We woke up to our first alarm clock in nearly two weeks, the sound so startling it felt for a moment like there had been a fire smoldering in our building overnight. We were to depart on a train that morning from Blois to Zurich and, to our further shock, arrived at the train station early. The concept of arriving early to board transportation took me years to come to terms with. Courtney, long familiar with my occasional lapses when it comes to judging the time it takes to get places, used to goad me into getting to airports and train stations early with the promise of Auntie Anne’s pretzels or browsing the pulp fiction at Hudson News.
That was before we lived in a world without travel, when there was still ostensible impetus to get anywhere on-time. But even in Blois, there was no prize for our remarkable foresight. We langured impatiently on the platform of the drafty train depot. For breakfast, I had a quarter of our previous day’s lunch baguette, stuffed with a convenience store chorizo, and paired with a hard-boiled egg. But the benefits, I would come to learn, were merely delayed; the journey was smooth, and the poor man’s bacon-and-egg managed to quell any further desire to eat until dinner.
Zurich combined all the most expensive parts of Paris with the soulless, corporate feeling of a Medieval Times. Everything was both too clean and too inhibited, like the sterile images of Europe that graced my grade school world history textbook. We walked up to Lindenhofplatz, a quiet park overlooking the city, where elderly men played life-size chess amidst shingled rooves and copper-trimmed steeples. The bells of the surrounding cathedrals were chiming to mark the hour, but each was slightly off, like a middle school orchestra tuning before a performance.
Our hostel room, located on the back side of an adjoining café, was the most expensive place we stayed on the entire trip, and still we shared a bathroom at the end of the hall. The cheapest meal we could find was the equivalent of bad Chinese take-out without the satisfaction of a good deal. Even “Old Town” was just a series of increasingly pricey retail shops. If there was any comfort in this, it was that no one else seemed to be able to afford Zurich either. In lieu of going to bars, groups of people were drinking outdoors on park benches and in plaza squares. It wasn’t that dissimilar to what we’ve all been doing recently, only this time out of fear or prohibition of being indoors.
With only one night in the city, we tried to see it all, but quickly tired. Instead, at Courtney’s insistence, we woke up early to go on a jog the following morning. Despite my initial reluctance, it was like seeing the city with a fresh set of eyes. We wended our way through West Zurich, a formerly industrial district typified by the trappings of gentrification: up-zoned development, restored landscapes, and renovated viaducts. Still, it was my favorite part of the city. There were stacked shipping containers that doubled as art galleries, an outdoor farmer’s market, a skate park covered in graffiti.
On the way back, we passed by a nightclub with a velvet-roped line still snaking out the door. Was it early by that point, or late? I saw a couple exit the front door, bleary-eyed but happy. To turn off the lights at night, believing things to be a certain way, and emerge not having remembered what happened the day before. As if we could all, for a moment, forget the tedium of the present, and reassure ourselves that every day could be made anew.
I turned back toward Courtney, but she’d already zoomed past. What a world to live like that again would be.