31 August 2003 ---JOURNAL ENTRY TWENTY-FOUR---
All right, I've got a ton to do on this lazy Sunday but I owed you an update so here goes... We didn't make it to Liechtenstein. We had a ride there but opted not to go, there's no other reason than that, really. We used the mitfahrzentrale to get to Zurich and 8 euro and 110 minutes later it was almost 10am and we are somewhere in Zurich. The guy who had driven us there said that the train station was only 500 meters but he was full of shit. It was a good 20-minute walk, and Kristian and I were with another guy who had ridden to Zurich, Colin from who knows where with the American English accent who claims to speak Romanian, German, English, Spanish and he's "picking up Chinese", the 20-year old professional concert pianist who says he plays pick up jazz shows in Paris sometimes, blah blah blah. Yeah, he was a nice guy actually but for someone (me) who is proud of how much life he is trying to squeeze into his life, this kid was too much for me! We left him at the train station, as did we our luggage and set off for Zurich.
We rented a paddleboat and checked out the lake, a great view of Zurich, we saw the city museum which happened to be free that day, found a grocery store (it's harder to do than you think in Zurich!) and made some bread/cheese/salami sandwiches and chilled by the lake, saw some Hare Krishnas playing music and giving away homemade desert things, and then later met up with my friend Karin whom I met four years ago in LA when I was working at Yankee Doodles...wow, that's a lifetime ago, eh? So, she took us to her town of Baden where we went to a beer garden, had a couple of beers and then she let us crash in her living room which we shared with two crazy black cats that jumped on us, ran over us, chased things in the dark that were merely my dreams and then it was morning....
In the morning, early, she had to go to work so at 8am we left together and she showed us where we could try to hitchhike. To Bern. For some reason we'd given up on Liechtenstein, and we don't even know why but Karin had said that Bern is a cool place and it is the capital of Switzerland and it wasn't further from home and it was only an hour and I wanted to see another old town and churches and rivers and who knows and, why not, we'll try to hitchhike there. And we did. We waited about 30 minutes, even made a cool sign that said BERN and we got a ride to Aarau which was 'on the way'. I didn't know where we were going but we were going somewhere. He was a young guy who had to drive to this town for work and he picked us up for the sole reason that we weren't hitchhiking in the right place if we wanted to go Bern. He dropped us off at a reststop type place and I walked around the parking lot and within 10 minutes we had a smoking fast ride to Bern, a 20 year old kid named Marc who was about to begin university in a couple of weeks and had just begun a small holiday and was driving to bern to visit friends. He didn't want gas money but was glad when I bought him a coke. And then Kristian and I were in Bern and it was about 10:30, another full day and we didn't know anyone there or where to go, what to do, who knows?
We found the train station eventually and went to the information center to ask about the town hostel. They said it cost 37SFr which translates to about 25euro, for a hostel bed!!! Uh oh, we thought, that's not a good sign. We wander around, decide to call the camping place since we did bring a tent and all, so find out that they only want 14Sfr per person for a bungalow of sorts. We go for it. We take one bus, transfer to another bus and then walk down a big hill and find the camping place, RIGHT on the Aare River. It was beautiful. Our room was small but fine, two small beds, small table and two chairs. We chilled by the river, went to the grocery store and made a fat lunch, and then we decided to find a good place to see the sunset and of course it was too cloudy but here's what happened. We took a tram to the center this time, wandered around the old town, seeing cool buildings and old churches and then found the Munster, the big church and had a drink there overlooking the river. That picture is above somewhere. Anyway, we just traveled, and I hope that makes sense, but if it doesn't then we looked at buildings, watched strange things happen, walked across the bridge for a different view of the city, and took a path along the river for 30 minutes or so and then crossed another bridge into the center, went to a couple of bars and got to see the 'real' Bern. We then went back to the camping ground and as we were getting ready for bed the rain started. The lightning had been going on already for about 10 minutes but with no sound and that's another way to know you're in Switzerland because the valleys and mountains are so big that on the other side of a valley the thunder could be huge but you'd have no idea. Then it came to our valley and I was suddenly so glad that we weren't in the tent because it really started raining hard, and I don't mean 'california hard rain', this was real rain and the thunder one time lasted about 20 seconds, it was amazing. It was still raining in the morning and we thought it might be hard to hitchhike but we tried anyway. It didn't work and after two hours of nothing we black drove (take public transportation with paying) back to the city center and bought expensive traintickets to Basel where Kristian's girlfriend, Nora was meeting us. We stayed there for a few hours, explored the old town and then got home about 9:30pm, exactly two and a half days since we left but both Kristian and I thought it had felt like a two week trip and in a way, it was. Adios!
Gruezi!= Greu-eh-zi= Hello in Swiss German
