Oakwinter.com

Car’s in the shop, bike needs a new seat, what’s a lad to do? Bus it is, then.

For those in the audience with short attention spans, let’s summarise: the bus system here in Music City, USA, was designed by someone with a serious mental retardation. I don’t think this person even knew what a bus looked like before getting the gig. I’m happy to provide further libelous statements as needed.

Consider the following:

• In real bus systems (for values of “real” approximating “the ones in Switzerland”), they know exactly when the bus will be passing a given stop, down to the minute, and they let you know it; the schedules are phrased like, “a bus will stop here at :03, :18, :33, and :48 past the hour”. Except, you know, in four languages.

  In Nashville, the best they can tell you is the interval between busses. The intervals are usually something like, “a bus will stop here once ever 25-40 minutes”. Let me translate that: “we have no idea where our busses are”.

• In Nashville, there’s a bus stop at every street corner. Americans are apparently too lazy to walk to a bus stop, so busses end up spending more stopped, picking up passengers by the ones and twos, than actually moving. Real bus systems know to space the stops out so busses can actually cover some ground between stops.

• Bus stops aren’t covered, nor do they have timetables or route maps. You should just know. Fool.

• Every route in the city (save one or two) run through a central choke point in the core of downtown Nashville. I don’t mean a covered central station. We’re talking about a single section of street, one city block long, one lane in either direction. Busses end up spending about 10-15 minutes at a dead stop here, waiting for the busses in front of them to move.

• The only places to buy bus tickets are on the busses themselves, and you have to have exact change. Have a $5 bill instead of the $1.25 for a ticket? Well, you get your change back in bus tickets. Sucka.

• In places like Basel, you buy a ticket and it’s valid for a certain number of zones for two hours. You can take as many busses as you need within those two hours, so long as you stay inside your concentric zones. Here in Nashville, everytime you change busses, you have to buy a new ticket, even if you were only on the first bus for five minutes. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is so brilliant.

All this combines to lead to a bus system that is so colossally inefficient, I cannot figure out how it functions. Going the two miles from Centennial Park to 4th Avenue took 45 minutes. Two miles. 45 minutes. I walk faster than that.

Here’s something that sounds like a good idea but isn’t: sleeper trains. Sure, you get travel and lodging all rolled into one, but that doesn’t mean it’s something you should ever, ever consider, even for one moment.

At least not in France.

Here’s the deal: after spending a day in Basel (the parents at the Jean Tinguely museum, me wandering around), we caught a night train to Paris. Departure time: 1:30AM.

As I remarked upon entering our sleeper car, the only difference between this and steerage on the Titanic is that we wouldn’t drown. Accomodations were tight, to put it mildly. Combine this with less-than-effective sound-proofing and you end up with a terrible night’s sleep.

What made this better was the French passport authorities didn’t speak English. I didn’t have any problem understanding them that night when we left, but my French wasn’t exactly at its best when my father woke me up the next morning, saying, “the passport guy’s here and he still doesn’t speak English”.

On the plus side, the train was late getting into Paris, so we got to sleep an extra two hours. I guess if a train’s going to be late, this is the kind you want.

It seems those mountains between Austria and Switzerland are their own country. Who knew.

We woke up early and hoofed it through town to the station to catch our train to Zurich. Buying tickets was fun, thanks to both the Austrian train system and the Austrian dialect of German: you can’t buy international tickets from the machines, and the Austrians seem to pronounce “Zurich” as “Too-reek”.

The train ride took us through the Austrian, Liechtensteinian (or whatever) and Swiss Alps, making the four-hour journey infinitely more pleasant than it would have been otherwise. It was uneventful, save for some issue with my passport when crossing into Switzerland. I don’t know what happened, but the border patrol guy ended up calling my passport information in to headquarters. Maybe it was that my passport’s a bit more battered and worn than the other three American passports we handed him.

After arriving in Bern and finding out hotel, the other three headed out to explore the Altstadt while some chocolate, a nice view and I nursed the cold that had been with me since Germany. I ended up calling it a day at 9:30.

Random tidbits:

• The girl at the desk at the hotel in Bern spoke the strangest German I’ve ever heard, heavily laced with Italian nouns and French prepositions.

• There was a Chris Langley impersonator doing his thing at the park overlooking the river: capris, dyed-black fauxhawk, tight t-shirt, Roman nose, iPod — the works.

Sleep five hours at the Three Ducks. Pay the man, nearly walk out the door with my key. Catch the Metro from Commerce, change trains at Concorde, direction: Palais Royale-Musée du Louvre. Get off, surface, requisition terrible oranges and a less-than-delicious pastry from a side-street baker. Eat them on a park bench, watching the sun rise over the most famous art museum in the world. Finish “breakfast”, approach the glass pyramid to buy a ticket.

Who the hell is closed on a Tuesday?

Well, that certainly explains the rather suspicious lack of a crowd, now doesn’t it. I’m so incredibly grateful for the 2kg book on the Louvre that I’ve been lugging around since borrowing it from Elizabeth in Caen.

So, given that it’s currently 9AM, what do to with the rest of my day? As I recall, my solution involved wandering around Paris (such a tough life I lead, I know) for 90 minutes or so, then finally catching the Metro back to the Champs Elysées-Clemenceau station and the Grand Palais located there. The Grand Palais was something that Ann and I had attempted to get into on Monday, but were thwarted by the long line. We didn’t know what was going on in there, but with a line like that, we assumed, it had to be good. On this Tuesday morning, however, the ticket queue looked just as long as it had the previous day, so I headed back toward the Musée d’Orsay to see if it were, by some miracle, open on Tuesdays.

Quelle bonne chance! Not only was the Orsay open and operating, there was a long line for me to stand in. While waiting, the girl behind me taps me on the shoulder and asks if I’m from North Carolina. She’s from Knoxville and had noticed the Cape Hatteras patch on my backpack. We chat a bit as the line progresses toward the door, parting ways to pass through the security checkpoints.

I proceed to spend the next five hours taking in the Orsay. It’s like they have the entire Impressionism movement in there.

One part of the Orsay that I’m perhaps most grateful for — if that’s the right word — is their gift shop. I’d been stressing this whole time in Paris over a gift for Charlotte, something that says, “I’m so sorry I went to France for a week and left you in Germersheim, please don’t kill me”. I had wanted to buy her some fabulous French coffee, but at the few places I found that actually sold beans, they wouldn’t mill it for me. In the Orsay, I finally hit on something that satisfied me: Charlotte used to be a ballet dancer, and with that combined with the tragically bare walls of our dorm rooms, prints from Degas’ ballet series seemed like just the thing (I had seen the originals earlier in the day).

So: it’s around 3PM by this point, and my flight leaves at 6. Rather than spend three hours at Charles de Gaulle Terminal #3, I opt to go wander around Montmartre some more. After walking up and down the Butte and then meandering through the backside of the district for a while, I head back into the Metro, airport-bound.

At least, that’s what I thought.

I’m back at Gare du Nord, my old nemesis from Thursday. After some confusion — though less than the first time — I make my way down to the proper place and settle in to wait for the next train north. And I wait. Still waiting. Yep, still here. I should mention that I’m not alone: there’s quite a crowd cooling their heels on this same platform. Several trains come up from the south and disgorge their passengers, all of their passengers; we’re forbidden to enter the cars, and once fully empty, the trains head off on their way north.

Time check: 4:30PM.

After waiting a total of 25 minutes or so, a loudspeaker crackles on and informs us that, Oh, we’ve cancelled all the direct routes to Charles de Gaulle; all you poor dumb saps waiting over on Voie 43, you’ll need to head over to platform 32 and catch one of the slow trains to the airport.

The difference between these trains is this: the direct route stops only three times between Gare du Nord and Charles de Gaulle, taking about 15 minutes to do the entire run. The other trains stop at every single station along the way, meaning that that same distance requires at least 45 minutes to cover.

For the next three-quarters of an hour, I’m certain the stress I’m feeling is palpable. Check-in for my flight closes at 5:30, and barring supernatural intervention, I’ll have only a razor-thin margin of error to make my flight back to Basel. Assuming, of course, that there are no complications of any kind with the Metro, and that I’ll be able to make my way from the Metro station to the terminal with no hesitation whatsoever.

Needless to say, that doesn’t happen. I arrive at the counter to see that they’ve just closed check-in for my flight, and policy being policy, I’ll just have to see about booking a seat on the next plane. A few minutes, some testy French and a swipe of my credit card later, I own a ticket back to Switzerland. Time of departure: 8:30AM, the next morning.

I’m faced with a dilemma: my three-day Metro pass expires in six hours, meaning that if I venture back into the city, I’ll have to buy another pass. Also, I’m not quite sure where I’d stay, and moreover, I’m terrified of possibly oversleeping and missing yet another flight. I resolve to simply spend the night in the airport; call it a character-building experience.

I settle in.

At some point, desperate for something to do, I decide to set off in pursuit of the elusive Terminal #1, which I’ve heard about and seen signs for, but so far had no idea where it was. I won’t bore you by recounting the following two hours spent trying to walk to this building. I will say this, though: if you’ve ever seen the video for U2’s “Beautiful Day”, remember the part where Bono is walking on a strange-looking road with the plane taxiing above him? That was shot at Charles de Gaulle, and I’ve walked that road. Having a 777 taxiing 10m above your head is a singular experience.

Note for the curious: as I later found out, the way you get from Terminal #3 to Terminal #1 (or whatever the big one is; I’ve just assumed that it’s Terminal #1) is by bus. There are no signs for this at Terminal #3, unless you interpret the abrupt disappearance of “this way to Terminal #1″ markers as an indication that you should secure motorised transport.

Returned to the relative warmth of Terminal #3, I and a dozen or so others tried our bests to catch some shut-eye despite the artificial sun-strength florescent lighting. The only time they dimmed was around 3AM when some guys came through and changed some of the bulbs, a task they did as noisy as they possibly could; I mean, really, did you have to drag the ladder across the floor? Could you not just have carried it for that 30 meters?

Outside of that, the rest of the night was fairly calm, if mostly sleepless. I managed to sleep in only 30 minute increments, due in equal parts to the bench I was sleeping on and the fact that I was nearly to the point of having nightmares about Charlotte’s Degas prints becoming wrinkled.

So it goes, the night passed. I got on a plane, then a bus, then a train back to Germany. In Karlsruhe, I took the wrong train heading north and so got to see what hell-hole rural Deutschland looks like. Eventually, I made it back to home base, a day later and €106.25 poorer than anticipated.

I met up with Charlotte that afternoon, after tending to some serious shower-and-shave needs. It turned out that she’d taken the wrong train north from Karlsruhe that afternoon, too, but, from her description, her slice of rural Germany totally out-hell-holed mine. I presented her with the things I’d brought back from France: three Degas prints (all mercifully unwrinkled) for her, two bottles of wine from Galleries Lafayette for us, and myself, ridden with a flu I picked up in Caen. She was very happy to have at least two of those things.

“Day one of seven“, I hear you ask. “I thought you were only supposed to be in France for six days?” Yeah, funny story about that.

Before we get started, here’s the executive summary of my trip to France: anything involving international travel, horrendous; everything else, wonderful. Now, to business:

I left Germersheim last Thursday (8. Dec) on the 11:22 south to Karlsruhe. The plan at this point is as follows: from Karlsruhe, take the train to Basel, Switzerland, where I would catch a flight to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I would then navigate the Paris Metro system, eventually arriving at Gare St. Lazare, where I would get a train to Caen in Normandy, where I would be met by my lovely friend Ann who’s an exchange student at the university there. We would party it up for three days in Caen, then head back to Paris for the remaining three days, after which, I would fly back to Basel, and you can guess the rest from there.

It all looks so easy written down.

From the very start, things didn’t work quite as smoothly as hoped. The train from Germersheim to Karlsruhe was later than I had counted on, meaning that my dash to the bookstore made me miss my train to Basel. No big deal; there’s another train headed for Basel in an hour, and I’ve built plenty of padding into my schedule. I sit down at a cafe with my new purchase (the German translation of my favourite book in the world, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood) and kill an hour.

Things do not improve once in the Basel airport: my flight to Paris is an hour late leaving the airport. This means that I’ve missed the train I intended to take from Paris to Caen, and even though some rational part of my mind knows that there’ll be another train to catch, the rest of me is starting to get pretty anxious at this point. I should mention that it’s now around 7PM, and given the rush-rush-rush I’ve been doing since leaving Karlsruhe, it’s been quite a while since I’ve eaten. The adrenaline in my system isn’t helping, either.

Also not helping is the fact that Charles de Gaulle airport takes top prize in the “Worst Designed Airport Collin’s Ever Been In” competition. It takes me a good 15 minutes to figure out how to get from Terminal 3 (where I landed) to de Gaulle’s Metro station, even though they’re only 300 meters apart. Stress levels are on the rise.

So, I buy a ticket to Caen; this is the easiest part of the next two hours. My route through the Metro system requires me to change trains at Gare du Nord, which sounds simple until you find out that Gare du Nord is probably bigger than the city I live in in Germany. I spend a good 25 minutes looking for the train to Gare St Lazare; I can see where it is on the map, it’s right there, but the signs pointing the way play a fun little game: you’ll follow them for a little bit, then they disappear. Totally gone. Poof.

I break down and head over to what appears to be an information desk, intending to ask how one crosses the 3mm of map-distance to This Spot Here. It’s at this point that the accumulated stress, hunger and adrenaline overcome me: I forget the infinitive form for “to go” in French. All I can come up with are the irregular forms, in any number of tenses, but I can’t summon up one of the regular forms that will get me back to the infinitive. Here’s a fun puzzle: ask the question “where do I need to go to get over here?” without “to go”. My solution: mumble where I should have said “allez” and let the other guy assume the right verb.

Once set in the right direction, I finally make it to Gare St Lazare. But the fun doesn’t end there, no sir. If you’ve ever had a dream about being lost in a maze of twisty little passages all alike, you were dreaming about Metro stations. You feel like you’re underwater and you’ve run out of oxygen: you are trying desperately to get to the surface.

Now, a word about the French rail system. Despite my initial encounter, the Paris Metro system is actually quite excellent; the rest of the French rail network, however, needs — shall we say — “work”. The French need to get over whatever issues they have with the German-speaking portions of Europe and go talk to the Swiss and the Germans about how to run a rail system:

• In Switzerland and Germany, they know at exactly which platform train X will be leaving from, on any given day, for the next decade. In France, the train is assigned a platform when it gets to the station. This means that there’s a huge crowd gathered around the main train board, waiting anxiously for their train to be assigned a platform.

• In Switzerland and Germany, they have boards (posted on every visible surface) showing exactly where train X is going, every stop it will make on the way, and exactly when the train will arrive at those places. The French, on the other hand, simply tell you where the train is going, and God help your poor, dumb ass if the geography of Normandy is something you’re less than fluent in. Oh, and if you try and ask someone, “Hey, is this train going to Caen?”, not only do they look at you like you’re clearly mentally handicapped, but they’ll probably berate you for not knowing; that was my experience at least.

So, I’m finally on the train to Caen, two hours later than expected. I spend the entire two-hour train ride worrying that Ann won’t still be at the station and what I’ll do if she isn’t. Fortunately for my frazzled nerves, though, Ann is indeed still waiting for me. At this point, 12 hours after I left Germany, she is the most welcome sight in the world. We head off to her dorm on Mission: Put Food in Collin, spending the tram ride bringing each other up to speed on our respective European adventures.

After my mental state returns something approaching “normal”, we head over to one of the bars on campus (yes, that’s right: “bar on campus” and “one of”) to meet some of her friends. After a beer there, the whole place decamps and heads back toward town, toward a bar on the waterfront.

If you ask me what we did at night in Caen, and if I say anything other than “go to clubs and dance till wee hours of the morning”, I’m lying.

During the course of the festivities, I get to know Ann’s best friend in Caen, another American girl from MTSU named Elizabeth. Turns out, she too knows my former roommate, one Mr. C. R. Langley; Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out.

Danger: there may follow exaggeration for dramatic effect.

• You know how Europeans are portrayed in movies as all being gorgeous? It is all true. Everyone here looks like a model, and is dressed impeccably at all times.

• The Swiss public transit system is amazing. An area is considered “poorly connected” if a train/bus/whatever comes by less than once every three minutes.

• Everyone rides a bike. There are massive, seemingly-endless bike racks everywhere. A number of buildings even have special covered racks to keep your bike out of the rain. Every road has dedicated bike lanes, and cars actually yield to, and drive safely near, bikers. Bikes can be taken on trains. Verily, my legs rejoice.

• On a similar note: the fact that I can say, “hey, let’s walk to X” — and not have people look at me like I’m crazy — blows my mind.

• I’ve noticed that I feel very self-conscious (De: gehemmt) about speaking English with an American accent.

• Swiss-German sounds like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets taking a first-year language course. That is to say, I can’t understand a word of it. This comes in handy, however: I can tell whenever someone’s about to speak to me, or say something they want me to understand, because they’ll switch to High German (or, of course, English).

• Just about everything is written in three languages (German, French, Italian), and sometimes four (English). That I love this should come as no surprise.

• I could spend days just walking around the winding little side streets (De: die Gasse) and the even smaller alleyways connecting them (De: das Gässchen).

• There are decorative fountains all over Bern, almost all of which carry potable water. For this American, refilling your water bottle from a fountain like that is strange at first, but it’s nice once you get used to it.

• I spent two hours today, wandering around Bern by myself, learning all kinds of new words.

  I’ve noticed something interesting that happens when I’ll read a sign or something in German: even though I’ll already know what it says, a little voice in my head automatically produces an English translation. This only happens after reading fairly short phrases/sentences, and only if it’s not something I’ve seen a billion times (e.g., Metzgerei, “butcher”, doesn’t produce this). I’ve tried to shut the little voice up without success. I’ve concluded that it’s a memorization trick I taught myself some time ago (that, ironically, I don’t remember teaching myself), since after I see a particular sign enough times, the auto-translation stops. Time will tell, I guess.

  On a related note, I can feel German abilities improving every day. I’ve noticed especially marked gains in reading and listening comprehension speeds. Woohoo!

Thursday, 20 October: the day after falling into my jetlag-induced coma, Cindy’s mom Uschi came down for lunch from the Valais (De: Wallis), a region up in the mountains. After eating, Cindy went off to go email a few of her professors, so Uschi and I spent a while talking about various things in German. She’s taking English classes and had brought some of her homework, so the native speaker got to help out by explaining English phrasal verbs (e.g., “to go on about”) in German.

That afternoon, Cindy and I went into Bern to go run some errands, part of which involved dropping by the English department at the University of Bern. The particular branch that houses the English Department is called “Uni-Tobler”, as it used to be part of a Toblerone factory. During its factory days, the building had a fairly large courtyard, which the university has since roofed-over and turned into a library (it’s pretty cool to look at, and so of course my pictures of it didn’t turn out). The English department was having a little party when we arrived, celebrating one of the students passing her final exams (or something like that). I got more German practice, talking to a pair of Cindy’s classmates (in that respect, the day was a great confidence-builder).

After errand-running, we went walking around the Altstadt in Bern. Among the sites taken in: one of the places Einstein lived while he was in Bern, a bear-less bear pit, a clock tower, and a good-sized church with a neat Baroque entry-way (the picture of which didn’t come out at all).

Friday, 21 October: We headed back to Bern in the late afternoon, the plan being to catch a play that one of Cindy’s friends was putting on and then catch the train to house-sit for Cindy’s parents in the Valais. Right as we arrived in the city center, Cindy realised she had forgotten a number of things back at her flat. She caught a bus back to Oberbottigen, meaning that I had 90 minutes to kill in the city. After walking around for a while, I went back into the train station to go buy my ticket to the Valais for that night. The ticket-buying experience went so well, I ended up purchasing two of them. The exchange, which you will note starts in French and quickly switches to German, went something like this:

• Me: Gruesse, un retour-billet de Bern à Brig. (Hello, a two-way ticket from Bern to Brig)
• Him: Nach wo? (To where?)
• Nach Brig. (To Brig)
• Hin und zurueck? (There and back?)
• Ja, genau. (Yes, quite right)
• Zweimal? (Twice?)

I was good up until he said, “zweimal“. I couldn’t understand why he was asking me that, so my gut reaction of, “oh, he’s trying to clairify my bad French/German”, kicked in. I answered in the affirmative, and so ended up with two two-way tickets from Bern to the Valais. Cindy later got a refund for the extra ticket, but even she had no idea why he would ask me if I wanted two tickets.

Saturday, 22 October Since we arrived in the Valais after dark the previous night, waking up the next morning was a bit of a shock. Naters, the town Cindy’s parents live in in the Valais, is surrounded on all sides by mountains. Real mountains. We spent most of the day walking around Naters and Brig (across the river from Naters).

Among the things we saw was the “Bone House”. When the town needed to move a cemetary, they dug up all the bones and moved them into this building. When you look inside, you’re confronted with a solid wall of human skulls and limb bones. The wall extends back quite a ways, from what Cindy said.

Basically, this entire region is one big postcard. Everything you picture in your head when you think of Switzerland, this is it. You fully expect to see Heidi bounding down the mountain with an Alpine horn over her shoulder at any minute. The train-ride back to Bern was cut from the same cloth: more incredibly picturesque mountains, valleys, gorges, rivers, etc. You almost have trouble believing that real people live here, that what you’re seeing isn’t just some massive, country-wide ski resort.

Quickly: unlike the last time I came to this continent, all airtravel proceeded without a hitch. All flights left on time, for the right destination, with me on board.

Atlanta: Continental Airlines employs magicians. As soon as I walked up to the desk to get my boarding pass, the guy behind the counter says, “I think they’ve bumped your flight; yeah, they’ve rescheduled your 11:30 flight to 2:30, but there’s a 12:15 to Newark I can get you on.” I have no idea how he knew any of this.

Around 10:30, I headed over to the security checkpoint, fully expecting to stand in line for an hour, only to be cavity-searched — roughly — in a back room. The lines were mercifully short, and I got through in just a few minutes, with all bodily cavities intact. The plane boarded on time, and the flight to New Jersey was uneventful.

Newark: I have to confess something: I didn’t know I was going to Newark until the night before. Even though I figured out which flights I would be taking, even though I printed out the itinerary three times, it didn’t register that I’d be spending six hours in Jersey until my father said something about it just before I left for Atlanta.

In any case, Newark was still enjoyable (as enjoyable as international airports can be, I guess). I spent most of my time walking around Continental’s terminal (yes, they have their own terminal), listening to all the languages swirling about. I got to practice my French with a woman waiting for a flight to Geneva, which was a nice little self-confidence boost. My final act on US soil involved a sleeping pill and a glass of red wine at a bar looking across to New York City.

The flight to London was abysmal. It left around 6:30 EST (midnight London time), meaning that I would need to sleep for the entire flight in order to adjust to the new timezone as quickly as possible. The colicky infant in the seat ahead of me, however, had other ideas. He cried — literally — from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other, nonstop.

London: Given the maze-like design of London Gatwick, I can only assume that there’s a minotaur somewhere inside. It feels like we’re being made to run some kind of physical fitness course: go up these stairs, down this ramp, down this corridor, now back through this parallel corridor, now down this corkscrew thing, now down this hallway, before finally reaching the Customs area. The EU and UK citizens shoot through their lines, but the “all other citizenships” queue has all of two agents, one of whom goes off on a tea break (or whatever Britons do at 6AM) midway through. At this point, I’m absolutely sweating bullets, worrying whether I’m going to make my flight to Geneva.

When I finally get up to the customs agent, he looks at my landing card and then starts grilling me on my plans in London:

• “What’s the nature of your business in the United Kingdom?”
• “I’m just catching a flight to Geneva.”
• “And what will you be doing there?”
• “Visiting a friend.”
• “And for how long?”
• “Five days.”
• “And what will you be doing after that?”

At this point, I begin having visions of this guy dragging me to a little back room and making me list, in detail, every trip I plan to make over the next year. I am about to liquify out of stress. Fortunately, he limits himself to a few general questions about my reasons for going to Germany, then glances at my itinerary and smirks, “guess you’re going to need to run.” I assure him that, yes, yes I will need to run. Thanks, mate.

I head in to yet another maze of twisty little passages, which the signs promise me will lead to the baggage claim area. I finally track down my bag, then race off to find EasyJet’s check-in desk. Lucky me, Gatwick’s check-in area is massive. I eventually locate EasyJet’s desks, which are, of course, at the very furthest end of the check-in area. The woman there gives me my boarding pass, saying something that I hear as, “gate 725.” When I get to the main departure gate crossroads, I find out that the gates only go up to 120 or so. I locate one of those “your plane leaves from gate X at time Y” screens, which informs me that my flight will be leaving soon from gate “please wait.” Wait is the absolute last thing I want to do at this point in my day. I run around, checking every one of these departure screens, until they finally update to tell me that my flight leaves from gate 2.

I am the first person to arrive at gate 2.

The flight was crammed full, and given that I had the lowest seating priority, I ended up without a window seat. I was initially disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to see any of England, France and Switzerland, but it turned out alright: there was a solid bank of clouds from London to Geneva, so I didn’t miss anything.

Geneva: Cindy picked me up just on the other side of Customs, and we set off to go see about buying train tickets and whatnot for me. We get into an argument with the guy at the ticket counter (in French) about whether or not the Swiss rail system is willing to ship me a demi-pris abonnement (De: Halbpreisabo, En: a card giving me a 50% off on all ticket purchases in Switzerland for the next year) at her address. Eventually, the whole mess gets sorted, though, and we’re on our way to Bern.

Bern: Cindy and I went for a walk in the forest near her little village, Oberbottigen. After this, I was unable to hold my jetlag at bay any further, and so, after 24+ sleepless hours, I crashed — hard — at 8PM, sleeping a solid 14 hours.

Note: I’ve started posting pictures on the Interweb. They can be found over here