Chasing the rabbit

When the sun sets on Freiburg – or really any city – its entire persona changes.  The shops close and the sidewalks empty.  Most nights, the city just rolls over and goes to sleep until dawn.  But as the week comes to a close, sunset brings with it a whole other meaning.  The shops still close and the sidewalks still empty, but there comes a breaking point after which they start filling up again.  People spill out of the woodwork, following familiar routes down darkened streets.  They follow their hedonistic spidey-senses and locate nondescript doors nestled in the walls between respectable shops.  They open the doors, letting out a startling explosion of bass-dropping beat, and descend into the grungy basements, making sure first to leave their dignities at the door.

Fantastic visibility in Ruefetto

I’ve experienced my fair share of nightlife here, in the name of research of course.  The only real mainstay in my nighttime activities is a delightful underground – literally – cave called the Rabbithole. Actually its real name is the Wheit Rabbit [sic], but its earthy physical location and mercurial atmosphere fit more precisely with its new nickname. Every time I descend the concrete stairs to the underbelly of the beast, my girl Taylor Swift’s lyric runs through my head: “We found wonderland; you and I got lost in it, and life was never worse but never better.”

The Wednesday nights there always start much the same, with philosophical conversations concerning weighty topics. Then the music starts – literally, on an open stage – with local artists playing everything from bizarre electronic noises to 70s covers. The crowd ebbs and flows with the hour, starting with a slow inbound tide that fills up the tables and chairs and overflows out onto the floor in front of the stage, into a mad sea of dancing bodies that force you to get to your feet and join in, until the clock strikes midnight and the tide turns to push those slightly more inebriated bodies back out into the night. Emerging back out into the cool night air brings with it a sense that time both stood still and moved faster on the surface than it did down there, and no one else knows it except the other brave souls who followed the rabbit with you.

       
Wheit Rabbit’s cousin, a vegan restaurant across the hall /// Fahrrad Disko (see below)

While I’m still young enough to enjoy the partying scene, I’m also old enough that I’ve come to equally relish the quieter discussion-based style of nightlife.  Recently during one of these Wheit Rabbit nights, someone brought up the ways we determine our own happiness. So often, we have most things in our lives under control (or at least as much as life’s chaos can be); we may have shelter and food and love and all the other components necessary for a happy life, but for some reason we still focus on the one or two tiny details that aren’t perfect, and we allow them to color our perception of how happy we really are.

I mention this because I went to Switzerland for the third time last weekend with a university-organized trip, mostly because I wanted to venture further south into the Alps but the cheap Europe-wide buses don’t run there. A visit to the adorable city of Luzerne was the part I was most interested in, and but it only came tacked onto a trip to Zurich, which I’d already seen. What I didn’t realize when I booked it that the lion’s share of the trip would be spent in Zurich, and we’d only get to Luzerne about an hour before sunset. I was pretty annoyed when I found this out until I reflected upon the fact that I was literally going on a day trip to Switzerland. I live so close to the Alps that I can decide to drop everything, board a bus, and within a two hours breathe crisp mountain air and walk across covered wooden bridges that were built 500 years ago. How many people do I know who have never even seen Switzerland? My complaints about the timing suddenly seemed less than trivial. It’s astonishing how much we stand in our own way sometimes.

Zurich was much the same as when I saw it in October, with one notable exception:  Weihnachtsmarkt decorations had overtaken the city.  The streets were lined with diminutive wooden huts, frosted with white lights and topped with fragrant evergreen boughs.   Moravian stars and light strings dripped from the sky as we walked the streets, listening to our guided tour by a pocket-sized pregnant woman from Poland.  As a bona-fide history-hater, I didn’t retain many of the dates or names she mentioned, though I did manage to pick up an interesting bit from her about a battle that happened in the 1200s.  According to her, during an altercation with the Austrian Hapsburgs, all the fighting men of Zurich were killed.  The Hapsburgs then attempted to take the city, but upon reaching one of the highest points of the settlement, they found a contingent of women who had taken up arms and were waiting to defend their city.  Too shocked (or scared, more like) to fight, they turned tail and ran.

    
Statue commemorating women fighters /// Largest clock in Europe

By the time we boarded the bus to head for Luzerne, I was wiped. I’d attended an un-translatable party called a Fahrrad Disko on Friday, and had stayed into the infantile hours of the night. In a thin hole-in-the-wall bar with nary a right angle in sight, people rode stationary bikes that powered a generator, which in turn fueled the electricity for a badly-DJ’d dance party (or so they claimed; the engineering jury is still out on whether this was possible). The various circles of people I run in somehow all managed to converge like a Venn Diagram in that tiny space. We slipped in and out of the front door all night, oscillating eratically between the inside party mode and outside conversation mode. It was probably the most Freiburg-ian thing I’ve done yet, besides climbing the blue bridge or having my bike stolen.

Anyways, the practical downshot of this is I was lulled to sleep just as we left Zurich and headed into the Alps. I didn’t wake up again until the bus jerked to a halt, and I disembarked to find myself on the shore of a placid lake parenthesized by mountains. We were supposed to take another short guided tour, but I instead opted to wander off and get a bit intentionally lost. Tours are wonderful for gaining information deeper than what meets the eye, but they focus all of your attention on the person delivering a rehearsed speech instead of the city itself. I didn’t want to miss my chance to actually meet Luzerne.

The light was failing when we arrived, bleaching the colors from the world, and I decided to tuck my camera away after struggling to take decent pictures for a few minutes. I wandered towards the pale sunset, crossing back and forth over the roaring river via the myriad footbridges that define Luzerne. Wooden heisse merroni (roasted chestnut) stands dotted the riverside. Loud packs of schoolboys added to the noise, throwing chunks of bread at even louder flocks of seagulls.

          

I wandered aimlessly for a few hours, led by nothing more than intuition and curiosity.  I may never have learned the names of the streets I took, or heard the undoubtedly colorful histories of the buildings I passed, but I did a decent job of conducting small talk with Luzerne.

The famous covered bridge, although this one burned and was rebuilt

I watched as she quieted with the setting sun, then burst back into life.  Light spilled out of warm and crowded cafes, shimmering off the river’s churning waters.  I watched as Saturday night revelers slowly began to fill the streets, and I silently wished them all well as they followed their own familiar pathways, chasing their own white rabbits into the belly of the beast.

Aaand we end with a swan butt