Two days before our departure we decided to visit Switzerland once again but this time Lausanne, so we got ourselves a car and off we went.
Throughout the year I was undecided between leaving to the UK or Switzerland (where my parents wanted me to go to) and Lausanne was the place of choice because of my M.Sc., so I had to take a look…
After the whole disappointment with Genève I was feeling a bit scared, but Lausanne lived up to my expectations – the city was clean, pretty, interesting and very pleasant. There was only this tiny detail that screamed creepiness: everybody around us spoke Portuguese.
Yup.
At one time, checking manga around fnac, I thought that I was back in Portugal – the clients talked portuguese, the employees talked back in Portuguese…creepy.
Setting that aside…… that fnac in Lausanne was simply amazing. It had this amazing collection of manga and merchandise and anime…..I was in heaven. I don’t think I ever saw such great collection of manga anywhere else. And it’s not about quantity (in Paris there’s also a big area reserved to manga) but about quality. Manga isn’t just Naruto, Bleach, Death Note or Pokemon, it’s so much more than that (even though I’m a huge fan of all those). There was a huuuuuuge collection of shoujo manga and with amazing tittles, some of them were relatively new, just out in Japan a couple of month ago…I was amazed.
I’m sure that at one point keoshi had to remind me how to breath again properly because I was hyperventilating. ^_^;
We walked around for the whole day in Lausanne, checking out the lake shore, where we sat relaxing, eating some snacks and feeding the birds…
The triathlon was happening in Lausanne so there were athletes working out around all the time, and we saw the finnish line, where there was this very nice expensive-looking party with two very nice cars just outside the place and quite a few people dressed for the party.
That was the kind of city I could live in, definitely.
We went back to Annecy and the landscapes were so amazingly beautiful that by the time the sun was setting we had to stop and take it all in. So, so, so beautiful…
While on our way to Annecy we had to drive through Genève and I felt I had seen a different city before. It wasn’t the kind of beautiful city like Lausanne but it was definitely better than what I had seen before…
It was definitely the case where our mood and the circumstances of the whole situation helped to make the city look bad. Had we not known that cab driver and the hostel guy and we were good to go.
But oh well.
Annecy 3.0
The last day in Annecy. We spent it doing nothing. We just lazed around reading in the garden – I bought this nice french manga that is just adorable -, we slept there for quite a bit, and we strolled around the city for one last time… I did not want to leave. Nope.
But we had to go… So the next day we got up *really* early ate our last Pain au Chocolat in Annecy and off we went to Genève to catch our plane.
We get to the airport and there’s this portuguese guy screaming at the top of his lungs with his wife because he had to pay an extra 500 CHF for extra weight of her luggage… The scene was quite… er… weird in a very bad way – we knew then we weren’t far away from our country. *sigh*
We get to Lisbon and off we went to get a cab and even though there was a system, just like in Berlin, there were at least two cops ordering people inside the cabs and maintaining order between the cab drivers…and it wasn’t even working. There were these two cab drivers that started to shout at each other because of a ‘I-got-here-first’-situation… Welcome to Portugal, vacation was over.
Right now I know that Berlin is in our horizon in a very near future, because it was most certainly a city that sunk deep in our hearts; not just the city itself, but everything that comes with it, the culture, the people, the fairness… It’s a solid city in every way possible.
Berlin, wait for us.
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