The only thing more boring than writing a blow-by-blow account of a weekend trip is reading one, so for everyone’s sake, I think it suffices to simply state that I went to Lucerne on Saturday. For the curious, highlights of my stay include: hiking (i.e. strolling) at the top of an Alpine peak on a paved path; sharing that paved path with some sort of horned mountain goat animal (see below); and gleefully patronizing such tourist gimmicks as the world’s steepest cogwheel railway, as well as Switzerland’s longest summer toboggan run. (On an unrelated note, I hold the record for being the world’s wittiest Chinese-Canadian-American under 25 and older than 18 who has been on the world’s steepest cogwheel railway exactly once, and who can move his left ear but not the right.) Unfortunate oversights from this weekend include: not actually spending any time in the town of Lucerne itself.

I had intended to make this a world-record filled weekend by hiking Mont Blanc on Sunday, but that trip was cancelled due to inclement weather and unforseen circumstances on Saturday night involving another member of our expedition and a bottle of port. Without any tales of mountaineering and bravery to bring back to my coworkers at the LMNN (my lab), today at lunch I instead extolled the efficiency of my Swiss-German waitress at the Lucerne train station buffet. My story was received with semi-impressed nods all around, which I take to be a success rivalling my critically-acclaimed “rant about the rain” last Thursday during coffee break.

Luckily for all the Swiss people I have yet to meet, my capacity for making conversation about weather is severely limited by my vocabulary. In particular, I do not know how to say “Torrential shitshow,” “Overcast hellhole,” or “It’s raining cats and dogs with stomach flu” in French. This has been pivotal in preserving my friendly acquaintance with the one native Swiss person I know. For those who think that one is a pathetically small number, I’m just going to point out that it is also the first number in the Fibonacci sequence. And what other numbers are in the Fibonacci sequence? Really big ones. Coincidence? I think not.