A Voice Behind the Numbers : Full day #1

Hello blog readers!

Wow, I'm blogging. Never thought I would have a blog, to be honest. Thought I'd leave that up to my bourgeois bohemian college professor mom, who mentions me occasionally in her posts when I happen to be related to her feminist theories, wandering thoughts on life, and complaints about the world of academia.

Well, I'm hoping this blog will be an account of my travels in and around Bern, Switzerland, and the climate stories I will gather throughout the next three months. I am here on a grant from the governmental organization ThinkSwiss and am working on a project titled "A Voice Behind the Numbers: Examining Climate Change Through Storytelling." The goal of the project is to interview residents within the Valais mountain region on the changes in the landscape they have witnessed throughout their lifetimes. Without bringing in any political connotations of climate change, I hope to interview farmers, mountaineers, ski lift operators, bottled water company employees, and the elderly, and create a story out of the narratives I collect. At the end of my stay here, I plan to gather all my interviewees together to have them listen to one another's stories and see how they relate to each other, and to the larger topic of climate change.

Today is my first full day here and everything feels great. I must say this is one of the easiest travel experiences I've ever had- I arrived at my Bern apartment before 8am EST and left Logan at 9:45pm the night before. Air travel still amazes me.

So far I've met my very shy and very skinny flatmate Dominik (he's also cute and nice- but shy and skinny definitely stood out first), who came home yesterday to let me into the apartment. It's incredible here. You never really know what you're getting into when you look for housing an ocean away over the internet, but I feel like I lucked out.

View from the apartment

I've also made the necessary first grocery run, which was of course overwhelming since grocery shopping is my favorite kind of shopping. Obviously I had to buy my favorite Swiss product:

Ovomaltine! (the powder was already in the apartment, as was the hipster clip).

Other than that I've explored the medieval part of the city, gotten lost (the River Aare cuts through the city in many places, which makes navigation confusing at first- not to mention the gazillion short and narrow streets), practiced my German when ordering "Einhundert Gramm Stilton Käse" and was then answered to in a German I've never heard before and didn't understand a word of (this situation has occurred many times since), run along the intensely blue-green river with the fast-moving current at the same level as my feet, run up a mountain, seen horses and cows (hi Paige if you're reading :), and frolicked through fields (in which I saw kids doing cartwheels- apparently The Sound of Music is still alive and well today).

Here are some more photos from today:

The River Aare (some of the bridges feel as high at the Brooklyn Bridge! But much narrower. It's
a very Bern thing to head north and float down the river-some people even do multiple laps).