I’m back in Switzerland, for the last of this series of brief stops across Europe. I’m heading to Milan and then Florence for a week, and then off to Sweden for three. It’ll be good to pause for a bit.

I had vaguely considered getting out and seeing something when I was here — the last time I was in the country I explored Zürich and visited Lucerne — but following a horrific night train where I didn’t get much sleep¹ I was more than happy just crashing at my friend’s for three days. There is a lot to see in Switzerland. I just didn’t see any of it that I hadn’t already seen.

So I spent three nights in a pleasant suburb of Zürich called Schaffhausen, and even then I didn’t see much of the place. We did host a small dinner party for some larpers I knew nearby² and even cooked a little bit.³

I’m considering coming back for a more thorough tour, two or three weeks roaming around seeing more of the place. I’ve even got a discount voucher for a Swiss Railcard if I can figure out how to cash it in before it expires. But that’s for later, when my Schengen visa has cooled off and I have the time to spare. Maybe some day.

I’m now on my way south on the train to Milan. Switzerland feels worlds away from Italy in my imagination, but of course Italy sits just on the other side of the Alps. It’s only a 3½ hour trip, not much longer than the trip from Paris to London.⁶

I’ve spent the last few posts dragging train service in Europe pretty severely, so let me take this time to partially walk it back. I might not have seen much of Switzerland this trip, and this route is far from the most scenic,⁷ but you pass by enough mirror-blue lakes surrounded by sweepingly beautiful mountain ranges to keep a landscape painter busy for the rest of their life. And the train is clean and fast and punctual and reasonably priced.⁸

So this is possible. And if it were the rule rather than the exception you’d eliminate just about every flight less than two hours from the EU overnight. We clearly aren’t there yet. Maybe one day.

There was a holiday back in the United States on Monday. I didn’t notice. I run headlong into local holidays where suddenly everything is unexpectedly closed⁴ but have difficulty telling when everything’s closed back in the States. And yes, I know that’s not exactly revelatory, but it still feels wrong to me. I grew up with things like President’s Day and Memorial Day and the Fourth of July marking the seasons, as integral to the passing of the year as the first snow of winter or the long days of the summer solstice.

But the holidays are artifacts of the calendar, not the natural world, as much as I didn’t understand the difference as a child. The US calendar has an entirely different slate of holidays than Europe does.⁵ And that’s only one way travel does violence to your sense of time. I spent a month in winter in Mexico in January, only to cross directly into summer in Argentina in February.

It’s just another way moving around so much can make you feel alienated. Things make sense if you’re tethered in one place. Spring precedes summer, winter precedes spring. Cut ties and suddenly you get to choose the order and duration of the seasons. You were tricked into mistaking localized phenomena for universal truths. Much of travel is relearning that fundamental lesson, over and over again.

Next: Florence (FLR) to Stockholm (ARN)
Prev: Berlin to Zürich

Footnotes

¹ See last post

² At least, within a couple hours travel. I’ve reached an odd point in my traveling where I’ve made enough friends that I can think of 3-4 people who are in the neighborhood of wherever I land, at least in Europe and most of the larger cities in the United States. I still don’t think of myself as someone like that.

³ Driving to Germany to buy groceries; Switzerland is crazy expensive and the shops close very early. But Schaffhausen is right near the northern border and it doesn’t take much longer to reach a supermarket in Germany than to stay in Switzerland.

⁴ Last Thursday was The Feast of the Ascension in Germany which I’d never even heard of in the United States and all the grocery stores where you might reasonably buy soda were closed. Thank heaven the restaurants and the small shops in the train stations were open. I’d have starved.

⁵ One more sparsely populated, among other things.

⁶ Granted, that’s true in part because the train from Zürich to Milan passes through the recently opened Ceneri Tunnel, part of a proposed high-speed link from Rotterdam to Genoa. The full route is being held up — surprise, surprise — by complaints from Germans who don’t want the tracks expanded. The delays have pushed the estimated completion date to 2035.

⁷ The aforementioned tunnel runs under a lot of the scenery.

⁸ Apparently I paid 38€, which seems ridiculously low?