The other cool thing Okki and I were going to do on Saturday was to meet up with Stefan. I was psyched about that, even more visiting CERN. He had been unable to meet me at Zurich Airport because of his work (he is a very diligent executive, and has risen up the corporate ladder through a series of jobs with different employers).
He is also crazy and nutty in the same way both Okki and I are, and love being with the both of them. In this case Stefan was brining along his wife, a Brazilian woman. They were driving in from their place north of Zurich along the German border. Ginger and I had visited them there in 2014, and we had last seen Stefan while he had come to Las Vegas for a conference in 2016, and driven down to stay at our place in Fountain Hills.
He and Okki are close friends, like a duo. Hard to think of one without the other. In a very similar, but not in how they look, other than both being taller than average. Okki's rounded facial features, as does his lingering accent, betrays his origins as Finn, whose parents moved to Sweden in the 1960s for employment. He grew in. working-class exurb of Gothenburg which has since becoming mostly Iraqi. Stefan came from wealth, also in Gothenburg, and has tall melancholic look that seems very Nordic.
Even though they are both from the same Swedish city, and of the same age, and went the same technical college in Gothenburg, they met only when both had gone to Aspen, Colorado in the late 1980s to work menial jobs in order to be ski bums. Both had leveraged their technical skills quite well in order to build financial stability working normal jobs for normal companies, while simultaneously seeking out, whenever they could, adventure travel together in Latin America, which might become a raucous week-long party adventure, barely sleeping until one could no longer stand up, or going hard on the slopes of a delightful bowl-basin in the Rockies or the Alps, or other mountains. Okki had recently lived in Andalusia simply for winter skiing above Granada. He had moved to Switzerland after falling in love with Zermatt, after a recent trip there with Stefan and other hard-skiing Swede. Lausanne had been chosen as comfortable base from which he could work remotely and access the winter heaven-on-earth just a short train ride away.
Our plan was to meet up with Stefan and his wife in the town Gruyère, which is famous for its cheese. There would also visit the Geiger Museum, which shows the work of the Swiss artist known for his grotesque imagery, who made the concept and sets for the 1979 movie Alien.
What a day it would be.
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