Nostalgia

I'm starting to feel like a hardened and weary ex-pat.  Not that I don't love my cute little Swiss apartment (where the lights turn off and on all on their own), I do!  And Intragna, albeit on the shadowy side of the mountain, is still as charming as ever.  No.  It's that I now find myself nostalgic for 'the way things used to be,'  when I first moved to Switzerland.

That's how I felt, a couple of days ago, when I walked down the hill to the stazione, expecting to find a familiar  FART ticket machine:

Old-school FART bigletti machina

Only to find this!

New-fangled FART ticket machine

Do you see the important difference here??????  What is the world coming to?  And it doesn't take bills.  Only coins and cards.  Which is actually kind of a pain!

At least Switzerland still has:

Wild Strawberries

Which make me feel just a little bit like Heidi.  Didn't she feast on them with fresh goat milk on the mountain with her grandfather?  I finally spotted some goats a couple weeks ago, clinging to the edge of the mountain as my train whizzed past them.  Too fast to catch a picture.

I did, however, remember to take my camera with me on a little walk back to what I now refer to as the Witch Cabin.  Who else could possibly live in such an enchanting place?

Witch Cabin

Spring just keeps coming.

The Quarks agree.