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.
