From Africa To Russia

Wake up, pack up and head for the train to Zurich. Get to station, bathed in sweat (is warm), sit down and get a beer. The waitress is extremely friendly, looks glad to see me. I drink a bit, and suddenly a feeling of extreme elation comes over me. I sit and just smile. I am in Germany, everything is fine, I can continue. I look around me, everything and everyone looks interesting. I go and walk around the train station a bit, it is a great train station, bright and airy and beautiful. It didn’t appear that way the other day, due to the manner in which I arrived. There are no seats anywhere, however, so I sit on the floor and wait. I chat on the train with a friendly Aussie, we wile away the hours pleasantly. You can almost always count on the Australians for good conversation and a few beers. Roll into Zurich around four or five pm, take the local train south to the youth hostel, the damn thing doesn’t stop where the info guy said it would, so I have to get off and take the same train again in the opposite direction to backtrack, and this time it stops. I tell a teen-aged girl about it, “Well are you in a hurry?” she asks. “Then don’t worry about it.” The hostel is a nice big place, widescreen TV and ping pong and pool and a million rooms. I try giving Thomas from the other day a call, but can’t get through to him. Oh well. I ditch my pack and head back on the train into Zurich to explore a bit. The city is pleasant and clean, quaint, almost utopian, but everything is EXTREMELY expensive, the worst yet on the trip. They also appear to prefer Swiss francs over euros. I see a few churches, walk down the ritzy main drag (jewelry stores, designer clothing, banks, watches), then spot a big red sign down a side street: ‘BAR’. Perhaps a place to relax and get a bite to eat without paying a fortune. I go in, it actually looks pretty upscale, and the waitress radiates ‘French’ as soon as a walk in. She is a pretty, bird-like little thing that looks mad at the world in general, with cold, staring blue eyes. She turns her nose up at me, refuses to even look at me. Hey baby, I’ve been carrying a pack on my back all day, what do you want from me. I ask her for a menu, she doesn’t understand English. She is utterly irritated at everything I do or say, no matter how I try to do or say it. Since I can’t understand the menu and can’t get any form of assistance, I point at something and guess. She brings me five small meatballs in a little cat’s saucer, to go along with my beer in the long, narrow flute glass designed to look large while holding as little beer as possible. The bill: thirty euros. I walk out of the ‘bar’ feeling diseased, like I am covered with lice, I want to go take a bath to wash it off. Completely unexpected from Switzerland. But the people on the street seem peaceful and comfortable and well-mannered, and I mentally resolve to not let one bad experience spoil the whole thing. I walk down by the water, through a park and wind up inadvertently hiking the whole way back to the hostel. I am tired, and shortly thereafter I turn in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.