Switzerland | Lake Lucerne

Everything I needed to know about Switzerland I learned while watching petanque. I discovered petanque, and by extension Switzerland, with the help of Nico, who is as illuminating about his country as he is cryptic about himself.

It is Nico who sidles up to me as I stand near a small, parklike square on the edge of Lake Lucerne and halfwhispers something to me in a furtive manner that I tend to associate with mafi oso types.

“Pardon?” I reply in my best SwissGerman accent, honed from years of watching Hogan’s Heroes reruns as a kid.

In a kind gesture, Nico does not roll his eyes at me, nor does he point out that the proper German response would be something more like “Verzeihen sie mir?” For this act of international diplomacy, he becomes my favorite Swiss ever.

“Petanque,” he says again, a bit more slowly. “The game you’re watching.”

“Ahh,” I say, happy that we are speaking a language that doesn’t require me to pull out my laminated cheat sheet of German words and phrases. “So that’s what it is.”