A few quieter days
The next few days, we decided to take things a little slower. It wasn’t entirely straight forward to extract my parents from their beds on Sunday morning, and it must have been 11am before we left the apartment. We headed in the direction of the Pfingsteggbahn, a small cable car which we could actually see from our kitchen window. This departed from a station just down the road, and ascended a short distance to a little ledge on the opposite side of the valley. It was rather an old-fashioned sort of cable car (Swiss old-fashioned = small) and the way we were all crammed in like sardines meant there wasn’t really much of a view.
Being honest, I failed to see the point of the installation at all 
The ascent wasn’t high enought to take us above the treeline (c.1800m), and so even when we disembarked, the view was somewhat restricted. Nevertheless, we set off on a little woodland trail towards a place called Milchbach where we were hoping we would get a view of the Grindelwald glacier. Back in the 19th century, one of the mountain glaciers used to extend pretty much all the way down to the village itself, but since then there has obviously been a fair bit of global warming and the ice has retreated significantly. Retreated far more significantly than the Swiss have deigned to mark on their maps, I hasten to add, as when we arrived at Milchbach after around 90 minutes we couldn’t so much as see a snowflake. We progressed to a place temptingly called Obergletscher (Upper Glacier), but failed to locate the glacier there either
There was, however, a rather exciting excursion which it was possible to make from Oberer Gletscher. Some enterprising person had built a series of steps and ladders up a massive rocky outcrop which sticks out just below where the glacier ends, so to speak. The steps culiminate in what looked like an amazing hanging bridge over the glacier itself, and me and my sister thought that it looked really cool. Unfortunately, my parents pronounced that it would be “dangerous”, and insisted that we all walk back to Grindelwald instead.
The walk back to Grindelwald along the valley floor was one which I personally found rather dull. I don’t like walking at lower altitudes in the Alps because of the sheer number of bugs which frequent the meadows. I’m okay with crickets up to a certain point but once they get to a certain size, they start to upset me. I also saw a lizard, which upset me greatly, but fortunately no snakes. I had a horrible holiday in Austria the other year where I encountered no fewer than three snakes in the course of a week 
By Monday the weather had taken a turn for the worse. We had suspected as much from the weather forecast, although our understanding thereof was somewhat limited by the fact that the weather on SF1 is forecasted exclusively in Swiss German. Swiss German, in my opinion, is a completely different language to German. I know that linguists may argue that Swiss German is merely a dialect, and it is difficult perhaps to classify it as a language when it doesn’t have a written form, but honestly, it is completely unintelligible even to native German speakers and most certainly to my sister and I. A weather forecast should be easy to understand in any language one has a basic grasp of, because after all you can predict most of the words you are liable to hear and there are generally pictures to help you. But after five days in Switzerland I was genuinely pleased with myself when I managed to hear and understand the word for rain 
There are a rather limited number of interesting things to do in the Alps on a rainy day, and after a certain amount of discussion we eventually took the train to Interlaken and had a brief look around the shops. My interest in looking around shops is obviously severely minimal, but it was at least a good opportunity to pick up some postcards. There is actually one funicular which ascends from Interlaken to a mountain called the Harder Kulm, and when the weather picked up a bit we decided to give it a go. We managed to do a short walk whilst remaining reasonably dry, then retired to the attractive restaurant in order to indulge in some rather delicious lemon meringue pie 
Tuesday morning dawned looking significantly brighter. My sister and I went out at half seven to fetch some rolls for breakfast, and we ended up having a long conversation with the girl who worked in the local bakery. She wanted to know why we were able to speak German, so my sister started explaining about her year abroad in Tuebingen, and the girl in return started telling us about how she had learnt English last year when she went to calendar. In the course of the chat she warned us that Tuesday was going to be the best day weatherwise of the entire week, and thus we ought to take advantage of it to do a long walk.
Just as an aside here, I have never encountered so many people shocked that an English person could speak German as I did in Grindelwald. Normally, when I’ve travelled elsewhere in Switzerland, in Austria, in Germany itself, people have been a little surprised in a pleasant sort of fashion, and perhaps complimented whichever one of us who was speaking on how good our German was, but in Grindelwald I am talking about the sort of shock which you or I would experience if we encountered a martian. It perplexed me for several days, and then one morning I went to the pharmacy with my mother in order to try and buy some new plasters for her much complained about feet. Adequate as my German is for general situations, it doesn’t quite extend far enough to discuss the relative merits of different brands of plaster, and so in the end we degenerated into an English conversation with the pharmacist. My mother complimented her on her exceptionally good English (it was significantly better than all our German put together!) and the woman just shrugged and said, “We have no choice but to speak perfect English. All the English people come here and they expect that we will speak to them in English. I have never met an English person before who has spoken to me in German”.
I found that horribly depressing. It’s true that there were very high numbers of English people in Grindelwald and the Bernese Oberland in general – this is historically the area which rich English people have visited when they have come to Switzerland, and the villages abound with statues of nineteenth century English gentlemen who allegedly invented skiing here, whilst the hotels abound with British pensioners who have come on a Thompson Lakes and Mountains holiday to look at the view. So yes, obviously it is practicable and reasonable for those locals employed in the tourist trade to speak good English. But I found it sad the way the woman shrugged and accepted the fact that English people could not be bothered even to make an attempt at speaking the language of the country they were visiting. She must really hate English tourists. I certainly would, if I were her.
On another tangent, there are also an exceptionally high number of Japanese tourists who visit the region these days, and for that reason you habitually find shop signs and menus translated into Japanese too, which takes a bit of getting used to. A lot of the Japanese I encountered were speaking English with restaurant staff and the like, which is fair enough, but there were a significant minority who seemed able to speak a reasonable amount of German. I would say without doubt that I saw far more Japanese tourists attempting to communicate in German, even if it was just a polite “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”, than I saw English tourists attempting to speak German, the latter being far more likely to simply launch into a torrent of English without a moment’s consideration for the person on the receiving end. And given how much more difficult German must be if your native language is Japanese, I think that is a pretty damning inditement of the English :cry:
Hmmm. That aside, we chose to make the best of Tuesday and went up the only remaining cable car in Grindelwald which we had not tried; First. Why it is called First I am not sure, but it doesn’t mean the same as “first” in English and you pronounce it differently Our aim for the day was to try and track down some of those elusive mountain creatures known as marmots. The people who own the First cable car were advertising a particular valley on the mountainside as being a popular home of the creatures, and so we set off to climb through it, each armed with our binoculars. Marmots are rather curious creatures, but I find them incredibly cute and could happily sit and watch them play for ages Unfortunately, they are rather timid. Each group tends to post a sentry who stands on a high vantage point and emits a high pierced whistle when he perceives there to be a threat from a predator. Upon hearing such a whistle, all the other marmots know that it’s time to scurry off and hide in their burrows.
We were particularly unlucky because we were walking a little way behind a couple who had a dog, and this set the poor marmots into overdrive. The valley was literally ringing with whistles as the frantic sentry attempted to alert everyone of the approaching danger, and by the time we got to the centre of the valley, all the furballs were safely hidden. In the end we decided to sit and have lunch, in the hope that they would reappear. They didn’t for a while, but we did end up talking to another walker who pointed out some chamois high up on one of the mountainsides. I had never seen a chamois in the wild before so that was quite exciting, although they were rather a long way away and I would honestly have assumed they were cows had I not been informed otherwise, and when we finally started our descent back down to the main path we were eventually rewarded with a sighting of some very adorable marmots indeed 
Tags: first, grosse scheidegg, harder kulm