2011-08-23 46 9

Location

A backyard in Chur.

Participants

Plans

This time as a limerick:

Today, there's a hashpoint in Chur.
It won't take me long, I am sure.
If I catch the train,
It won't be a pain
To get to that hashpoint in Chur.

Expedition

After his last No Batteries attempt had failed because of his own doubts, Calamus decided to leave his GPS at home to eliminate the temptation. Unfortunately, he also left his camera next to the GPS, which proved not to be very wise.

Chur is the capital of Graubünden (litterally the "Place of the Gray Leagues") or Grisons, the largest canton of Switzerland. For its kind-of-glorious 7000-year history, it appeared a little unadorned and austere to Calamus, who had never been to Chur (but often to Grisons) and had expected a mini-version of Zurich or Berne. Indeed, it appeared to be little more than a particularly big Grisonian vale village. Fun fact: The first thing a visitor sees when exiting from the main station is the logo of Zurich Assurances. Calamus felt at home immediately.

Anyway, the hashpoint was in the backyard of a youth hostel near the main station. It was easy to get there and to identify the hashpoint (exactly in a corner), but of course, Calamus couldn't take any pictures of it. Shame.

He consoled himself with a Grisonian beer from a nearby pub and then went exploring. While he didn't find much of interest, he did notice something very strange: All over the German-speaking part of Switzerland, the people have a very concrete idea what a Grisonian has to sound like - /r/ is pronounced as an alveolar trill, if not a flap, and all vowels are spoken deeply and openly. This is, of course, because of the influence of the ancient Romansh language. However, Calamus noticed that none of the people around him were speaking like this at all. In fact, they sounded exactly like the people back at Zurich. It was bound to become public once: Calamus is a linguist. As such, he fully supports every diachronical change in languages - but a dialect being completely displaced by his own one bothered even him. So when he heard a youngster at Quaderwiese (if you had to give a name to a relaxation zone, would you choose "Meadow of the Cuboids"?) bullying a younger one in a perfect Grisonian dialect, he could have hugged him.

After hanging out for a while on, umm, Meadow of the Cuboids, Calamus drove a few Grisonians crazy with his initiative and then returned to Zurich.

Photos

As stated above, Calamus did not have the mental capacity to bring his camera. Instead, here are two kind-of-proofs of his journey, photographed in a mystery location: