Swiss village festival

Luzern, Switzerland

When memory fails us, we say our blessings to digital memory enhancers...

But when the battery is dead, who are we to say what happened?

To Luzern, we hitchhiked with a woman who had never previously picked up hitchhikers before, but felt both intrigued and compassionate after seeing a woman in need of a ride on the road. Her love for reggae and ragga music moved her kind spirit to a life-changing travels in Jamaica. Being back in the land-locked mountainous nation-state of Switzerland only encouraged her to expand her horizon of love. [What would Schopenhauer the philosopher say about the power of will and the passion of music to change inner and outer worlds completely?] 

We arrived to a beautiful lake and immediately set up our afternoon squatter's camp.

But alas, a cold misty rainfall interrupted the afternoon's blue skies. The villagers of this mountain town, just as those urban residents of Zurich, insisted that this fast changing, heavily raining weather was quite uncharacteristic for the summer period. Needless to say, the weather left a damper on us tropical island kids traveling through the mountains. [This would not be the first time that the symptoms of climate change would be so unconsciously articulated by perplexed locals. Or is this an outsider's perspective of inner dimensions?]

While the cloudy weather may be untypical, the prices for sunglasses in Switzerland are not.

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This weekend happened to be Luzern's annual town festival. With my cameraphone battery dead, I managed to capture only one image of the festivities --- a photograph includes my thumb.

The festival, in plain language, could be described a... strange... a stranger's experience.

 I will share one anecdote: After asking the farmer's market during closing time for any leftover vegetables, we happily took our sack of greens to the outdoor tables to put together an enormous celebration salad. But there we were: two foreigners slicing up and salivating over a raw freegan salad surrounded by local Swiss festival attendants literally eating whole pieces of chicken with white bread; accordions, horns, and voices chanting in the background the sound of a culture celebrating the memory of itself.