June 2 -- We land in Zurich a couple hours late, past 10 AM local time, which I don't mind. Okki had already indicated he needed to work (from home) at least until, and if I arrived at his rented AirBnB flat in Lausanne earlier than that, I'd have to chill out. My late arrival meant I'd get there closer to the end of his work day.
My backpack showed up in the luggage, thankfully, but when I touched it I found it was soaked through and through. It confirmed my fears while sitting on the tarmac at JFK, and seeing luggage carts in the rain. I reasoned my oddly-shaped pack would be at the top of whatever pile it was in, on the carts, and might have borne the brunt of the rainstorm. Everything inside that might be damaged by water, including the vintage maps I'd brought along from previous trips, were wrapped up in ziplock bags. I'd gone crazy with ziplock bags the night before I left, going to Target and buying three different sizes, and using them both for organization and rain-protection. But all my clothes and my Rumple synthetic blanket were drenched. I felt stupid because in the pack were three large garbage bags specifically to use for all my possessions in the pack. I thought I would use them if hiking in the rain. It didn't occur to me that I would need them while in flight. Mistake number one of the trip.
Through Swiss customs, my task was to get to Lausanne by train. First step was figuring out how to buy a train ticket. From my meticulous research, I knew the station was directly across from the entrance to the terminal, I probably could have bought one all the way to Lausanne. Using the machine, and making it easy on my self by choosing English instructions instead of German, I navigated the menus, buying a ticket only as far as Zurich central station for now, where I could buy another ticket for Lausanne. I don't mind these interactions in foreign countries. They are part of the fun. When I put in my credit card to verify my purchase, it rejected it. Uh oh. Bad sign. The last thing you want to see abroad. It is for this reason mostly that I have multiple bank accounts and multiple credit cards--so I don't get stuck while traveling. I went through the process again, through the same screens, and used by debit card and this time thankfully it worked. Sigh of relief.
I caught the train into Zurich, wondering if it was the right one, and the conductor was happy with my ticket, so I figured it was heading in the right direction. I had used my iPhone to tell me the schedules to Lausanne, and bought a ticket in the machines for the next one, using my debit card, which worked. So far things felt rocky but I was in motion. No big screw ups yet. While I waited for the train, I strolled through the Zurich station, marveling at the architecture, which I love--those old European stations, even if they are partially modernized. The one thing I miss is the clackety-clack of the old schedule boards with their mechanical flipping letters and numbers. Now it is all digital. Somehow it doesn't feel as much like you are on a train trip in some faraway place.
I thought about the previous times I'd been in Zurich, going back to the summer of 1992, when I was by myself, and only passing through because Switzerland was expensive, and in 2014 with Ginger, when we "did Switzerland right" because I had a decent-paying job I would work at while abroad.
Switzerland felt almost normal, routine for me now. I wouldn't have come here except for my friend Okki, who had recently relocated from Spain to Switzerland, all the while holding down the same remote IT job for an American company. He'd moved into his new rental only a few days before, sending me photos of the spectacular view over Lake Geneva.
You can usually set your watch by the Swiss train schedule, and soon I was seated on my train, headinbg out of the city and into the lush green countryside of Switzerland, along one lake and then another on the way to Lausanne. One chain of trains got me there in a couple hours.
In the station there, toting my backpack like days of old, I looked around, trying to remember it. Did I remember? It was here, at the tail end of that glorious trip in the summer of 1985, when I conquered all my fears and emerged into manhood, that I had gotten off the train (because my ticket allowed one to break one's trip, and I didn't want to get back to Paris quite yet). I had put my old blue Camp Trails internal frame pack into left luggage, using some of my last cash, and wondered around Lausanne, winding up in a park where I found a quaint old well-kept building that was a movie theater. I resolved to see whatever was showing and walked up to find that it was a hard-core porn theater, the nicest looking one you'd ever see. A sweet old lady sold me a ticket and for the first and only time in my life I went solo to such a showing, feeling like it was so ironical that I couldn't resist following through. Then I had slept on the train station platform waiting for the express to come through in the night, to catch it onward with my precious ticket I had bought in Athens, that would get me home, and would sleep on the train.
I told Okki this story when I finally got to his place, walking twenty minutes from the station to his flat, cheerful like days of old. I told him how ironically, in the autumn after that trip, I went back to college as a transfer to a small liberal arts college in Oregon, and that one of the dorms was called Lausanne Hall, named after immigrants from that city, and that I had two girlfriends "in Lausanne" that fall. Such are the adventures of youth. I was at different stage of life. What would the Swiss city reveal to me this time?
That fall in 1985, turning 21, I found myself the object of much female attention at my new college, partly because I was a bronze sculpted god from my travels, and more importantly, I was fearless and cocky. I figured there was nothing in Salem, Oregon that could possibly matter, or intimidate me, I could always move on. I assumed I would always feel that way. I didn't realize that effect of such adventures, like the tan I had gotten, wear off and must be renewed. When it did, during that first year in Oregon, it would horribly confuse me, even depress me, as if I lost the Grail.
I told Okki that using Google Maps, and a little bit of deduction, I'd located that old porn theater in the park from 1985. It was once part of a casino, which makes sense, and which I vaguely remembered, but it no longer showed porn flicks but was a proper art cinema.
Okki had plans lined up for the weekend for us, but he would need to work the next day (Friday). We didn't go out that evening but sat around in his flat, on the patio with its magnificent view over the city and the lake. The discussion went late into the night. I had barely slept on the plane, and was overcome with fatigue but the vagaries of jet lag kept me awake and we talked on the patio. The conversation got rather heated. As he has done over the phone (using Whatsapp), he gets animated asking me, on the edge of anger, how I can support Donald Trump. The school massacre in Texas had just happened, so of course I got an earful about how America needs to conform the rest of the world on gun issues (Ain't gonna happen, I said. You better come up with a better way to stop school shootings? Are you open to alternative solution or does it HAVE to be a gun ban?). He's a very strong atheist, and he also peppered with me inquisition-style probing about why such a rational scientific man like me can believe in God. I tried my best to be frank with my answers to him, but often I needed clarification to his questions, i.e. Do you believe in Santa Claus? He found this very frustrating, telling me just to give a straight answer, and I tried, but it kept getting worse and worse. I very much wanted him to not open up this can of worms, but he needed to "go there." I knew this. I knew how people get disturbed just by knowing someone disagrees with them. I felt resentment towards him, that he, of all people, had succumbed to the need to break me down, even humiliate me. It felt so boring to me. So stereotypical.
Yet he was ultimately able to pull back and say shake my hand, and say, I love you and respect you, Matt, and of course I did the same in return, because of course I don't care that disagrees with me. I'm not threatened by that at all.
Finally at 3AM, with him needing to get up in a few hours for work, we went aside and I crashed on his air mattress, while all of my clothes were draped over his dining room chairs, drying from having gotten soaked on the tarmac in New York.
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