The Indie Travel Challenge, week 4: Winter Getaways

                                                           
It's week number 4 of the Indie Travel Challenge, and I have to say that this week's topic couldn't be more appopriate. The good folks at Boots'n'all want us to talk about our dream winter destinations. You can see the prompt here.

Saturday night I cam back from a 3 day mini vacation to Leukerbad, in the Valais canton in Switzerland. It was one of my 2012 travel resolutions to see more of the country I live in and going on this trip showed me how much I had ben missing. Switzerland is tiny, but is also very diverse in landscape, language, culture and food. In Tessin, where I live, we have a fiarly mild climate, everyone speaks Italian and things aren't as organized and rigis as one might think. Only two hours away, though, Leukerbad folks speak French and German, the cuisine is definitely not ass-friendly and the Alps, which I see from a distance here on lake Lugano, are so close and beautiful, they take your breath away.

I traveled there by train -total travel time 4 hours and 20 minutes- and was definitely happy not to have to deal with having a car there. It's not a car friendly village, unless you have a 4x4 with snow tires. I was greeted by a gorgeous blue ski and 29°F, perfect weather for a little exploring and working up an appetite. You can see my rendition of rösti, the Valais "national" dish, here.



View from the Alpentherme pools

After lunch it was thermal baths time. Leukerbad is famous for its hot springs and, even more, for the amazing Alpentherme, a complex that features indoors and outdoors hot water pools, saunas, steam baths and everything else your heart might desire. I went there both on Thursday and on Friday, after skiing which was heavenly. The best part? The 100°F outddors pool you can reach from inside, with a view of the Alps and massage jets. A 5 hour pass that includes access to all areas of the complex is 39 CHF, about 45 dollars. a little steep, but worth every penny. 

 Leukerbad also rocks because of its beautiful ski slopes. I spent Friday skiing at the Torrent station, at about 8900 feet. The weather, again, was wonderful, so skiing was even more enjoyable. Not to mention how enjoyable it was to stop at a bar at 8000 feet and drink a cold beer on the terrace, with my face in the sun.

I was lucky enough to see an abundant snowfall on Friday night, after I was done skiing. And Saturday morning, it was still snowing as I woke up. I lingered in bed, under the comforter, watching the snow fall out of the window. It was quiet and peaceful and beautiful, all at the same time. It reminded me of similar mornings back in the 90s, when my parents still had an apartement in Val Gardena, in the Italian Alps. It's alwasy nice to time travel while you are traveling. It made me feel like an 8th grader again, wishing the weather would turn so bad it would keep me from going back home.

Too bad it didn't happen. Not then, not now.

The Indie travel Challenge, week 3: "Learning through travel"

                                       

Travel is learning. If one travels and manages not to learn anything, I suspect he or she could very well be braindead. I mean, how can you not absorb everything that is new and different around you? Art, language, food, traditions. You name it. One of the most exciting aspects of traveling is meeting different people, who live in ways that are foreign to us for reasons that are part of a history that is not our own.

Week 3 of the Indie Travel Challenge deals with this. Learning and traveling. Except for when i attended summer school to learn English in California (every year from 1992 to 1998) I have never really taken classes while abroad, but that doesn't mean that I haven't learned a lot while traveling. i guess I'm just not much into taking organized classes while I'm on vacation. My bad. I'm sure that if I had taken, let's say, some cooking classes while abroad I would have learned to cook the same recipes I know how to cook now, but without all the trial and error.

One thing, though, I have learned by traveling, and that is appreciating art. When i was in high school Art History was possibily one of my least favorite subjects. Watching works of art printed in a book isn't that exciting and we were never taken to any museums, despite the fact my school was across the street from the church where Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper is. I know, I know. Terrible.
Anyhow, I had to learn to love art as an adult, by browsing art museums on my own, without the aid of an art expert. Sure, I'd probably learn even more if I had someone telling me about focus and composition and the likes, but would I enjoy, and therefore learn, from the experience that much? Probably not.

So alone I go to museums of all kinds and I let the art speak to me. If the art in question doesn't, well, no biggie. Not all art can move us, which is what makes art so interesting. For it to arise my interest, it has to surprise me, amaze me, even shock me. Or, some other times, to make me discovere that even a mirror placed on wall of a museum can surprise us, ^making us realize that us, too, are works of art.

Self portrait, Tate Modern, London.
January 2012

The Indie Travel Challenge, week 2: "What is an indie traveler?"

So here we are. Week two of the indie travel challenge. This week's prompt is a question I knew would arrive sooner or later, but I was hoping it would arrive later rather than sooner. The question is: what is an indie traveler? And my problem with it is: why do we always feel the need to define everything?

Defining an indie traveler is pretty mucg impossible, in my humble opinion. There are as many types of indie travelers as there are travelers. So who am I to say that I'm indie and someone else is not?

Of course there are those who consider themselves better than most because they go to the most exotic, hard to reach, unknown spots of the world and kind of look down at anyone who would get excited about going to any place where you can get a hot shower and a decent bed. And there are also those who would never leave the beaten path, who would never try whatever food the locals eat (unless they are in Italy or France, that is) and are afraid of getting robbed pretty much everywhere.

Those, of course, are extremes. Then there's a whole bunch of us who are somewhere in between. Who like nice hotels and crowded hostels just the same, who like to explore less traveled by destinations, but won't disdain a touristy museum or monument. We would love to take a whole year off and go travel around the world, but for a number of different reasons -both financial and personal- we just can't do that right now, so we have to travel when we have time off, or suring weekends or even explore our own town on a Saturday afternoon.

Does that make us indie travelers? I think so. Being an indie traveler is more of a state of mind rather than a collection of stamps on your passports. Is that need to go and see what the rest of the world is like, no matter if the rest of the world is 10 or 1000 miles away.

The Indie Travel Challenge, week 1: "Planning for 2012"

So I'm not much of a planner. Nor am I much of a resolutions person, mostly because - let's be honest - I'm horrible at keeping resolutions. Or follow through with my plans, for that matter. There is one exception, of course: travel planning. I absolutely adore travel planning. I buy Lonely Planet guide books on a whim, whenever I see them, even when I'm not planning a trip. I constantly scan the internet for insipration, as if I needed more crazy ideas running through my head. When relatives ask me what I want for Christmas or my birthday, I usually ask for train passes or more guide books or anything, really, that is travel related. It's a sickness, similar to only one other sickness that I have: cookbooks. But that's another story.

Let's focus on the traveling. And the planning. I read about the Indie Travel Challange while I was browsing the web for my upcoming Paris and London trip, and I thought it would be a fun little (errr... not so little actually) way of pushing myself both as a writer and a traveler. Ever since I moved from Florida to Switzerland I have missed writing the travel articles I used to write for the Naples Daily News, so why not taking up travel writing seriously again? After all, is only one of my two dream careers (the other one being a food writer for a large newspaper).

So here's week 1, a week about planning for 2012. After reading Boots'n'all travel resolutions for the upcoming year, I feel pretty inspired, and ready to share my list. Here's a link to their resolutions and the challenge: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/11-12/travel-resolutions-to-keep-this-year.html

1. Speak French while I'm in paris, even though my French is poor, to say the list
2. Get lost around the little streets of Bruges, Belgium
3. Eat perfect, greasy, salty fries from a street vendor in Brusselles
4. Try a new dish I've never tried before, everywhere I go
5. Visit all cantons in Switzerland, including the one where I live, which I don't know quite as well as I'd like
6. Take a German class
7. Go to Oktoberfest
8. Buy a ticket to go to Vietnam in January 2013
9. Swim in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland
10. Blog about my travels more consistently

That's it. Well, I hope you all will follow my adventures... as I travel, eat and drink my way around Europe.