I think I never gave Fribourg any credit to be remotely pretty. From Buttes, to Peseux, to Basel, to Olten, to Aarau and now a bit Aarau and a bit Fribourg – and to be honest, the latter city always seemed to me very “mediocre for being the capital of a large canton”! Particularly on a foggy winter morning, when everything seems gloomy and not very pretty. Yet, despite its aesthetic “qualities” – it is populated by very good people.
Of course then comes the part of exercise. You don’t need to really go to a gym if you walk everywhere here. Not just the fact that reaching Fribourg is hard, but also it’s internal neighbourhoods are so irregularly placed that to get from one location to the other, you have to climb flights of stairs of considerable height. Perhaps one of the many reasons why I didn’t want to study here, despite it pretty much being a student city.
Yet today, as I look out of the balcony, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, upon rolling hills with tufts of green trees here and there, old city and new blocks of buildings merging together – I realise that another circumstance in my life where fate brought me to like a city I so desperately wanted to avoid.
Monsieur is a very good hearted man, very reasonable, but I am glad he is not a Fribourgeoise. It would have been painful, – despite my recently found pleasure in visiting this city more often than I ever thought humanly possible, – to move here! I would no doubt have lost all pleasure of movement, and tough to live with limited number of commercial areas, bars and shops – that ends up closing early! For sure though, I would have lived in peace until my last hour in this city. Or so I believe if I don’t count the crime rates (must Google that for reasons of curiosity); and I must know better than anyone that my pleasure and displeasure of being in Fribourg has nothing to do with its people, but rather the city and it’s “appealing” aesthetics.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF LOVE 