Not So Neutral After All

So, I almost got arrested earlier this month in Switzerland. I swear, I’ve never been so consistently close to being placed in prison as I seem to be here living in Europe. It’s not that I’m out getting myself into trouble, it’s just that I don’t seem to know the rules - and I suppose that I tend to keep “guessing” on the wrong side of the law.

Crime aside for the moment, Gabriela and I love our trips to Switzerland. It’s a beautiful, mountainous country with not a lot of real sites to see, but plenty of nature to enjoy no matter where you are. We decided to begin our fourth-of-July holiday Swiss tour in the city of Zurich. Like most Swiss towns, you could see the Alps in the distance (though less in Zurich than other places) and plenty of lakes and trees surround you. While there, we mostly walked, hiked and shopped (duh!). Truly Zurich offered a pleasant stay. But just before 7:00 a.m. on the day we were to leave Zurich, we woke up to find a ruckus right outside our bedroom window.

As we stared out the window to find out what was going on, we noticed that the Switzerland SWAT team was gathering directly across the street from us - probably no more than 10 yards from our hotel. I could see the officers huddled together in two locations, but couldn't really see much else. I heard one man using a bullhorn to announce something in the Swiss/German hybrid language used. He spoke clearly and firmly, but all I understood was “fumpf minuten” meaning “Five Minutes”. He did not sound happy! I turned to Gabriela, and said something to the effect of “WE HAVE TO LEAVE HERE - NOW. RIGHT NOW.”

We were taking an early train that morning, so the activity going on outside didn’t seem to change any of our travel plans. But when we hurried down to the front desk to check out, the lady seemed very relieved that we were leaving. I asked her what was going on outside and she said, “I don’t know how to say in English….a man…..they want him to come out.” Apparently, so the story goes, a man barricaded himself into a building right next to our hotel. The Swiss Swat team was there to get him out, whether by conversation, or by force. So we left the building as quickly as possible, relieved to be exiting the situation. Until I almost got arrested.

So, as any proper tourist would do in this situation, surrounded by SWAT team and in the middle of a Die Hard movie, I started firing off pictures with my camera. I was moving pretty fast at the time, so I didn’t really get any clear shots of anything, but I was hoping to have something interesting to post up on the Blog. Unfortunately, the SWAT team doesn’t appreciate tourists taking photos of their faces and crime scenes. In about three seconds, a very tall and burley Swiss police officer grabbed me by the shoulder, said something in German, and pulled me into a corner of a nearby building. I was FREAKING OUT. Somehow though, Gabriela was more annoyed than upset at me. She said, “Tony…geez” more like I just interrupted her phone call than I just got hauled away by a foreign SWAT team. The police officer grabbed my camera and went through deleting all the photos I took at the scene. None of them were any good, so I think right away he recognized that I was just a stupid tourist instead of an honest threat. Especially after he got to the picture Gabriela took of all the grocery store food we bought arranged nicely on our bed for a photo. He must have figured that no dangerous person would take a picture of salad and cheese laid out neatly in a hotel room. Then he said something else to me, of which the only thing I understood was “OK”. And I walked REALLY FAST away from the situation. We made it to the train and left Zurich for Lucerne, but more than anything else during our trip, the SWAT experience provided an added adventure to the Switzerland experience. The moral of this story: the Swiss are obviously not near as “neutral” as they’ll have you believe.

In Lucerne, our highlight, as well as our lowlight was our trip up Mount Pilatus. Seven-thousand feet in the air, the mountain is named for Pontius Pilot, who legend has it was buried there and continues to haunt the area. The trip began with a beautiful hour-long boat ride on Lake Lucerne. We then transferred to a cogway train that runs for 30 minutes at the steepest angled track in the world - somewhat unnerving going up, but nothing compared to dodging Swiss prison. Finally, we arrived at the top of Mount Pilatus to experience the glorious view at the peak of the mountain, looking over lush green valleys and deep blue waters surrounded by the Swiss Alps. Except that we saw nothing. NOTHING! The clouds had descended upon us at that altitude, and even three hours later, we couldn’t see 10 feet in front of our face. All our pictures showed nothing but gray cloud. It wasn’t until we were waiting in line to descend from the Mountain that the clouds broke temporarily for us to run out and fire off a few photos. It didn’t last long however, and our photo-op vanished with the gust of wind, driving the clouds back within our view. Check out the picture of me standing on the observation deck. There is nothing but a thick gray wall of cloud behind me.

The ride down from the mountain was actually more memorable than the stop at the peak. We took an actual Swiss cable car down from the top of the mountain. It was really cool. I thought it would be like a roller coaster dropping down off the cliff, but it was more of a relaxed smooth decent. It was peaceful way to travel and provided more beautiful views of the surroundings than a train or car could offer. If nothing else, taking a cable car down from the mountain peak in the Swiss Alps is a pretty neat thing to add to the resume of life experiences.

Our last stop near the Italian border in Switzerland was Locarno. Locarno was surrounded by palm trees and had much warmer temperatures then Zurich and Lucerne. And somewhere during our 3 hour train ride from Lucerne, the country stopped speaking German and began speaking Italian. It was interesting to be in a country where so many languages are spoken, from Italian, to Swiss-German, to French.

Gabriela was excited to be in Switzerland where we could sample an extremely large amount of Swiss chocolate. Currently neck-and-neck with the Hershey bar in the race to be her all-time favorite food. Swiss chocolate comes in tiny gourmet squares, lightly dusted in coco powder - a beautiful sight, topped only by their taste. Gabriela stocked up for the trip home, ensuring that she’d have enough for the trip back and some to snack on back in Germany. Strangely however, at some point between me packing up the food for the trip back, my enormous two-liter of diet coke ended up directly on top of the aforementioned delicacies. It wasn't until after the bumpy train ride, the long bouncy walk through the airport, and the up-and-down of the airline security checkpoints that I discovered that I had taken her beloved gourmet chocolate, and turned it into an absolute squishy, melty mess. No lie, it looked a dirty diaper - dark chocolate mashed into a clean white bag. It was a VERY sad experience for her, and obviously then an even sadder one for me. So as we waited for the plane to arrive, my wife and I sat in the airport terminal, sharing a fork, spooning very unappetizing looking chocolate goo from the bottom of a torn and crumpled white bag. Not surprisingly, no one sat anywhere near us. I'm assuming that it will take much shopping and Hershey’s to help my wife move through this difficult time in our lives. It's not easy to move on from a loss like the one that she suffered, especially at the hands of her husband and his Diet Coke. However, she appears confident that we'll simply find a way to re-obtain Swiss chocolate. WHATEVER THE COST. Note to others - keep heavy plastic bottles away from $18 bag of gourmet sweets!

Until next trip.

Tony and Gabriela

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