Switzerland

 

It was mid-August of 1990.  After a week in Italy it was time for my girlfriend Lona and I to head to the next country:  Switzerland.  Using our Eurail passes we boarded an overnight train from Venice to Zurich.  We tried to sneak into a sleeper car and that lasted all of 10 minutes before we got booted back into the regular seats.  We arrived in Zurich on a bright sunny morning but had not slept that well on the uncomfortable, bumpy train.  We were tired, but nervously excited to be in a new country and looked forward to checking it out.  We exchanged our Italian Lira for Swiss Francs at a bank and then made our way to a youth hostel.

 

As we were unpacking our stuff and settling in at the hostel we ran into another pair of travelers from the United States.  A brother and sister from Ohio who had been in Europe for awhile and were heading back home the next day.  They were extremely friendly and in addition to giving us tips about cool places to go in Europe, they gave us their ‘Let’s Go Europe’ book!  We had religiously used our ‘Let’s Go Greece’ book for the 4 months we were in Greece, but once we left Greece for Italy and then Switzerland we were winging it…not really sure where we were going or what we were doing.  We were ecstatic to be armed with the new friendly book packed with knowledge and tips.  We pored over it for information on Zurich, and then again that night making plans for the rest of the 3 weeks that our Eurail passes were good for.  After spending our first day in Zurich exploring the city’s museums and other attractions, we decided to spend the following day in Lucerne, Switzerland.

 

Lucerne was only about an hour train ride from Zurich so we decided to make a day trip of it.  We would get up early, spend the day and come back that night.  We got to this beautiful city on the shore of Lake Lucerne about mid-morning and set out to explore its sights.  First we checked out the Church of St. Leodegar, a beautiful building with huge twin towers that was built in 1633.  Then we checked out the old rocky walls of ‘Old Town Lucerne’ which is on the hills in the woods above Lucerne.  We climbed along the walls and visited the eight watch-towers along the way.  We eventually found the famous carving of a dying lion carved into a rock wall in a little park.  This carving was made to commemorate hundreds of Swiss Guards who were killed in 1792 during the French Revolution.

 

By mid-afternoon we were hungry and tired so we decided to see our last site before having dinner and getting on the train back to Zurich.  We slowly walked across the famous Chapel Bridge to the other side of the Reuss River.  The Chapel Bridge is a 669 foot long wooden covered bridge that was built in 1333.  Inside the bridge were a bunch of paintings done in the 1600’s showing events from the city’s history.  Exactly three years after we were there most of the bridge and its paintings were burned up in a fire that was started by a cigarette.  How does a kickass wooden bridge withstand 750 years of Swiss winters and wars and god knows what else and get taken down by a cigarette?  Very sad.  It was rebuilt, but I feel fortunate that we got to see the original bridge before some dumbass destroyed it.

 

When we got to the other side we found a cool little café/bar type place right on the banks of the river looking out over the bridge and the city.  Perfect.  We ordered a bunch of food and the beers started flowing.  We had several hours to kill before our train back to Zurich that evening, so we settled in and kept ordering drinks.  We were celebrating our freedom and the fact that we were in freaking Switzerland in this beautiful little city in the middle of nowhere.  We had no idea where we were going to live or what we were going to do when we got back to the United States, but we didn’t care.  We were here and we were happy and for the time being we didn’t have a care in the world.

 

Granted we had no place to sleep that night but we would figure it out.  Our backpacks were stored at a locker in the train station.  Our vague plan was that when we got back to Zurich we would catch an overnight train from there to some other city in Europe...maybe Innsbruck or Vienna.  It was a good plan, but unfortunately the plan did not include getting hammered in Lucerne.  We just kept ordering more and more drinks and after a couple hours we were both completely wasted.

 

To be honest I do not even remember getting on a train.  The next thing I do remember was waking up in complete, total, absolute darkness.  Overwhelming blackness and complete disorientation.  Where am I?  What time is it?  What day is it?  What city am I in?  What country am I in?  I literally had no idea what the f*ck was going on.  I heard soft breathing next to me.  Oh yeah, I’m in Europe with Lona!  Is that her??  Oh god I hope it’s her.  I was slumped over in some sort of worn leather seat.  I reached out into the blackness to touch this person next to me and she grunted and woke up.  Lona!  It’s you!  Where are we?  What’s going on?  Are you still as drunk as I am?  Then slowly the memories of Lucerne came back to us.  The walls, the lion, the bridge, the café…and the beers.  Okay, we remembered where we were, but where were we now?  We sat up and could make out a faint line of light coming through the bottom of a window next to us.  The shade was drawn.  Wait a minute, we are on a train!  But it’s not moving.  “Hello! Hello!” we shouted but quickly realized we were all alone.

 

The shades were drawn, the lights were out and the train was completely abandoned.  I pulled up the shade next to us and we looked out.  We were in a train yard.  It was pitch black out and there were tons of dark, empty trains sitting on various tracks all around us.  This was kind of scary.  Again, where were we?  What city?  Were we locked in this train?  What should we do?  Sleep on the train and figure it out whenever it got light out?  No, we had to figure this sh*t out now.  We could be in Russia for all we knew.  Lucerne felt like it was light-years ago, but we were still pretty buzzed so it must have only been hours ago.  We opened up more shades to get some light in the train and then we felt our way to the end of the car.  We managed to slide the door open and jumped down to the rocky train yard below.  We looked around and it was dark and quiet.  Nobody was around.  What should we do?

 

It was tough to see much of anything being surrounded by all those trains, but off to our left it appeared to be the brightest.  It looked like the downtown of a large city a mile or two away.  Was that Zurich?  Please let it be Zurich with our backpacks safely tucked away in the train station we thought.  We started walking down the tracks towards the light, the city.  It wasn’t easy walking, especially in our condition, but we eventually made it to the train station and our spirits brightened considerably when we saw the big ‘ZURICH’ sign above the tracks on the entrance to the station.  We found some stairs up to the platform and it was pretty much abandoned other than a few stragglers wandering around.  We spotted a clock and found that it was almost 2 am.  What should we do?  It didn’t look like any more trains were running, and we were in no condition to try and catch one if we wanted to.

 

I remembered reading about ‘Needle Park’.  A park where drug use was decriminalized and addicts could exchange their dirty needles for clean ones.  Drugs were still technically illegal in Switzerland, but in this particular park the cops wouldn’t touch you.  We didn’t have or want to do any drugs, but I had read it was right next to the train station.  I figured we could go there and sleep for a few hours and decide our next step in the morning.  The train station was connected to some sort of an indoor mall complex.  As we walked from the station into the windowless mall (were we underground?) we started coming across more and more people shuffling around in a stupor.  They looked like the walking dead.  Zombies.  Emotionless, expressionless faces.  Pale white skin, dirty hair and filthy torn clothes.  Some were nodding off while standing up, some passed out on the ground, and many of them had fresh or dried blood on their arms or necks.

 

We were not underground and when we found an exit I looked out into the park and there were hundreds of them...all over the place.  The park was alive with the walking dead.  No way we are going out there in the middle of the night.  I ushered Lona back in to the relative ‘safety’ of the mall and decided we would sleep in there.  We tried to find an out-of-the-way place, but not too out of the way where we could get mugged.  The heroin addicts were everywhere though.  It was like an indoor-Needle Park.

 

We found the wall of a closed shop to lean on and we slept back-to-back.  We were both drunk, tired, dirty, and my hope was that we would blend in and look like a couple of passed out junkies and the real junkies would leave us alone.  I think that helped, but I didn’t really get any sleep that night as I did not feel like I could safely close my eyes and not pay attention to what was happening around us.

 

Basically what was happening was that while Lona slept leaning on the wall and my back, I kept handing out cigarettes to people who would wander up, stop and ask if I had spare cig.  Luckily I had a couple of packs so I would hand a cigarette to the poor lost soul, maybe light it for him or her, and then they would shuffle off.  It was sad and horrible to see these kids so completely hopelessly lost in this terrible world.  It seemed like they were already dead, and they were just waiting for their bodies to realize it and stop working.  It was one of the saddest things I had seen in my 24 years of life.

 

By 6 am I had almost run out of cigarettes, but the zombies had started to thin out and the real world had started to wake up and move about so I woke up Lona.  We walked back to the train station, got our backpacks, dug out our new ‘Let’s Go Europe’ book and planned our next move.  We decided we’d definitely had enough of Zurich and boarded a train for Innsbruck.  Austria would be our next country and the subject of a future blog…stay tuned.