friday, 15.06.2012

There they are, my guests. Not that I had planned to take pictures of all my guests and put them in the blog, but seeing they were my ONLY guests in the week I have been here, I think they deserve to be published. Stefano, Elena and Alicia. They seem quite happy, I think they enjoyed the stay. 

Here you can see what I spent hours doing yesterday and today. I feel immensely satisfied just looking at it. It suits my sense of order and tidiness. Even though, I suppose, it may not meet the standards of the experienced Soveltra team. It was rewarding working physically, although I noticed that I am definitely not fit, but still I had a quite intense feeling of happiness when I ate outside tonight (spaghetti with tomato, olive and caper sauce), looking at Campo Tencia, just being in this wonderful, peaceful place and, of course, admiring the lovely piles of wood.

I actually walked about 30 metres today. I went to the bridge that leads over the river “Ri della Löita”, which is a lovely, but freezing place to bathe in: 

I did just that three years ago, it was painful at the beginning, but wonderful in the end. But then again, it was August and we had walked in the heat. And we were in that mood, that incredibly happy mood that makes almost everything possible.

IMPORTANT INTERRUPTION: England should have started playing now. I have no idea against who, but my dear friend Bernd in Germany will keep me up-to-date by SMS as she did with the disappointing match against France (1:1). Ta, Bernd.

Well, you have to cross the bridge if you, amongst other things, want to go up to Campo Tencia peak, which is a long, but incredibly beautiful ascent. I did it three years ago with my ex-boyfriend. We went up to the peak and over to Campo Tencia hut, which is a great trek, but it takes long, I think we took about eight hours. It is marked in white-blue, which are the colours for “alpine route”, meaning more difficult route, because it takes long, you need to do a lot of climbing, a little bit of scrambling and crossing of snow fields, or glaciers.

And this is the new bridge over the small stream of water outside the back side of the hut. The round wooden sign reads: “A new bridge for a new president”. Which is a joke. Because Arturo has been president of the SAV alpine club for,  I think, 16 years or so, and actually wanted to hand the baton over to somebody else. But, apparently, nobody was willing and he was re-elected. So, he has now been declared the “new president” that was sought. And he didn’t approve of the old bridge, which was not in a very good state. If you look closely you can see the corks from the bottles that were emptied to inaugurate the new bridge.

I am really settling in here. It is starting to feel like home. Very, very slowly, I am starting to leave everything behind. It will still take some time, but I am relaxing. No more tensions in the upper back, my sleep is starting to regulate itself, I am adjusting to this new rhythm and feel. Clean air, absolute silence. And I love the sight, every morning, of Campo Tencia, never mind the weather.

Every time anew that I look up there I can hardly believe the amount of water that flows down from the mountains in Ticino. It is incredible. No other place I have been to in the mountains so far has had this much water. I remember regions with quite a lot of water and others with none at all, like Slovenia, or Corsica, where you were lucky to maybe find a described source every week or so. Sad thought to know that one day there will be no more water coming down from these beautiful mountains. The glaciers are melting, global warming and so on. So, please, dear readers, try to do what you can to protect the environment.

21:30: GOAL! England leading against IKEA! ENGLAND, ENGLAND!! Football’s coming home…

By the way, no matter who comes by or not, I ALWAYS have one guest – the mouse. It’s a ritual, I’d say, by now. I set the trap in the evening under the oven with the chocolate and in the morning, the mouse is in the trap. It is sweet, but it’s a mouse. Every day I take it further away, but until now it has always returned.