June 29th - Off to a festival on Lake Lugano

"Festival of the fishes, 29 June 2008, Plaza at the Lake, Caslano, from 11 hours, fried little fishes, plays the 'Trio Malcantonese', Lottery." At least that is how I translated the poster. The Untour newsletter that we received at orientation listed this festival as an event we might like to attend. It is connected to the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and is based on the feeding of the fishes and loaves to the crowd of 5,000 by Jesus.

So Susan and I took the S2 commuter train to Lugano where we changed to the FLP (Ferrovia Lugano-Ponte Tresa) "little orange train." The emblem on the side of the little train reads "a smile every 20 minutes." In about a half hour, we were in Caslano which is south of Lugano on a neck of Lake Lugano.

When got off the train in Caslano, we couldn't see the lake and were not sure in which direction to go. We wanted to visit the Alprose Museum of Chocolat so did that first since there were directions at the train station. The production line was shut down on Sunday but we looked at all the machinery, watched a movie in English with a Japanese couple, looked at all the exhibits about making and selling chocolates, and tried a few samples. The ladies there directed us to the lake.

At the lake, we found a real small-town festival going on. There were booths selling various stuff and at the far end there was a gathering of a couple thousand people with a line forming to buy food and drinks. We joined in since this would be our lunch. Susan waited while it took almost an hour for me to get the food.
The reason that the line was so slow was because they were only using two deep fat friers to cook the fish and each cooker could only make about ten servings.

The little fish from the lake were delicious and we enjoyed the trio of musicians very much. They played and sang typical Swiss/Italian music. As the day went on there were other groups standing around singing as well. Everyone was having a good time as you can see from all the bottles that lined the middle of the tables.



After having lunch, we had a gelato and walked around to see some of the sights of the town. The cemetery had very elaborate family monuments. It was hot enough that the children and dogs were playing in the fountain. We sat under the huge sycamore tree near the dock until we decided to cool off by putting our feet in the lake.


At 3:30 we boarded the ship "Italia" and spent the next two hours cruising on Lake Lugano. We stopped at several of the very pretty towns that dot the lake.

We especially enjoyed seeing Morcote from the ship. We had visited here by car on a trip 25 years ago.
As we were about to disembark in Lugano, I started to take a photo of Susan with Mt. San Salvatore in the background like one I had taken 25 years earlier. A young girl came over and asked if she could take the photo of both of us. We are very happy to have these fond memories of Lake Lugano.