The last leg of our journey in Switzerland was based in Lausanne. By that stage, I was feeling like all Swiss cities looked remarkably similar and had no appetite for photos (my enthusiasm was not high in the first place compared to Mum). We tried to visit the Sauvabelin Tower but after getting off at the right metro station, found that it was still too far away so we gave up and went back. Later (when we were back at the hotel) I googled again and found out that we saw the tower in the distance before we gave up. But to be honest, I did not find it particularly attractive as a place to visit so no loss. We grabbed something for lunch at the supermarket. We had dinner at Leonardo, a restaurant that I had reserved and their sauteed clam was the one dish I was looking forward to for this entire trip. And it turned out to be excellent so we went back to it the next day and ordered two saunteed clams for dinner. On the first dinner though, I ordered the tagliolini with black truffle cream to share with Mum and we both found it a bit too creamy for our taste such that we were only able to eat the top layer of it and the waitress though that we really disliked the dish and I had to explain that we just naturally have a small appetite (which is also true).
The second day was spent at Gruyeres. In retrospect, that was a total waste of time and we had to change trains to get there with the wait time between connections usually being half an hour. The only positive thing was that there are no ticket inspectors on regional connections unlike the connections between cities (in Switzerland, if you take the intercity trains, there are bound to be a ticket inspector every single time, on the clock. And it feels like each one does things a little differently, from just wanting to scan your half fare cards and stamp your tickets to wanting to look at passports in addition to the above). And there was not much at Gruyeres.
I first learnt about this book through the UBC online novel writing courses and I was rather curious about it but the curiosity was not that acute that I searched for it straight away. In fact, it was only because I saw it in my library’s online catalogue that I decided to put it down for my Curiousity Read for this year.
I ordered this book from my library and I’m currently in the top spot for it but I’m still waiting on it.
The Banned and the Banished by James Clemen
I did not think this series was great in terms of prose or any other aspect as I’ve previously blogged but it was third person limited with a reasonably sized party of protagonists that I thought I could learn something from.
I had barely started running over this series from the start alongside my other fiction reading. One thing I’m struck with straight away is the high stakes at the start that has been driving the book. Not necessarily something I can replicate but a good illustration of stakes at work in a novel.
This is only peripherally writing related but due to the unexpected real life circumstances of one member of my gaming group, we are running one-shot games until December when he goes away. So for the very first time, I signed myself up for being the GM (game master) of a game using a premise that I thought up ages ago (I did intend to dip my feet in GMing sooner or later, it just came up sooner. I thought my very first game would be a different game, one that I adapted from a Chinese online novel).
The game premise was a combination of inspiration by a FB game called Criminal Cases: Time Travel and my own imagination. The world premise is as follows:
The game is set in Earth in the near future, where a dimension incursion was repelled with the use of new time travel technology. However, the technology itself was later captured by the invaders which gave rise to a disrupted timeline. So a band of fighters was formed who constantly wage wars with the invaders across timelines in various ways with the help of subsidiary characters summoned from history or stories.
The fighters operate in units of 4 as a hit team, with fixed roles within the team. They embark on missions with a range of explicit objectives that all ultimately contribute to thwarting the dimensional invasion.
In this setting, PCs are at least partially robotised which makes rotation across roles possible: you just need different calibrations to your mechanical body parts for the different roles. There is also good camouflage technology to make the most outlandish subsidiary characters blend in at any given timeline.
I ran two sessions before my trip and it went okay according to player feedback. I had hoped to use this experience to strengthen my shortcomings in descriptions and this is too early to report back on how the experience would help. But that is one goal I have in the back of my mind besides having fun with my friends.
I want to keep it short and sweet today. More forthcoming as need be.
Day 12 started our 3 days’ stay at Interlaken. The first day was spent at Interlaken and Brienz. We had breakfast at Cafe de Paris where we had two plain omelets. Since that was rather filling for us, we skipped lunch. There was really nothing at Interlaken (it was also raining that day) so we did some random pics and moved onto Brienz in the afternoon. I think the focus of the Brienz was the village and around the lake.The lighting was not right around the lake so we ended up taking more pictures of the houses instead. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and I ordered three dishes- half a Cantonese style roasted duck, prawns and mushrooms plus vegetables. The roasted duck was too dry and the mushrooms were so salty to be almost inedible (I’ve actually experienced this before when I joined a Eastern Europe tour in Shanghai but I forgot since that was a few years back). And true to Switzerland being high in living costs, the bill came up to 111 Swiss Franc!
The second day was our big day visiting villages near Lauterbrunnen and for that I bought two Daily Saver Pass but somehow selected the digital ticket option that nearly got us into trouble (more on this later). We basically visited Lauterbrunnen in the morning and did Staubbach Falls. Originally we planned to go up to Murren via the Grutschalp cable car but it was apparently down for maintenance until June so we caught a bus up to Stechelberg instead. We had to change cable cars at Gimmelwald and I was originally apprehensive about the cable car but in reality it was a huge cable car jam packed with people so I could always choose not to look outside much. I was also prepared for it being really cold since Murren was at a high altitude but in reality it felt all right. Our down jackets and two layers of turtlenecks were more than enough for it. We didn’t shoot much photos of the Alps because we were very reluctant to get outside the set pathway and it was raining on and off that day so that lighting was not too good either. We had lunch at Murren where we shared a prawn spaghetti. I originally had visiting Wengen as the next day’s activity but we wrapped up Murren early so we had a bit of rest at the hotel and then after discussion we decided to do Wengen too. And then we had the fright of our life when the ticket inspector would not accept photos of the Saver Day Pass (the morning ticket inspector did accept it since he could still scan the QR code from the photos) because he was sticking to the rule books and apparently we could have taken a pic of someone else’s tickets even though each ticket had our full name and date of birth on it. Luckily, an Asian girl sitting right across from us was kind enough to share her wifi with me so that I could show the original email, phew! But I was determined to never get a digital ticket again if I could help it, it was just always such a challenge for me who came very late to switching to a smart phone and never learnt to use anything besides the basic function of web browsing on it (I didn’t get a local SIM card because this trip involved us being partly in Switzerland which was not part of the EU and I didn’t want to switch between 3 SIM cards and hold onto such tiny things at the same time and the experience with data roaming at Italy made me even forget that I could open data roaming on my phone. Plus, the ticket inspector was just being pushy and totally unhelpful.) We were going the flexible approach with dinner for this day because my extensive research could not find which place was best suited to our tastes. In the end, we opted for a supermarket food dinner costing 6 Swiss Franc in total.
We had an open day for the next day and because I was worried about the train transfer at Bern and I googled to learn that Bern was very close, we visited Bern on the last day of our stay at Interlaken. Because the main goal was to check out the Bern train station, even though we got a free map from the tourist’s center, we basically only visited a church at Alstadit and the signature clocktower and then called it a day. Mum found the capital city very old and dilapidated and I pointed out to her that it was because it was the Alstadt that we mainly visited. We had MacDonalds for lunch for short of anything else that appealed. For dinner, we had seafood pizza at the restaurant just below our hotel (it was not owned by the hotel though). The topping was not quite full but passable. And given Mum and my small appetite, I finished my half and ate a small piece for Mum while she threw away about ⅓ of hers, clearly sick of our alternating diet between pizza and pasta/spaghetti.
Born in 1768, to a highly learned family. Specifically, her grandfather had been a local governor while her father had turned to studying medicine after failing to qualify as a government official through the imperial examination. Her grandfather taught her astronomy, her grandmother taught her literature and her father taught her medicine, geography and mathematics
When she was 16, she and her father went traveling around China and such an experience broadened her horizons. When she was 18, she became pen pals with many female scholars and focused on exploring astronomy and mathematics through self learning. She kept postponing her marriage until 25 when she married Zhan Mei, a renowned scholar and calligrapher.
She became renowned for literature as well as her knowledge in mathematics and astronomy and she even taught male students
In 1797, her grandfather passed away in the region where he worked and she went to stay there for 5 years during which she studied from his stores of books and learnt riding and martial arts from the wife of a Mongolian general
She passed away in 1797 at the age of 29, childless. She gifted away all her written work and drafts to her best friend who passed onto her nephew who organised and published her work.
Her contributions in astronomy and mathematics included
Works on sun and moon eclipses as well as rotation direction of various planets in the solar system
Being expert in the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry and she has an essay on applying the Pythagoeran theorem to triangles which is proved to be correct
Moonlake’s thoughts on her:
This is clearly a woman who knows what she wants from her life and works to cultivate that. I have great respect for her.
I had just ordered In Cold Blood by Truman Capote from my local library because I had heard about it during the UBC novel writing courses and I found it on my local library’s electronic catalogue so I switched out the Lovely Bones.
I’m still contemplating the idea of swapping out the Shipping News for the Banned and the Banished series. I mean, with the October trip, I only have November and December to work with. That is still plenty of time for one book so I think I will leave it to my whims when I come back.
I’ve been doing book analyses on and off as a means to improve my own writing craft. This is something I picked up from the UBC novel writing courses. I mean, it’s a simple enough idea but the key takeaway or revelation was that you could use this to study specific craft elements which means that you can take a more focused approach when analysing a book and basically be more focused on the get-go about which book to handpick for such an exercise.
Personally, I’ve done Under Heaven to study the omniscient voice at first (but then I realised I was wrong in that regard, it’s actually written in third person limit with an omniscient narrative voice) and then I’ve given it another pass to study how tension works in a scene, especially if the conflict is subtle.
I now have a new target- the Banned and the Banished series that I’ve just read. My aim this time is to study the partition of different voices in a story with a reasonably large party written in third person limited and absorb in any other aspects of interest to me such as the non-linear unfolding of time.
And that’s all my share for today. Feel free to leave me your comments you have.
Day 8, we finally left rainy Venice for Zurich. Not much to be said for the short flight but somehow we got completely turned around from the tram stop to our hotel, which was only 5 minutes away, and ended up lugging around two checked in luggages plus one hand carry and two backpacks for half an hour. Spooked by that, Mum insisted on calling a taxi to Fraumunster which was actually not that far (price of a short ride from the closest tram stop to the hotel). I was still apprehensive of taxis after the Rome airport incident but the taxi driver this time around was honest, displaying the Google map openly. So we mainly visited Fraumunster and the lake since we could not really find our way to Alstadt or Old town in Zurich. We had dinner at the place I reserved way earlier than the time I actually booked and they let us do that. I had the marinated salmon and Mum decided to order calf kidneys after seeing it at a surrounding table. The calf kidneys were actually yummy.
Day 9 was spent at Lucerne where we did half of the attractions (basically, we gave up Musegg Wall and the attractions on that side). I also had visiting the Meggen Castle being an optional item on this day but we did not really feel like it so we just returned to Zurich where we grabbed a quick bite to eat for dinner at Santa Lucia Subito which was right next to our hotel. I ordered the ravioli alla parmigiana (dumplings with eggplant fillings) for Mum and the salmon spaghetti for myself. To be honest, the eggplant dumplings tasted more like pumpkin dumplings (I think that’s because there was too much butter and the whole dish just tasted buttery). My salmon spaghetti was all right but I’m not crazy about creamy sauce in general. I could have ordered pizza but the pizza was fairly overpriced at this place- a plain Margherita pizza costing 18 Swiss Franc.
On day 10, we took a train to Thun and just at the square near my hotel was the prime spot for taking a picture of Thun Castle. So, Mum and I did the cheat way of just taking a picture of it down below rather than going all the way up. In fact, that is the approach we’ve been using for this whole trip. At Cinque Terre, we mostly just took pictures at the entrance rather than hiking up any stairs. Well, the only physical exertion we had was at Riomaggiore where we could not avoid going up the steep incline because its terrain was just steep. But, back to Thun, I don’t think we visited much attractions in Thun on this day. The only place we visited was Mühleplat where we chose to have lunch and ice-cream as dessert at La Faroviro, an icecream place/cafe combo. It was a Sunday with not all places open for dinner so we just walked around nearby to see which restaurant was open and ordered a seafood pizza at an Italian place called Al Ponte.
Day 11 was supposed to be spent at Spiez but I also wanted to visit Schloss Schdau which I originally planned to visit on day 10 (but we always cut down on my planned itinerary whenever we felt tired) so we split the day between Thun in the morning and Spiez in the afternoon. We took the bus to Schloss Schdau and got off at the wrong bus stop but it was still fairly close so we walked over to the park housing this ‘pink’ castle (it is pink but a very light coloured pink and sometimes looks a little orangey). We hopped over to Spiez via bus (because it was free with the Panorama Card that came with our stay in a hotel) and walked to Spiez Castle. We did not end up actually buying tickets for a tour but we took enough pictures without having to pay because the foyer was free for public access. We originally planned to do part of Faulensee walk but instead we just walked along the harbour and had lunch at one of the restaurants there. We went back to Thun for dinner at my reserved Italian place where we shared garlic prawns and a spaghetti (no recollection of which exactly and even with a photo, no idea what the noodles came with- some fried stuff?, the noodles looked like egg noodles, flat, thickish in width but very thin by height).
Moonlake's Fiction Space 