tiredness

The worst thing about college for me was this constant feeling of sleep
deprivation; often my first waking thought was when I could sleep next.
I was notorious for taking multiple naps throughout the day, even biking
back during the 15 minute break between classes to sleep for 10 minutes.

I don't quite feel this way right now, but I'm getting pretty close.
Our schedule is quite taxing and I am so tired. Tired...but it's been
good...and it's always interesting how certain topics will always wake
me up. I'm off to take a 20 minute nap now, and then we've got a full
afternoon. Tomorrow, we'll be in Geneva to visit UN refugee agencies,
and then I'll spend the weekend in Tubingen visiting my friend Ursula.

Coffee

With our grueling schedule, coffee is essential. And strangely, the coffee at Caux is horrible. You would think that being in Europe would guarentee decent coffee, but Caux serves this instant stuff that's nasty. Fortunately prior to the program, a friend of mine gave me some German coffee as a gift.

How many Caux Scholars does it take to make coffee? Apparently, a lot.

This here is a picture of this weird machine in the kitchen next to our classroom:
Behind it, you see four sets of colored instructions in four different langauges, one of which is, of course, English. Despite the instructions, despite days of trial and error, none of us can figure out how to make a decent cup of coffee from this machine! Much good German coffee has been sacrificed. So some of us resort to instant, and die hards like me resort to tea or coffee made from this giant cone filter drip thing. It works pretty well actually.

Swiss breakfast

Here we all are---okay, some of us---thanks to an anonymous donor at the Col de Jaman for a wonderful Swiss breakfast. The Swiss, at least in this region, eat a wonderfully simple breakfast of bread, jam, cheese, orange juice and coffee/tea/hot chocolate. Yum, yum, yum! This is also the same region where they make Gruyere cheese which we also have for breakfast every morning! Yum, yum yum! Here's Victoria and Katerina: And this is me and Kathy, our fearless coordinator/mom extraordinare:

We've been hiking...

We've been hiking lots this weekend....twice---which for me is a lot. It's been a lot of fun. Friday was our first free afternoon, and a bunch of us went down to a waterfall, which I have a picture of but it didn't come out that great. It was really fun to splash around the very, very cold water....and not as fun to hike uphill on the way back. We tasted these lovely wild berries along the way.
On Saturday, we went hiking again to the Col de Jaman; "col" is the French word apparently for low point between mountain passes or something like that. Well, actually we were suppose to walk part of the way to this restaurant to eat a lovely Swiss breakfast....but it did turn out to be a hike. Here is a cow I met along the way:
And here's some of the view....

We had a wonderfully beautiful hike on the way back....most of which I spent listening to a very interesting conversation on the Serbian/Croatian conflict...which suddenly stopped when we came to a crossroads and started walking on this trail shared by the railway tracks. The trail then became a very steep, and then became only railway tracks. It was interesting when the train slowly passed with our bodies only a foot away, our eyes diverting the dirty glance from the train conductor.

A wonderfully, lazy Sunday

It's a wonderfully lazy Sunday...one that I am very conscious and sad that will end soon. I think this is the first day where I haven't had anything scheduled since I was last in Vancouver. It's been nice to rest. I spent the morning with Linda washing out all the water jugs (150+) and then she introduced me to the music practice room. It's kind of cool...there are all these hidden rooms yet to be discovered....I feel like this kid in this old, old house full of secret passage ways and treasure....only...I haven't had time or energy to go explore just yet. Anyway, we ended up playing piano for a while. I tinkered with a Bach fugue which I've decided to go photocopy, and Linda played her viola and read Tom Prachett (is this the man?) from her PDA. It was pretty fun.

Since then I've ate and slept, and ate and slept...and chatted and met the next round of conference attendees. The next conference is called Renewal Arts, so I sat with a circus guy from Stockholm today at lunch. There's also now a harpsicord now in the Great Hall. It should be an interesting week!

(Footnote...20 of us are here for a separate program for 4 weeks, but the rest of the 300-500 people are here for weekly conferences.)

Here's a pic with some of our water jugs...