CH2

I intended to post much earlier, but I've been suffering/enjoying dial-up purgatory on Whidbey Island - an anachronistic oasis in the otherwise tech-savvy PNW culture; eg this will be my first posting about 10k feet, as Alaska Air has free WIFI until the end of July!That's Michael who swam out to a platform in Lake Geneva. People looked worried as he swam out, wondering who was watching this little guy, but he made it. I generally am more cautious than Carolyn with these things; she's usually right. With the French Alps across the water, the view is spectacular, although the water was FRIGID - cold spring.
Jo introduced us to Oliver, a very red-headed boy with an English mom and Irish dad. Jo was the program assistant at Pepperdine's Lausanne branch 2 years ago and lives in nearby France, where the real estate and cost of living is generally much, much cheaper.
Julian and Ann brought their children to play in the lake, where we had a familiar grill and picnic of sausages and wine.

Michael really liked grilling his bread, as well, until almost burnt.

We then visited Julian and Ann at their new home in Oron - a real out of the way village with one noteworthy institution: a private Christian school. Not sure how far private Christian schools will go in Switzerland; I suspect not as big a movement as in the States, but this one's been going at it for 15 years.
Evangelical Americanism generally leads the way, as European believers seeking authenticity look to North America for the contemporary.
Juian, a ballet dancer and former British downhill Olympiad teaches a dance class at the school, which Michael joined for the afternoon. Simple, lacking the bells & whistles we might value back in SoCal, it was a nice window into "Big Jack's" world. We named the older child "Big" Jack to avoid confusion with our "Little" Jack.
The art class absolutely rocked. Switzerland is extremely sophisticated in terms of its museum/art knowledge spread in the culture at large, local cities pouring much resources into opera, classical music, and visual arts, although Zurich and Basel hold the world-class collections. Big Jack can identify numerous 20th century (Rothko, Klee, Mondrian, Matisse, etc), as well as Old Master painters. I am determined that M & J know their art!

We had a pasta lunch with tomatoes and peas from their garden.Their home was lovely and, in Swiss tradition, very sturdy and high-quality materials, but we were surprised to hear that the careful laws that govern apartments don't exist for private homes, where people can get ripped off, as did happen in this case.

A shot of our rental's front windshield which had a bus-like touring panorama view; we got tans just driving around.
From the balcony. We rented the top efficiencies of the house, which faced the La Tour port - a real find. Lake Geneva enjoys a temperate microclimate (check out the palm tree).
Our Italian gelato man welcomed us, noting the boys' growth. He seemed to think Jack was a real bruiser. This little stand sells the most intense flavors of chocolate, black currant, jamaican rum/raisin, although the tropical flavors seemed particularly popular now.

Leftover bread went to the swans and ducks

We kept running into that little swan family. Also, enjoyed the local perch & fries meal at our favorite spot. I am always pleased to be able to order wine by the deciliter. Switzerland is an anomaly in Europe - not socialist, but very strong capitalist traditions. EG everyone required to have health insurance, but it is not State run. Curious that the US is now adopting European models of government run social polity - a postwar model that eventually failed in the 80s, which is currently unraveling, especially in Greece, Spain, and Italy.

Traveling abroad is definitely a luxury, but also a home of sorts, due to my earlier L'Abri life. We weren't sure how our new church family would react to our excesses, but it definitely cost us a lot of postage in postcards! So, for the first time, we feel pulled in two directions: home and home elsewhere.

We were very glad to have dinner with Rodman and Becky Miller (no picture), whom I knew from the early L'Abri days. Rodman was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor last year, so I wasn't sure he'd still be living, but he's responded well to treatment and is beating the odds right now.

CH

This posting - written at a wifi hotspot at Keystone Cafe two blocks from our vacation rental - will be somewhat uninspired. This is of our CH holiday (Conferation Helvetica - ancient Latin term overlapping with modern day Switzerland).

Anyway, we landed in cooler weather

which turned to this everywhere we went. Same miracleworking power seemed to follow us in Salzburg and, now, in Washington.

Walking to church

after a tasty hot chocolate. The Swiss consume more chocolate per capita than anyone in the world; a statistic Jack surely contributed to two years ago.

We began Sunday AM by visiting All Saint's, where a Swiss couple shared of offering meals for hungry refugees.

First Father's Day brunch at the Montreux Palace, with visible signs of recession - less pricey offerings at this pricey venue. CH has been relatively insulated from the downturn, but their banks have investments in riskier European countries, which has been driving up the value of the Swiss franc.

We stayed on the port of La Tour de Peilz, a super-charming village between Vevey and Montreux, an international outpost for Brits and aristocratic Europeans since the mid-19th century. Nestle is headquartered here. Carolyn and I spent our honeymoon here eons ago. It's nice to go back to places, returning with an income, rather than a L'Abri worker taking in the considerable riches of the on the cheap.
More and more Swiss are converting their homes into vacation/BB rentals for independent travelers wanting to cook their own meals and, most importantly, DO LAUNDRY! "Self-catering" is the British term.

After church, Ann and Julian and kids came down to visit. The had moved to Oron to be near a private church school - a relatively new movement in Switzerland, where public education is solid.

Poster for the Food Musuem. CH is the design center of Europe. Modernist architect, Corbusier, as well as this kitchen classic...

including the Mondaine timepiece designed for Swiss Rail stations (in the MOMA collection) are also CH in origin.

The bread from Freddy's bakery always inspires me.

It was World Cup time, as the national flags and public screening venues and just plain lots of intermittent yelling during the day and night attest.
The hysteria in Europe surrounding this sport is quite something; I guess the US city-based team rivalries might compare, but soccer always seems like a preeminent fascist sport to me, referring only to the intense, national identity galvanized over this play. Hitler loved the Olympics, important as a staging device for his collapsing of national identity with theater.

M&J occupied while visiting Schaeffer's apartment.

Memories of the past carefully placed: China Inland Mission documents, family reunion photos, L'Abri kitchen ware; antique dollhouse, favorite tea set. Affirming the ongoingness of material culture, rather than resigning to the ephemeral nature of life under the fall.

We are meant to be here, to outlive things, not unravel, but deferring the eternal and embracing it is a balancing act. All I know now is that the one thing we have - and don't have - is time.

ERS at 95

We had a remarkable time with Mrs. Schaeffer (everyone else calls her Edith, the boys Noni [Hebrew for grandma], but I knew her as Mrs, so, like Mary Tyler Moore's Mr Grant, she remains Mrs to me). Very lucid and responsive and the gentleness of her demeanor came through.

Her daughter, Susan, was caring for her - Debby and Udo were away - so we caught up, discussing children's education. Susan was an early advocate of homeschooling in England and America and her youngest is heading a start-up school in Cambridge based upon Charlotte Mason's ideas.
We like her easygoing approach and are uncomfortable with the sometimes academically superior focus of classical Christian models which can smack - to me, at least - of an evangelical version of No Child Left Behind. Diane Ravitch, the education reformer and spearhead of NCLB, has recently blown the whistle on Laura Bush's program, saying that the focus on test scores (and not on the available research) proved to be a failure. Christians also stress behavior and character, so it's more well-rounded, but I'm reacting to the accelerated aspect.
It's a fascinating topic, dealing with child development, which we are familiar with since our boys faced these issues as adopted children from a low-stimulation environment.

"Low stimulation" doesn't exactly describe Michael & Jack these days; they are a long way from Siping and Deyang.

Michael - the urban cowboy - absolutely loved his get-up, refusing to change even in downtown Lausanne.

He really wants cowboy boots, so this may morph into Swiss Western wear - Alps, not the open range.

Salzburg

A trip to Salzburg was inevitable, I guess, given Michael's obsession with The Sound of the Music. Two years ago, everytime we saw a nun in Italy he wondered if Maria was closeby. Lookout this Halloween for two lederhosen-clad Chinese boys.
As a parent, I've been impressed at the power of fantasy and this one has considerable hold worldwide; although the German film story about the Von Trapps does not mention the war, apparently. After being in Europe last, seemed clear that ol' Walt D was trying to recreate the fantasy of Western Europe in Anaheim:
Flowers everywhere, castles, pristine walks -the whole package. For Europeans and Americans, the medieval becomes a powerful storage house for the modern imagination (Japan has its corollary, as well). This had a great run in the '60s (Tolkien), superimposed in science fiction via Star Wars, and this is making a serious theological return, say, in Doug Wilson's book
but particularly in the liturgical aesthetic expressed in the emerging church movement. Europeans tend to fantasize about their past, but also the American wild west. The social fantasy of Europe - the social welfare state - is unraveling now, given the debt crisis and their demographic decline; fascism of the 1930s was the last time these pressures - and the modern nostalgia for the past - surfaced, albeit, violently.

Maybe The Sound of Music (the REAL von Trapps escaped the Nazis for Italy) is more timely than I gave credit for. And Hitler's "project" was heavily invested in creating a cinematic fantasy of the German people, so there's a lot of overlap here.

But back to the four of us

on the Sound of Music tour

with Christine,an American PhD who leads English-speaking tours of this fabled land:

We learned a lot about the making of the film, ranging from bursting of the bubble information - eg the church where the original Capt and Maria REALLY got married -

which seemed only to intensify the experience, even for me (above: where Andrews and Plummer got married).
The side chapels were beautiful illustrations of Biblical narratives

which informed the imaginations of illiterate believers of the past - superior, I think, over our own media-saturated, PowerPoint condition which, almost universally, tends to freeze, not provoke, the imagination. As one writer put it, "Images are the new opiate of the people." Check out the actual skeleton in the front altar piece which the Capt and Maria faced.

Carolyn found her beloved lamb and geometric designwork

The market where Greta Von Trapp dropped a tomato.

The medieval section, where our 15th century hotel (Goldener Hirsch) was located, was vibrant with tourists, yet not bad at all - at least the hotel served as an inn then and now.

Scenes of Salzburg:

Michael was thrilled at every point, reliving each scene. We then traveled to Zurich on Air Berlin - a better discount carrier - where I got prepaid SIM cards to work the phones from 2 years past; they worked! More on telephones in a later entry. We have been visiting friends and enjoying some fantastic weather.