Let's see where this goes

I'm not highly motivated to write at the moment, the weather over Lugano is absolutely dreadful and I'm in a bit of a food coma. Side note? Melt dark chocolate with a bit of butter and cognac. Seriously, it turned my mood around. Before I forget I also need to share a truly weird story. The past few days there have been more bugs than usual. Specifically I keep finding these giant brown spiders on my bedroom floor (and only in the bedroom). Now anyone who knows me knows I hate, loathe, despise and otherwise abhor spiders and bugs of all kinds. Even typing the words "spider" and "bug" give me the creepy crawlies. One of these spiders was even big enough that I could see it without my glasses on. Just to be clear, I can't see my own hand in front of my face without my glasses. Yikes. So when I saw the first giant critter I thought, "I don't have the energy to deal with this right now, I'm just going to trap it under a glass until I get the courage up to kill it". So I did. Except I never did get the courage to kill it, and more spiders kept showing up... long story short I basically have a little menagerie in the corner of my bedroom of spiders trapped under glasses. I'm started to feel like a creepy serial bug killer a la Silence of the Lambs, letting the bugs build up their terror before I kill them. But I'm not really like that! I just don't have the courage to kill them. This is why people have boyfriends and roommates, huh?

But on to nicer things. See I haven't told you about when my friend Jon was here and we went to Bellinzona for the flower festival. Up until this moment I wasn't sure if I was going to, because I'm feeling lazy, but here we go! Bellinzona has a market on the weekends, but one weekend a year they also have a flower festival where local florists submit impressive structures made of flowers (and wire, etc). The general public gets to vote! Here are some examples of the entries, which are located in little corners all over the city center:

Actually, I don't think the giant chair was entered in the competition, but still. It's pretty, right? There were also giant vegetable constructions suspended over the streets. At least I'm pretty sure one of them was supposed to be a carrot.

Throughout the rest of the year Bellinzona is known for the awesome castle whose wall cuts through the middle of the city. It's pretty confusing, we were attempting to access the castle by climbing up ancient stairs to locked gates, when in fact the part that was open for tourists was on the opposite side of town. Once we finally made it was started laughing at the entrance. The "door" is a concrete tunnel with a very high ceiling cut into a sheer wall of rock. You walk in a few yards and there is an elevator and a staircase going maybe four floors up to the castle grounds. It looked a little like something out of Lord of the Rings, I swear. Let's see if there's a good picture. This doesn't show the entrance itself, but it's cut into the wall of rock pictured here. Once you get into the castle walls you can walk up the tower to see the valley. It's really very pretty.

So Bellinzona was an utter success, but we were also able to visit Lugano and nearby Ponte Tresa, sort of the Tijuana of Italy and Switzerland. Only with pasta and cheese instead of drugs and booze. All in all it was a delightful weekend (with beautiful weather). Unfortunately I came down with a cold directly afterward, which I have only just kicked.

Here are a couple more pictures from the trip.

A traditional Swiss Alpine band!

A View!