Well today is a zero, and a comfy place to have one. The monastery guesthouse is plain and comfy, and our corner room is bright and airy. Perfect for laundry airing.
The one thing about the room, though, is that it's all of 100m or so from the monestary bell towers, and Those Monks Must Toil For God. So at 5am it was a DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG dong dong dong dong dong, so time to get up and Prayse The Lord, though that isn't our thing so we rolled over. DONG at 5:15am, though, so yeah the monks put in a snooze feature on their bell tower. Sigh, fine, we'll stare at Insta or something.
Brekkie was cozy and cute at 8am (no hurry today!), and the gaggle of nuns we saw enjoying a bit too much red wine at dinner last night were looking a little slow today, asking for a bit too many tiny pitchers of coffee. We planned our day--how about a visit to the monastery? Sure. How about some shopping? Of course.
We wandered down the main ped street in town, not much open, but we did go in the tiny Migros to look for ice tea mix, and I looked for sunglasses since my 8 year old glasses are a bit beat up now. Nothing much open, so all good and back to the room for some reading and writing and photo editing and the like. Gotta keep these vacations kinda focused on the now, and just thinking and doing photos helps that a lot when there's a lot of instructive distractions. More information just isn't beneficial information--there shouldn't be any impact on my life or happiness if Trump gets his request for His Special Master, for instance.
After some relaxing, how about some... more shopping! Chris spotted a Mammut store, so out we strolled again, and again nothing interesting, but we did go through the monastery gates into the herb garden for a look. Then just outside the gates under the room was a decent looking pizza place, so yum we had a tasty venison and pumpkin pie, it's that time of year.
More napping, then more flipping over drying socks, then the monastery tour. It wasn't terribly interesting, but there were a few nuggets. The monk who led it has been there for over 40 years, mainly teaching school kids and the like, and there are only 18 monks left (though there are pretty vast property holdings). One interesting thing was that the monastery was really worried about the Swiss government shutting it down in the 1860s or so--when the government was very concerned about undue religious influence. So the monastery founded a couple of branches in the US, one near St. louis and the other near Salem, Oregon. They're still around, and if the website of the monastery near Salem is any indication, that offshoot is definitely keeping up with the times.
A little bit of touring, another simple but tasty meal, and we were done for the day.
Tomorrow, I think we'll skip the tedious uphill section out of town, and take the cable way up to the first station. Maybe walk around the lake, then head up to the pass. From there, it's a simple 4 or 5km down to our next stop, a kinda old-school hotel up at 1800m. Call it a second day of almost a zero, a near-zero, a nero.