Lemania

The day before I left Illinois, a lovely late August day, I was coming home from visiting friends in Chicago and it was a little dangerous driving down Lake Shore Drive with Lake Michigan being so distractingly gorgeous. All I can say it’s probably for the best that I’m not driving here in Lausanne – I don’t know if I would be able to handle three dimensional street plans and pedestrians who think they own the place even if Lac Léman weren’t there to distract me.

And Lac Léman is there to distract me. Always beautiful, but always in a slightly different way. It has many moods, depending on the time of day and the weather, and I’ve only gotten to see a few of them so far. I sometimes have the urge to stop strangers who aren’t paying attention to it and ask them, “Have you SEEN the lake today?!” But I haven’t. Yet.

The listening comprehension section of today’s French placement exam was an interview with a literature professor at the University of Lausanne who specializes in “the history of travel and of landscapes” (oh, academia), in particular the region around the Lac Léman. So it turns out that at least one person managed to make appreciating the lake a full-time job!

According to the professor, it took the British, who had a long tradition of spending time studying and traveling on the continent, until the 18th century to notice that Switzerland was kinda pretty. They would pass through on their way to Italy with their curtains shut, sleeping, until Jean-Jacques Rousseau set his La Nouvelle Héloïse in a utopia on the shores of Lac Léman and it became “probably the most widely read novel of the century.” Then people started to open their curtains when they went by. Good job, guys.