Today I want to ramble a little incoherently about a trip I did to Zurich in 2010. I’ve never talked about it before simply because I’ve never had much to say about it. I remember very little – I remember aimlessly wandering Basel and I remember 6am in the back streets of Zurich and the night before that morning and other than that, all I’ve got is photos to tell me what I did.
That all makes it sound worse than it is.
I’d booked it in something of a hurry only a month or so in advance and the reason was that two comedians I wanted to see were doing a mini-tour. This was April 2010. I’d only really realised stand-up comedy existed the previous summer and only seen my first show in November 2009. I already knew Ed Byrne was a favourite and I particularly wanted to see Rich Hall because he’d failed to show up at Altitude Festival the previous month. I’m sure he had a good reason and he was replaced by Micky Flanagan (who was still a few months or a year or two off being big, of whom I wrote in my diary “likeable” when he appeared at Wednesday’s Headliners show) but I kind of felt like I needed to even up the universe by actually getting to see him and this double-mini-tour felt like destiny. It was also the first time I’d been back to Switzerland since living there, so Switzerland was definitely part of the whole thing. There’s a very good chance I’d have gritted my teeth and said no to it if it had been just about anywhere else. Maybe France or Austria But my adopted home country and two comedians I wanted to see? No, I knew in my heart and soul I was going to go long before my head agreed to it.
They were doing three dates – Geneva, Basel & Zurich. I hadn’t warmed to Geneva on my only visit there during my year abroad – literally. It was bitterly cold that day and Jemma and I hopped from greenhouse to greenhouse in the botanical gardens and then shop to shop back to the station and I really need to get to know Geneva better some day. Basel didn’t appeal either, although today I wouldn’t be so quick to write it off. But Zurich – Zurich’s not the capital but in an alternate universe, it would have been. It’s an excellent transport hub and it’s a big and interesting city in itself so that was a no-brainer.
Oh, there are so many things I would do different if this came up again today. But number one would be choice of accommodation. I have a well-documented history of choosing the cheapest hotel within a three-minute walk of the main station on the grounds that it’s easy to find and doesn’t require me to walk around a strange place looking lost for too long. However, the station is rarely the pleasantest area of a city and the cheapest hotel nearby is almost invariably a mistake and this was a bad one.
In 2010, my brain had a bit of a blip. These days I’m accustomed to the fact that I’m occasionally at the mercy of its whims and its hyperfixations and it’s far easier to just roll my eyes and wait them out and go “Oh, we’re going to stand here for an hour, are we? Fine, if that’s what you want, brain” but this was kind of a new discovery back then. However, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I’d managed to accidentally induce insomnia in myself, probably from fighting with Irrational!Brain, which was to get worse until about November.
It was severely not helped by the location of this hotel, which was steaming hot. The only way to not die of heat exhaustion overnight was to keep the fan on, which didn’t really help with either the heat or the sleep. Opening the window might have been an option had it not been right above a curve in the tram track. I don’t mind trams rattling past all night. What I mind is the way they scream as they go around that bend. Screeches and anything of that approximately that frequently just bypasses all my reason. I just can’t. Today I’d storm off to a hardware shop in the middle of the night and stand out there with a can of WD40 and hiss in the face of any authorities who tried to stop me oiling their public transport. But in 2010, I just lay awake all night for four nights while the screeching drove me out of my mind.
I went to Luzern on my first day. I’ve never known Luzern that well and perhaps my liking for it is disproportionate to how well I know it, but I do like it so much. The second day I went to Basel where my chief memory is of looking out over the river from a church that I’m about to google and discover is significant. Yep, Basel Minster. Well done, 2010!Me for taking no interest whatsoever in a church I’d be all over today. Day three I went to Zug and did a boat trip on Lake Zurich.
The show was the third night. It was good. Ed and Rich are both very good at what they do and nearly twelve years on, I will still leap on tickets if either of them tours within two hours of my house. I remember Ed listing all the bands that don’t actually start with “the”, even though people always add it and I remember him gleefully reciting Rich’s old material while Rich stood right next to him looking bemused and going “I don’t even remember it this well” and I remember my front row seat not existing, and the entire front row watching in some bewilderment as a school-style wooden bench was brought out for us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen comedy from a bench since, although I’ve seen it from the floor more times than I would have expected back then.
Google Maps says Zurich Volkshaus is only a fifteen minute walk from my noisy overheated hotel. Knowing that I’d have to walk back alone in the dark, I don’t know why I didn’t find somewhere closer but then 15 minutes is pretty close in a reasonable-sized city and it’s entirely likely anything more city-centre was out of my budget. Anyway, I’d lived in Switzerland and although I don’t think I walked around in the dark much when I lived there, I had no fear of doing it. But by the time I got back, I was probably quite wound up and then it was hot and noisy and I hadn’t slept for two nights and…
Well, long story short, I gave up at dawn and went out. There’s a kind of island immediately east of my hotel, wedged in between the river Sihl and where it joins the bigger Limmat. It’s kind of rural, in a slightly disheveled way, although it’s also home to a nice neat riverside park and bandstand and the National Museum. Anyway, it’s probably a disreputable place to be wandering at that time in the morning when you haven’t slept for three nights and are quietly going out of your mind with tram screams. Are you getting an idea of why I don’t remember much of this trip? Are you getting an idea of what I looked like that morning? I’m doing the “traumatised movie character shamble and long-distance stare”, most likely. Someone else, who I don’t remember seeing, but who probably didn’t look entirely unlike me, asked if I wanted any sugar and in my exhausted and overdone haze, I said I didn’t and wandered on.
I don’t know when I realised what I was actually being offered. Not that morning. Not that trip. Later on, probably 2011 at the earliest, when I could think with the usual crystal-clarity, when I replayed that morning in my brain.
I don’t remember what happened after that but at some point I got myself together and went off to Rigi. It’s only at the other end of Zurich’s lake and you can make a round trip of it. From the photos and the internet, I think I took the train, possibly via Luzern, to Arth-Goldau, west-south-west of the peak, and took the cogwheel train to the top, then came down by train to Vitznau to the south and took the steamer back to Luzern before presumably finishing off with the train back to Vilnius. Going up a mountain is always going to be head-clearing to a certain degree but look at the view!
Yep, pea-soup fog. It’s atmospheric in its way and it did get better as I made my way down to Vitznau and I’m sure I revelled in the boat trip back to Luzern – I usually do. That night, for reasons lost in the mists of time and lack of reason, I apparently filmed 23 minutes of trams going past my window which I won’t inflict on you. To wail and gnash my teeth about and yell “listen to it!” when I got back, presumably. To remind myself it was real and not a product of my broken mind.
Well, anyway, I spent my last day at Davos which is not at its best on a damp day in late May. The train trip was quite pleasant, judging by the pictures, but train journeys through Graubunden always are – if there’s one thing I could recommend for visits to Switzeland, it’s to take a train up to a mountain town in Graubuden. Chur to Arosa is lovely. Anyway, Davos was not glamorous and it was not pretty. Definitely a town to visit in the winter when it’s full of snow, skiers and royals.
And then I came home and probably slept for a month. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a complete failure but it was definitely my least successful trip to Switzerland ever and possibly my least successful trip anywhere. Bucharest a year earlier had also not gone great but at least most of that has stayed in my memory and I didn’t get offered any drugs. I go back every three or four years and although 2014 had some interesting and frustrating and annoying moments, every visit since 2010 has gone well, although admittedly they’ve all been in the Oberland. Clearly I just thrive in mountains.