I'm back from Switzerland!
I promise Alex was there, too, but most of our pictures only have one or the other of us.
If you want pictures, I'm sorry it took so long. Facebook decided that it was not necessary to make albums easy to organize by date, so after taking hours for everything to upload, I had to scrap the album because it was all out of order. And Then Alex and I did this thing where we bought a house and had to move into it. It's been a lot. But in a good way! So this blog post is about Switzerland, I'll write another soon.
Switzerland is a truly amazing country. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to visit, it's not a country that everyone has been to. And I can understand why, it's not as flashy as France or as historic as Greece, but it has a special charm. Despite being smack in the middle of Europe, it's a surprisingly rural place, with loads of tiny farms consisting of oddly-shaped fields and small herds of cattle. We spent a lot of time outdoors in the crisp mountain air, enjoying the pleasant diversion from the rolling, scorching hot landscape of Texas.
One of my biggest impressions of Switzerland is how "casually beautiful" it is. What I mean here is that as we went from place to place, just looking out the windows of trains, the landscapes are incredible. A "tourism sight" in and of themselves. This beauty isn't manicured, it's not specially formatted for tourism, it's just...there. Casually. The glacier lakes really are that blue and the mountains really are that green. I wondered how anyone could ever get used to something so incredible, and then I remembered that...we all kind of get used to beautiful things.
Much as tourists get a bad rap for getting in the way and awkward gawking, I think there's something we can learn here. To someone from another environment, the things I see every day are worth noticing. I know my enchantment at the birds hopping around the grass might be a bit much, but maybe we can all stand to be a bit more like a tourist.
So much of life can be wrapped up in getting from one thing to another that we don't notice just how cool some of the things around us really are. I may not have a full view of the alps on my commute to work, but the sunrise over the lake? That's pretty nice. We get used to the specific flavor of beauty around us much like we get used to the specific smell of our own house. Sometimes leaving for a short while can let us look at those nearby wonders with fresh eyes. Some people live in a city their entire life and don't even know what's there. Sometimes, it pays to be a tourist in your own city. Why would someone visit and what would they do here? Maybe give those things a try.
The abundant natural beauty of Switzerland gave me an appreciation for the beauty all around me, even back home. Just because the land is flat, it's no less beautiful than mountains, and my home in Dallas has no shortage of things to discover. And here, all the signs are in English! I know this isn't anything revolutionary, but it doesn't need to be. Maybe just try and be a tourist in your own city every now and again. You may be surprised by what you find.
