Klosters is up in the mountains, at about 1200 meters (about 4000 feet) and so gets a lot of rain normally (though till now this has been a warm and dry summer here). Yesterday it was wet early but I did get in a 45 minute hit before the rain started coming down in earnest. I’d never been to St. Moritz, about an hour by train from Klosters but had wanted to see it and yesterday seemed like a perfect day for it.

St. Moritz is about 1770 meters, nearly 6000 feet and cooler as a consequence than Klosters. It’s quite near the Italian part of Switzerland and close to Italy…the train announcements were in German, English and Italian and I heard a lot of Italian spoken in the stores in St. Moritz and there were more Italian foods in the local Coop grocery store.

The ride to and from St. Moritz was beautiful, green fields leading up to the high mountains. The weather was a bit better on the way back from St. Moritz and I could see more of the mountains and some snow. The hay here is compressed into cylinders rather than bales as in the US and then wrapped in plastic, very neat and tidy.

St. Moritz is a ritzy town. It’s not all that big but every major haut couture store is there, from Armani to Yves St. Laurent. The busiest store though was the chocolate store. Yesterday was Swiss National Day, like our Independence day and Swiss flags and red pinwheels with white Swiss crosses were everywhere, especially at restaurants. There were also farmer’s markets and flee markets in Klosters and St. Moritz.

When I arrived in St. Moritz I exited the train station to the Lake which has a nice walking path around it. It was pretty cool and overcast to I walked towards St. Moritz Dorf and then up several long flights of stairs (there were also escalators) to the town. There’s one beautiful old church steeple but the part of the church open to the public was minimalist and modern, not at all what one would expect after seeing the steeple.

After walking around the town I went back to the train station and back to Klosters. It was dry so I decided to go back to the tennis center and hit some serves. However it started raining again and kept raining most of the night (it’s soggy out now). I did run into Nora Blom and Annelies Simons from Netherlands and we had dinner at the club. Back at the hotel I met up with Bridget Harrer from Austria and So Africa. We are going to try and play doubles here if there are enough entrants to make a draw…never a given in Europe.