ESCAPE FROM THE COLD COLD ALPS

The train offers a unique and spectacular view of the Swiss landscape. The more pressure Africa puts on Europe the more these mountains just keep rising skyward, while renegade India covers the eastern flank doing the same thing in the Himalayas, sliding in and under like trying to steal a base. But for me Switzerland is defined by its lakes, not its mountains. They’re everywhere, pacifying the violent rugged landscape. It’s like a movie where the actors are natural landmarks and the acts are tectonic movements, all occurring in geologic time. It’s like a movie in 360 degree Sensurround happening right outside the train window, for Europe is defined by its train travel, too. Buses are typically only local here. It’s like a movie where all of Europe plays a partial supporting role, each major nation occupying a corner of the country and meeting somewhere in the middle. There’s a reason Switzerland is historically neutral. It has to be, with component German, French, Italian, and Romansch ‘other’ sections. This is Europe in microcosm, their pride and their prejudice, their heart and their handicap. While Switzerland learns four languages, America and the English-speaking countries create the popular culture that the world lives on, that serves as its operating system.

We’re moving into the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland now, a part I’ve only seen briefly before, crossing the border at Chiasso. Borders are only a formality now, and not even much of that, maybe a Customs or Immigration officer looking at a passport or poking a bag, MAYBE. Sometimes they don’t even wear uniforms, just flash a badge. It’s only a few minutes to Milano from here, where I catch the train to Torino. The industrial heart of Italy doesn’t offer too much more than that, if I remember correctly, though it was one of the great new cities of the Middle Ages, along with Paris and London. That’s young by Italian terms. I’m traveling light now for the first time this trip, all my road food gone and no reservation for the night. Whether I’d have made the reservation if I’d had the Net to do it, I’m not sure, but I won’t pay the price of a meal to use the Net for an hour unless it’s absolutely necessary. I still don’t know why the cost of living can be so high in some countries in Europe, typically cold low-population Germanic ones, and not others. I’ve almost decided it’s all ultimately based on real estate values, but I’m still not sure, and that in and of itself doesn’t really answer much. Why is the real estate expensive? Italians complain bitterly about prices going up with adoption of the €uro, and that seems correct, perhaps explained by an increase in real estate values, or just merchants taking advantage.

At least trains are cheaper in Italy, but nothing fancy like those in some other countries. The clickety-clack of rails and tracks is hypnotic and soon I catch myself nodding off. Then I catch everybody else nodding off. Exccept for one or two people, THE ENTIRE COACH IS ASLEEP! I feel better and cop another wink. People ask me what I do to pass the time on trains. I nod. Outside the sky is clouding up and soon it’s raining. At least it’s not cold like Zurich. The sun is still high in the sky and we’re running on schedule so I’m not too worried about finding a room. I only worry if it’s late and/or a weekend and/or high season. Worst I’ve ever done was a $129 room close to Stansted Airport outside London. Ouch! At least they picked me up, nice of them since I was half dead already, rigor mortis setting in and that smell emanating. I almost booked a $60 place in Torino several days ago from Ljubljana, but hesitated on the final click, deciding to keep my options open. I may regret that decision. If I’m lucky they’ll have a booking service at the train station. They do. I request a place with wi-fi but back off that quickly to keep the cost done and snag a place for $50+change. Italy still considers Internet a luxury, not a necessity, another reason to go with hostels. They’ve always got Internet if not wi-fi, usually free. Why not? They don’t pay by the hour any more than the hotels do for TV. Internet spots in Italy tend to get lumped and marketed with video games and other juvenile pursuits, like Thailand where Internet is considered play, not work.

By now of course it’s pouring down rain, but at least my place is close, or at least not TOO far. The nice lady there asks if I can speak Italian but before I can explain my twenty-five percent-and-rising level, she proceeds to proceed with her 30% Simplified English, filling in the gaps with extra thick linguistic molasses, sweet nothingness the consistency of axle grease, but so gooey you don’t want to bust her chops, since this is something she obviously loves to do. That’s okay, Psycholinguistics 102; I’ll be conversational in both French AND Italian by the end of this trip, Insh’allah. My main problem now is that I’m ssstttaaarrrvvviiinnnggg, since I had no time to eat in Milan. I’ve got to get a ticket for a train tomorrow to Cannes also, so I’ll grab something on the way. There the ticket seller can’t or doesn’t want to speak English, so we do that in Italian, my confidence growing. At least the street food is reasonably priced again and the pizza is made by real Italians, so I get into the Italian fast food swing, pizzerias and pasticcherias, talking funk and eatin’ junk. Other than that I try to see what I can of the city in the short time I have, a city made famous by a Winter Olympics a few years ago, and trying hard to live up to its fame. Tourism is way up in the Piemonte, they say. Italy has so many interesting places, it’d be hard to see them all in a lifetime. The few images I have here will have to suffice. My train leaves early tomorrow morning and I’m dead tired from an early departure from Zurich this morning, so when I click the light and hit the pillow… zzzzzz…

Somewhere there’s a beach, warm and sunny, with all the fresh fruit I can eat, sweet and sour, and a fat ol’ massage mama ready to pounce on my back and pound the kinks out of me, pound the kinks out of my tortured psyche, turn me into mush… aaahhh… I’m melting… Then the clouds begin to roll in and the sky grows black. But it doesn’t rain; it snows. Everybody packs up and goes back to from where they came, but I don’t know where to go, so I just get on a train going to some place I’ve only heard of, written in an alphabet I can’t read, everybody speaking a language I can’t speak. All I know is that I’m heading south. I know that by the location of the sun. But instead of getting out of the snow it just keeps falling harder. And instead of going downhill, we’re going up, past cactus and agave, juniper and sage, into tall straight pines and tall smoking chimneys. ‘Welcome to Flagstaff’. That’s what the sign said as we hit a bump in the track. That’s the last thing I remember as the screen goes black.

When I wake up we’re stopped on the tracks somewhere. It’s snowing. The sign on the train station says ‘Limone’. Well there’s a contradiction in terms, ‘Limones’ in the snowy mountains. It’s beautiful, though, I’ll have to admit, even though my main objective right now is just to get warm. I’ve been gone a month and a half on this trip, been to Tunis, Malta, and Athens, and have yet to see a day of 20C-68F. Now it’s snowing again as I head south. Oh boy! Then we go through a long tunnel and the other side is like another dimension, like we traversed a cosmic worm-hole. Snow is gone and a different language occupies the signs lining the tracks, lining the roads, lining the walls of my perception. Welcome to France. We straddle the border for a while, even changing trains again in Italy, but that line continues to define, even more so down the road. Soon the loudspeaker announces ‘next stop Monaco/Monte Carlo’, and then we enter another tunnel. When we stop I get a brief glimpse of the country of Monaco outside, one of 192 that are members of the UN and therefore on my list. Otherwise why would I be here? I’m just passing through on my way to Cannes and the south of France of such world renown. Though it hardly sounds like ‘me’, that’s a changing and ongoing concept, subject to constant revision. When you travel constantly, some comfort and superficial attractions are welcome. Welcome to Cannes.

NIGHT TRAIN TO ZURICH

I’ve woken up partially several times throughout the night, starting as we entered Austria and the ticket checker wanted to see tickets. That must have been Villach. That’s when the bozos got on and started reading something in German that must have been hilarious, since everybody was laughing so hard. I don’t know why getting on a train means it’s party time. I just wanted to sleep. That’s not easy when the seats don’t lean back and all the lights are on. Fortunately no one’s sitting next to me so I tie my scarf around my eyes and go for oblivion. That’s AFTER taking my secret sleeping pill. If I want to pass out fast and hard I just start studying Arabic; puts me out like a light, every time. I don’t know why. I wake up drooling and my Arabic language book’s on the floor somewhere. Don’t try this with your laptop. We’ve been stopped a while now. I wonder where we are. WE’RE IN FELDKIRCH! That’s where I had originally planned to get off to go visit Lichtenstein until I found out that the train goes right through Lichtenstein already. Sounds good to me. But that means that I’ve slept the whole way through Austria! Sure enough there’s a little glow on the horizon, meaning the sun’s starting to rise. It all starts to make sense.

The train lurches to a start and I get my last chance for a glimpse of Austria; sho’ is purty. Next thing I know we’re approaching another town but don’t slow down at the train station. The sign whizzes by- ‘Schaan-Vaduz’- that’s Lichtenstein! Then we cross a river and approach another town. This time the train slows down and we pull to a stop at the station. The sign says ‘Buchs, Switzerland’. So much for Austria and Lichtenstein. I’m glad I saw the little I got to see. I may have even passed through Austria before in the night, on the way from Prague to Budapest five years ago, but to this day am not sure. The sun’s rising higher now and a Matterhorn-like peak comes into sight, craggy pyramid like a golden eagle’s beak shining in the sunlight. I thought there might be a lot of snow on the ground since we got so much rain in Ljubljana the last couple days, but there’s none, plenty on the hills, though.

Now that I’m officially out of the Balkans it might be a good time to reflect on the highlights and low points. Yesterday certainly wasn’t a high point, being stuck inside all day because of the rain. It’s better than being stuck outside in it of course. Late night rides are always problematic, killing time waiting before, then trying to function normally the day after. The savings of a night’s rent isn’t always worth it. Then while I was waiting some local guy comes up and gives me a hard luck story about how he only needs €2.70 to get home, and nobody will help him. Since I was feeling good I wanted to believe him. In the US I’d never give money for a hard-luck story to some slob with a slur, but this guy seemed so neat and spoke such good English… I saw him again about two hours later. I guess he missed his train. This time he slides right past without so much as a glance. I know that vacant look, that studied gait, every step a calculated risk, every second a calculated eternity, an algebra with no variables. JUNKIE! He’d lie to his mother to get what he wants, then forget it just as fast. That’s why he’s hitting on strangers in the bus station. But you know all that. Remember Samuel L. Jackson in Jungle Fever? So I decide to follow the guy into the ticket office and see if by some chance he’s actually buying a ticket, but… he’s gone, disappeared, vanished!

Then there was the guy at the bus station in Pristina, Kosovo. I was waiting for the bus when a nice-looking woman comes and sits a few seats away. Well not three minutes have passed until Vitalis man comes putting the moves on, purring sweet nothings under the radar. She blows him off, but politely, much too politely. Does he know something I don’t? Maybe she IS working, but… the bus station? The friend she’s waiting for soon shows up and sits down, so that should quell the rumors, but Vitalis man just gets up and moves a few steps away, lurking watching waiting. I’ve never seen anything like it, like something straight out of the Discovery Channel. The closest thing I’ve ever seen in real life was when Nonay was in heat back in Thailand and Kanoon had to hang right with her till lockup, and even after to make sure no other suitor got in his two cents. Dogs are like that. But this is a HUMAN; at least I think. Thoroughly disgusted I go get on my bus, which is now waiting at the platform. Then not ten minutes have passed until Vitalis man gets on, too! Vitalis man sits right behind me chewing gum so loudly I can’t think. What was he going to do with woman in his spare ten minutes, take her to the bathroom?

Fortunately most of the scenery and the characters were a little more pleasing esthetically. Tops of the list of places would probably be Dubrovnik in Croatia, Mostar in Hercegovina, and Ljubljana in Slovenia, vivid combinations of history, culture, and architecture without so many distractions that all that gets obscured. Tourist high season in summertime might be different. There is more diversity than might be immediately apparent, divergences in time and space amongst people with a common history, up to a point. Slovenia and Croatia could fit right into Western Europe without missing a beat while Serbia struggles to throw off its past, Bosnia struggles to cling to its own, and Albania struggles to pull itself together after dodging bullets for most of the last two thousand years. Bulgaria has ‘sex shops’ to rival Amsterdam and ‘escort’ TV ads till early morning. Dubrovnik even has a nude beach, while not so many miles up the road their cousins in Mostar kneel in prayer on Turkish kilims and loudspeakers call the faithful to prayer five times a day.

It certainly puts the rise of Islam in context, a reaction to permissiveness in the West, an unjust Hindu caste system, and Buddhist passivity to it all. I can’t help but think that this is the image Ahmedinijad and others have of the West. Obviously he ain’t been to Jackson. At least the West’s being honest. If he thinks Iran has no gays he doesn’t know his own country very well. It was a haven for gays before Khomeini, and I doubt they’ve all left, though many have I’m sure. It’s punishable by death I believe. You can’t enforce sexuality, though Islam certainly tries. I just saw the BBC debates on ‘Arab Unity’. Not once did anyone question why this was even desirable, nationalism being essentially systematic racism. What’s wrong with Arab diversity? Palestinians are the sacrificial lamb for racist ‘Arab unity’. Their problems will never be solved as long as they’re an international issue, not a local one. Thai Muslims tell me that Jews are their enemy. I tell them that that’s absurd, too polite to tell them that they’re stooges for political manipulation. But I’ll tell you. ‘Islam’ might mean ‘surrender’ religiously, but hardly even the most minor compromise politically. Still I credit Islam for removing personality from religion; they’re way ahead on that count. Of course Arabs and Muslims are two different groups, but the fact that the former fits mostly into the latter only intensifies the issues.

When the train finally pulls in to Zurich, the immediate impression is one of shock. The prices are stratospheric! That’s in the upper stratosphere, right at the stratopause, next to the mesosphere, where temperatures are supposedly about the same as on the ground here. After all the urban legends about the price of coffee in Tokyo or New York, and their subsequent de-bunking by people who have actually left the airport, I assure that a cup of coffee of any kind or flavor will cost you at least three bucks in Zurich. You can quote me. Prices here are as high or higher than any I’ve ever seen, and that includes Reykjavik. I haven’t been to Lagos yet, but I’m in no rush. It’ll be next-to-last, right before Israel. Some Muslim countries won’t let you in with Israeli stamps in your passport. This is where a hostel can save you some real money, since no hotel has rooms for less than a hundred bucks, or have long been booked up. In Western Europe there are guests in hostels even older than me! This is reassuring.

So the big goal in Zurich is to try to spend as little money as possible. In fact, I’m so put off by the high prices that I decide right then and there that I just won’t spend any, or less than usual, anyway. That’ll show ‘em who’s boss. Already I’ve booked a dorm room in the hostel instead of a private room there or somewhere else. Half the time I even end up paying for two just to get the private room since many don’t have ‘singles’. The concept doesn’t exist in the US. We don’t have rooms that small. Except for M6 it’s the same price whether one person or two. A room is just a room and a bed a certain size; how many people you put in it is another issue. There are no ‘kings’ or ‘queens’ either, just twins or doubles, one big bed or two little ones. This is boring, right, but how often do you sleep in a dorm? It’ll make you think. The nice thing about hostels is that you sometimes meet interesting people. The bad thing is that sometimes they feel like the downtown mission, this one especially, both for the institutional floor plan and the people staying there. It seems they’ve got the rooms divided by age, for whatever that’s worth. At least it’s got a kitchen. That helps in a pricey place. They’ve got thick brown breads, too, so that looks like the ticket. I’ll buy a loaf of bread and eat up all the leftover food I’ve been accumulating for the last week. That’ll work for me.

Zurich itself is interesting enough, but hardly the place for someone trying to get warm. The clock towers are almost like a cliché come to life and testament to a mechanical age that’s long been superseded by an electronic and digital one. Should somebody put up a full-fledge digital clock tower? I don’t think they could compete with video screens. I’m glad I only booked one day here. It’s too cold. I suspect some of these other ‘backpacker’ tourists are really here looking for work. With prices this high, wages must be astronomic, highest in the world I believe. So I get a train ticket for Torino (Turin), Italy, where I’ll stay a night, then continue on to Cannes, France, determined to get warm or die trying. It was either that or book straight through and spend half the night in the Milano or Torino train stations. Even I’M not THAT hard core.