Rome'ing to Malta; swanning around Switzerland

From Rome I’d booked a flight to Malta. My parents moved out there some years ago and I thought I would fly out to see my dad on his birthday. It was strange not having to sort out a hostel for the next six days or so but not unwelcome — at this point I’d been travelling for about seven weeks and was ready for some home comforts.

Rome wasn’t prepared to let me leave so easily though. I’d booked a place on a shuttle bus to Ciampino airport, which conveniently departed from a stop down the road from my hostel. After five days of nice weather it decided to pour with rain, soaking all of us who waited for at least 45 minutes for a bus that didn’t show up.

I still don’t know what happened. There was the usual cluster of irate and noisy Italians shouting far too quickly for me and my poor Italian to follow. Fortunately, just when I was becoming a bit worried — I had no backup plan for getting to the airport — a group of Italians came over and through a combination of single word Italian and some excellent hand gestures I got a place in a shared taxi.

Never in my life have I been more certain I was going to die. I alluded to the craziness of Rome’s traffic in my last piece but this was something else. The sheer amount of work the driver needed on the steering wheel as he muscled his way through the traffic astounded me. If you didn’t know and just watched the steering wheel you’d swear he was driving a high performance sports car at Spa or somewhere. The horror must have shown on my face because at one point the guy sat to my right gave me a thumbs-up and said “Eees OK!”. I think I gave a weak smile and made sure I was gripping the seat tightly enough.

All credit to him though, he was right and we arrived at the decidedly ramshackle airport in good time and I managed the flight without drama. I did discover that my bag is now 2 kilograms lighter than when I left the UK and I can’t seem to figure out why. Either the machines are wrong or I’ve been leaving a trail of dirty socks across Europe.

I’m afraid I didn’t do much “travel” in Malta. I mostly did laundry and lounged around and chatted to my parents and their cats. That’s kind of a cop-out, I know and I’m sorry, but at this point I was quite travel-weary. It is a surprising amount of effort to find places to stay, things to eat and things to do. When travelling you don’t really have “fuck it, all I’m doing today is putting on my dressing gown and watching TV” days — even a lazy day involves a fair amount of effort in comparison.

One of the travel tasks I had to do while not travelling was decide where to go next. While booking my flights to and from Malta (I was in Nuremberg at the time) I’d had a vague notion of continuing around Italy when I got back, but I couldn’t face the chaos any more. I looked for flights to anywhere else but the cheapest flight that didn’t go to the UK was £60 which was too much and that was without me wanting to take my bag with me. I decided on an optimistic “let’s hope everything is on time!” plan to get through Rome as quickly as possible and take an overnight bus to Zurich. This would give me a good staring point to go through Liechtenstein, Austria, and the Czech Republic before Poland (this would prove to be very naive but we’ll get to that in further entries), and had the bonus that I would only have to be in Rome for about 3 hours from landing.

Luckily it all worked, even through the Rome metro rush hour crush. We made it to Zurich without too much drama, although one woman was shouted at by the Swiss border control people for not having a visa. This confused me a bit because I always thought no visa meant no entry for you, but they let her continue. (I was secretly hoping they’d try to drag her away only for her to resist, Jason Bourne style, but no dice!)

Arriving at the bus station, as buses are wont to do, I was pleased to see the train station was close as I wanted to store my bags there until I could check in to the hostel. As ever though, I made this task far more difficult than necessary as I couldn’t find the luggage lockers for a good 40 minutes. Zurich’s train station is a strangely combined shopping centre and train station, and I simply couldn’t find them. There were no signs in the part of the shopping centre I was now in, and I had too much pride to go into a shop and ask. (I would later discover if you go in the train station via a normal entrance rather than my special one they are right there).

Something important to note about Zurich — it’s very expensive. Coffee shops were pretty pricey, and not all that great. Supermarkets didn’t seem too badly priced but looking at menus of restaurants made me quickly realise I wouldn’t be dining out while here.

Zurich certainly seemed to be a prosperous place that probably wouldn’t miss my dining custom. I wandered down Bahnhofstrasse, for it was the first place I found, and the place was full of those high-end, pretentious and “luxury” shops. Prada, Chanel, Louis Vutton, all those places where you can’t imagine anyone buying anything. I’m not sure I’d want to meet those people who would actually want to go and buy a Mont Blanc pen, for example.

You can play a fun game with these places, by the way. What you do is make sure you look a bit of a mess (I haven’t had a haircut for a while and was wearing old jeans that are more hole than denim but you’re welcome to experiment, see what works for you) and then you can worry the doormen by idly walking towards their shop, making them scared that you’re going to try going in before veering away at the last minute. The look of slight panic on their faces is priceless, though I did think the guy at Van Cleef & Arpels was going to tackle me.

For the sake of my wallet I took a free walking tour which was quite good, certainly worth the money I paid for it considering we got some free chocolate into the bargain. I was a little miffed that our tour guide didn’t want to touch on Switzerland’s neutrality during the Second World War as apparently that’s a sensitive subject. I can understand this to a point, but I think Germany’s approach of confronting the past is a better, more constructive one.

I also learned that another taboo subject in Switzerland is money, with some married couples not knowing what each other earns. This seemed incredible to me. I can’t imagine being married and having a wife who doesn’t know what I earned and vice versa. It did make me want to whisper “how much do you earn?” to Swiss people passing by though, perhaps while winking salaciously or waving an old payslip at them.

We also stopped by the spot where Winston Churchill made a speech in 1946 about his vision of the Europe of the future, and how a more integrated Europe would prevent future wars in Europe. This was especially poignant now, what with the ongoing Brexit furore. I felt ridiculous while the tour guide was saying how good it was that Europe was working together, and I was just waiting for the inevitable Brexit comments.

I don’t really want to get into politics here, but I will just say that anything Donald Trump says is a “great victory” is unlikely to be much of a victory. What I have noticed in my travels is that there’s not much I’ve thought the UK does substantially better than other countries (apart from sausage rolls, preferably from Greggs — I would actually murder for one right about now) and I’m not sure leaving the European Union is likely to make things better.

There, that’s all I’m saying about that. I don’t think that was too painful.

Getting to my dorm room in the hostel, however, was a bit of a pain. To get to the reception required a three floor ascent up spiral stairs which was enough to make me quite dizzy by the time I arrived and of course reception wouldn’t open for another half hour.

When it did open the receptionist, who was very friendly, mentioned my birth year I did the usual self-deprecating “yeah, getting old now!” comment which didn’t really go down very well; in fact, she said that I was 10 months younger than she was. After that I decided it was for the best to not try any more humour and quietly filled out my registration card before climbing another three floors to my room.

This was the cosiest room I’d had so far — the beds were quite uncomfortably close together so I picked the one nearest both the door and sole plug socket. Why these places don’t provide more plug sockets I don’t know. It would really help matters quite a lot. The communal areas were almost always deserted and my dorm mates quiet apart from one Swedish guy who talked a lot and then disappeared for good while I was out for my evening stroll.

Zurich is a really pretty town by night. I went to check out the Grossmunster (I thought they might do specials for other gross monsters like me but alas it was closed) which was lit really nicely. The streets around it were fantastic too, and as with everything in Zurich it was litter-free and spotlessly clean. It’s a good place to walk, as unlike Italy drivers stop at pedestrian crossings.

I also checked out the Landesmuseum which was certainly educational, if maybe the slightest bit dry. I wasn’t very interested in the graphical art exhibition, though the Einsiedeln exhibit was interesting in that it showed how much wealth there was in monasteries back in the day — it seemed like every passing king would hurl a chalice or crown or something gold at the monks. Such riches! I was tempted to make the guards nervous by measuring the cases with my hand span before making interested “HMMMM” noises and looking at security cameras, but thought I’d better not.

It did have quite a novel way of presenting information though. Scattered throughout would be books of empty pages that when turned would project an often animated display, giving the impression of an animated book. You could press areas on the page for more information, and it was there I learned facts about Switzerland. My favourites were that the Swiss people voted against more public holidays and for higher taxes, which seemed the wrong way round to me. I asked a friend who lives in Switzerland about this and he told me that people tend to vote for things that make the country better overall, and on this you have to respect the Swiss people.

It does show in the city too. As I mentioned previously, everywhere was spotless. I don’t recall seeing a single boarded up shop, there was little graffiti and there were very few homeless people. I think that’s how I’ll remember Zurich, a place I have a lot of respect for because there is a lot about it it does really well. I suppose that’s why it’s so expensive; it’s just a shame that it seems to have a clean, pleasant city the cost is prohibitively high. Written on December 7th, 2017 by David Seddon