{"id":76440,"date":"2026-06-02T18:30:25","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T18:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/76440\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T18:30:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T18:30:25","slug":"a-piece-of-switzerland-that-is-forever-irish-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/76440\/","title":{"rendered":"A piece of Switzerland that is forever Irish \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was newly arrived in the city of St Gallen<\/a> on Sunday night when my phone crashed. Worse, the Franco-Italian adaptor that had worked in Zurich could now not seem to make itself understood by any of the local plug sockets, in my hotel or elsewhere. <\/p>\n

So, with great reluctance, I was forced to take refuge in a pub and drink beer while the barman juiced the phone up behind the counter.<\/p>\n

The place looked and sounded like a biker bar, although the only obvious Hell\u2019s Angel among the clientele was outnumbered by customers with dreadlocks. <\/p>\n

There were also several other varieties of eccentric present. The only thing they all had in common, I guessed, was being Swiss people who didn\u2019t quite fit in Switzerland and needed regular asylum from it.<\/p>\n

Sitting at the counter, I was soon engaged in conversation by the wiry, tanned, 60-something gin-and-tonic drinker beside me. <\/p>\n

Highly animated, he was complaining (in German first, then a heavily accented English of which I could understand only one in every three or four words) about the ice hockey: Switzerland versus Finland on the TV. <\/p>\n

Or more particularly about the presenters\u2019 interval panel discussion, which he deemed \u201cboring\u201d and \u201cstupid\u201d.<\/p>\n

Then he asked where I was from, and when told, declared it \u201ca cool island\u201d. Coming from a man in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, I took this to be a cultural rather than meteorological critique. <\/p>\n

But he grew even more animated when I reminded him that St Gallen is believed to have been founded by a 7th century Irish monk.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd a bear!\u201d he seemed to say, making me wonder if I had misheard. Then he started into a story about the monk\u2019s journey across the Alps, which I also struggled to follow. <\/p>\n

So by way of general encouragement, I interjected that it must have a daunting trek for a lone traveller. \u201cAnd a bear!!\u201d he repeated (with two exclamation marks this time). <\/p>\n

Here he got off his stool and started miming what looked like a 7th century monk\u2019s ascent of the Alps, without proper skiing equipment. <\/p>\n

Except that the climber appeared to morph at one point into an abominable snowman: stamping his legs, waving his arms and growling. <\/p>\n

The resulting spectacle might have been a cause for amusement in most bars. In this one, it attracted hardly a glance from the other customers. They were clearly used to drama.<\/p>\n

It was only next morning, when visiting the Unesco-listed Abbey of St Gall, that I realised what my friend at the bar had been trying to say.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Abbey of St Gall is a Unesco World Heritage Site <\/p>\n

Exhibits in the abbey\u2019s museum depicted the legend whereby, while travelling through the Kingdom of the Franks (no known relation to the diarist), the saint was attacked by a bear, which he first rebuked and then befriended, to the extent where they became inseparable companions.<\/p>\n

One modern novelist has reinterpreted the story in Jungian terms (aptly, since Jung was a Swiss psychotherapist), as a parable for making peace with one\u2019s inner wild animal. <\/p>\n

Either way, the historical St Gall (c. 55-645), who had been one of Columbanus\u2019s 12 apostles, settled down in a hermitage at what is now St Gallen, and lived the life of a hermit there, gaining a reputation for supernatural powers.<\/p>\n

As his fame spread, he refused repeated offers of bishoprics or any other role that would involve him in the affairs of the world.<\/p>\n

But after he died, a great abbey and scriptorium grew up around the site. Today, the complex holds one of Europe\u2019s oldest and finest libraries.<\/p>\n

My accommodation in St Gallen turned out to be a bit of a hermitage too. To get there, I first had to descend into an underpass beneath the railway station and climb the 40 steps back to ground level on the far side of the tracks.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0When dinner in Dublin costs about the same as Switzerland, how do the Irish afford it?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Then it was another 182 steps up a walkway to the hillside hotel. On several trips to and from the city centre, I must have ascended the equivalent of a small alp.<\/p>\n

It was \u201cnot a traditional hotel\u201d, as the email had warned. This explained the suspiciously cheap rate of 73 Swiss Francs (about \u20ac80), a giveaway compared with the stratospheric prices of Zurich. <\/p>\n

The \u201ctrade-offs\u201d of a 120-year-old villa in original condition, as the email further explained, included very thin walls (earplugs were provided as standard) and a shared bathroom. <\/p>\n

Guests were encouraged to live monkishly, with no showers after 9pm, because the house itself was so noisy. Floorboards creaked if you as much as looked at them. <\/p>\n

The monk in the cell next to me did his best to be very quiet. Even so, between creaks of the floorboards, I could hear him thinking.<\/p>\n

Still, the air was pristine and the views over the city spectacular. Also on the plus side, there were no wild bears up there. Jungian or otherwise, those were all hanging out down at the biker bar. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was newly arrived in the city of St Gallen on Sunday night when my phone crashed. Worse,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[39930,17],"class_list":["post-76440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-irish-diary","tag-switzerland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116681940876473926","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}