Girl: I like my boyfriend. His friends at the office, they make a joke about his, uh… <turns to friend and asks a question in Swiss-German>
Friend: “Duck arse.”
Girl: Duck arse. They say he have a arse like a duck.
Me: …
Girl: I like it, though. Duck arse.
We slept on the side of a mountain, so of course we drank and played the Stick Game. It’s a little hard to explain, but the basic idea is that you drink, carve up some sticks, and throw them into the ground. Sometimes you also throw them at other people’s sticks.
I got 2 points.
“No need to bring any special clothing or a tent,” the amiable Swiss friend-of-a-friend said. “The mountain is high but it will be warm and probably won’t rain. We can sleep under the stars.”
As I lay under the picnic table at sometime around 3am, convinced I was going to die of exposure as the rain dripped down from the slats above, it occurred to me that I’ve never seen a Swiss man who wasn’t already dressed in what I’d consider ‘special clothing.’ On close inspection, even the average guy on the street’s practical shirt and plain jumper usually turn out to be the kind of gear Mountain Rescue teams wear: certified to -400 degrees Celcius and/or 50 fathoms below sea-level, impermeable to dragon fire, and made of some lightweight nano-material. “Special clothing”, to the Swiss, would need to be truly spectacular to prove more useful, warm or practical than what they normally wear - a space suit, perhaps, or the inside of a tauntaun. Lying there under the picnic table, the only thing I could think of that a Swiss person on the side of a mountain would be able to wear that would actually prove more warm and practical than their usual clothing might, in fact, be another Swiss person.
I gave up trying to sleep at around 4am and stumbled out from under my sodden picnic cave to pee. I weaved my way out by their tents (“no need to bring a tent” meaning “bring a space-age tent that apparently folds out from something the size of a vitamin tablet just in case” in Swiss, apparently) and wandered out to stand and piss in the rain. I actually felt a little better, standing alone in the dark out there, junk in hand. Pissing out in an open space, a black forest on one side and a steep drop on the other, you can’t help but get a deep sense of how ridiculous and vulnerable your place in the universe is. For a guy, I think that it has at least something to do with being very conscious of the fact you’re holding your dick while you stare out into a big, unforgiving world.
I stood there for a while longer in the rain and looked at the forest and the towns below.
I crawled back under my picnic table, then, and slept.
I just got lost at 11pm at night in an industrial park and had to ask a prostitute for directions!
She seemed really nice!
Travelling!
I am travelling alone now for the first time on this trip, having previously stayed with friends or friends-of-friends. I like the feeling, though it’ll end soon enough.
(I call it a ‘trip’, but since I don’t have a flat to go back to, everything I own is in two bags I have with me, and I’m doing (a little) work as I go, is it really a ‘trip’? Aren’t I just… here, now?)
I’m in Luzern now, holed up in a hostel for a few days to do some freelance work.
I went for a run along the lake just after arriving. As I run along a gravel path by the lake, freshly green trees lining its length, a group of runners rounded a corner ahead. It was 5 men, each more of a clichéd Swiss man than the last - blonde hair, chiseled jaws, blue eyes. They ran almost abreast and in the same uniform of white shirts, black shorts, and white running shoes. The middle runner ran slightly ahead, the others forming a line just behind him. They weren’t intimidating - they smiled as they ran and seemed to be talking happily amongst one another - but they didn’t break formation for anyone coming in the opposite direction. As they ran past me (my chest stuck out and my belly sucked in, my face set in a grimace of what I hoped looked like vague disinterest), the leader inclined his head in a nod of exactly 15 degrees. No more, no less. A simple, quick gesture of acknowledgement, one runner to another.
I thought about them as I ran around the lake and wondered how different each of their lives were to mine. It helped pass the time. I imagine they wear tasteful, mechanical watches and starched shirts. They’re slow to anger but quick to defend their friends, and they’d be the first to ask a stranger to apologise for knocking over a lady’s glass of wine in a restaurant. Should the stranger not, and dare to insult the lady further, they’d be the last to start the ensuing fight but surely the first to end it. They’d not get hurt in the affray - not seriously, anyway - and any minor wounds inflicted on them would be caused by something dastardly or uncouth on the part of the stranger, like having a metal plate in his head or, being cut from a lesser cloth, simply exploding when punched by so just and earnest a human being. Overly stern fathers, dutiful husbands, firm Believers, constant runners. The kind of man who, in another time, would’ve made a good Paladin or Knight-errant. Somehow imbued with a healing nimbus and +5 against the Undead.
A girl smiled at me on the way back. A simple smile in the afternoon sunlight intended specifically for me. Uncomplicated. It made me happy.
I am in Switzerland.
I travelled by train, the first time I’ve done so between countries. It seems like an entirely different mental experience when compared to flying. Flying is very clear on the difference between the Point of Origin and the Destination: you begin at the point of origin, are ushered into a long metal Purgatory tube in which you are forced to eat terrible food and watch worse movies, and you are, after a specified period, at the Destination Holding Area. You show some Destinational people at Destination some papers and, after they’ve uhmed and aahed (or whatever the regional equivalent of ‘uhm’ and ‘aah’ is), you are told you are now officially at Destination - why not try some of Destination’s famous flans? Or perhaps go watch a traditional Destinationish dog fight? It’s the perfect time of year for it, what with rabies almost never being a problem in the summer. Take the kids! Make a day of it!
Travelling by train between countries feels like more of a gradual assimilation process. After a little while you realise that the houses whizzing by have changed a little, though you couldn’t say how exactly. At some point you realise that the conductor’s deep booming announcements have changed from one language you can’t understand to another you can’t understand (which simultaneously makes you feel both worldly and worried that you not only going to miss your stop but somehow the entire country within which your stop is located.) And then, suddenly, you’re on a platform somewhere and the guy selling cheap train station coffee uses an set of words you don’t know to greet you that differs entirely from the unintelligible greeting coffee sellers in the train stations at your Point of Origin (which you swear you were at only a little while ago) use and you realise you’re at your Destination.
I guess I don’t feel like I’ve ‘arrived’ in Switzerland, so much as I feel like a deep feeling of Switzerland has quietly stolen over me.
