trudy's husband André were there too, and also three of Daniel's cousins and a couple of their children and one of the great-grandkids. We all had lunch at a lakeside restaurant and then walked to the cemetery. In Lausanne, burial in the community grave consists of your ashes being ceremonially poured out of their urn into a big underground chamber of ashes. Which for my taste rather unfortunately resembles the underground recycling and garbage containers we have around here...but I suppose the basic idea is indeed the same.

So for 24 hours or so, we got to be part of a bigger family. It was...nice. We failed to get any pictures of lunch, but I think in a good way: we were too busy socializing.

The end of the short but sincere and very professionally executed burial ceremony, at which which we were collectively relieved to have arrived because it was quite hot.

Four generations.

The next day we visited Catherine, another of Trudy and André's children, who lives in a community for people with disabilities near Vevey. There was some drama after this because Daniel left his bag on the little train up there and we spent a couple hours stalking the trains coming back into Vevey until we located it again.

On a more touristy note, we also visited the Olympic Museum. My favorite part was the display of Olympic mascots.