Alexa Abroad! Part One.

THURSDAY:

Having spent the previous few days contorted into a terrified rictus, I was surprised to find myself calm on the day of my departure. I was frazzled by packing (I had selected nine books for the trip, but my mother felt nine was too many and I was forced to winnow), but generally felt prepared, and even excited. Before we left, I asked my mother to take a picture of me, Scott, and Simone, presumably so that after they perished in a car crash while I drank capriciously in some far-flung sidewalk cafe filled with dissolute European gentlemen, I would have something by which to remember them:

{fig. 1: …and they were never seen together again.}

I kissed Scott and clutched my baby, and was whisked away in a taxi.

At the airport my mother and I had cocktails and a pot roast sandwich, and the mood turned festive. Why, I wasn’t nervous at all! I was on vacation, and felt nothing but peace and the comforting heft of gravy in my stomach. I reflected upon How I Had Grown As A Person while I chewed a french fry, regarding my former self with a wise pity.

Because my mother flits back and forth so often, we had managed to wrangle seats in INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CLASS, for people on very fancy international business, and let me tell you, it is the only way to fly. Free champagne before takeoff! Menus from which you may choose a variety of entrees with appetizer, cheese plate, and dessert! A sort of pod-recliner to sleep in, with a down pillow and blanket! Complimentary toiletry kit with sleep mask!
It was all very exciting, and I settled in to read, wondering which on-demand movie I would watch later, after my hot towel and personal dish of mixed nuts. I used my blanket as cover to wriggle out of my bra. This was living.

About an hour or so after take-off, my chest began to feel constricted. I was seized with a desperate, terrible dread, my hands numbed, and suddenly there it was, a panic attack, and all I could think was I want to go home. But it was too late! Six more hours TRAPPED ON THIS PLANE MY GOD, and in order to get back I would have to do it all again. I thought of the Concorde—was there some special speedy-jet for mental health emergencies? My mother, so pleased by my sportsmanship thus far, was obviously disappointed at the turn of events that left me breathing studiously while staring wild-eyed at the air in front of me, and her disappointment only panicked me further. I took one Klonopin after another, cancelled my dinner order, reclined my seat and scrolled quickly to my calming ipod playlist while pulling up the covers and slapping my lavender sachet over my eyes, the one I used every night on hospital bedrest. After four tranquilizers and what seemed like six or seven months but was almost certainly only an hour or two, I was asleep.

FRIDAY:

I awoke feeling fabulous. The sun was shining outside my airplane window, and all was well with the world, or at least above it. Snug in my pod, I dozed on and off for a bit, and then sang Roxanne to myself as the plane began its descent into Amsterdam “You don’t have to put on your red light! You don’t have to sell your body to the night! Unless you want to! Because it’s perfectly legal!”
Strangely, I didn’t feel particularly tired, despite the fact that it was three in the morning back at my apartment, and only in False European Time was it anything like an appropriate waking hour. That is the useful part of having a baby where international travel is concerned. You are already accustomed to, say, getting two hours of sleep and waking for the day while the rest of the world is deep in REM stage slumber.

After the luxury of INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CLASS, the tiny puddle-jumper from Amsterdam to Zurich felt barbaric. I was like a veal, forced to sit upright in a seat with another seat RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. We were served a long thin box containing an odd Dutch breakfast, part of which was a tiny caramel tartlet, and the rest of which I do not feel qualified to identify.

And then we were in Zurich, and if I hadn’t already known I was in Switzerland, I would have figured it out by the scene at baggage claim. In every American airport I have visited, the baggage claim area is something of a zoo: people reuniting, talking loudly on cell phones, jostling for position around the lurching carousels. In Zurich, however, baggage claim was silent, populated by quiet citizens standing patiently and evenly-spaced around the conveyor belts.
The Swiss (with the exception of me, apparently) are an orderly people. The clocks in Swiss train stations have an extra red arm, and when this arm reaches 12, the clocks—and all other official clocks in the country—stop and synchronize. In some apartment complexes, men are not allowed to urinate standing up after 10:30 p.m., in their own bathrooms, because of the noise of the urine splashing into the bowl. The trains have designated “Quiet Cars,” on which you are not permitted to speak, or even to wear headphones, so as not to disturb other passengers.
Contrast this with the subways in New York, where even a “No Masturbation Car” would have a difficult time gaining a foothold. Like I said, an orderly people.

My mother lives in Obervil, about a six-minute train ride from Zug, which is about a twenty-minute train ride from Zurich. A car met us at the airport, and as we wound through an unsavory part of the city, I began to feel overwhelmed, and to wonder again whether this had been a good idea. Foreign countries are so foreign, you see, and I wanted to be home with my boy and my baby, not whipping along cramped and unfamiliar roads far from my beloved couch. Later that night I would try to call home, misremembering the time difference and reaching my mother-in-law instead, who is staying the week to watch Simone, and I would utterly fail to hide the fact that I was weeping with homesickness (or, more probably, exhaustion). But my mother’s apartment eventually won out over my anxiety:


Pictures, regrettably, do not do it justice. It is the most peaceful place you have never seen.

SATURDAY:

Saturday we took the train into Zurich. A full night of sleep—no baby kicking me in the ribs! No cats yowling at phantoms!—had acted upon me like a powerful drug, and I was nearly skipping along the cobbled streets, babbling a mile a minute and grinning loonily.

Our first stop was a tapas restaurant, where we snagged a table outside, perfect for people watching. We drank chilly Spanish rose and ate fresh, pale sardine filets on a cluster of diced tomatoes, a ceviche of octopus and shrimp, perfect wedges of Manchego drizzled with oil, and patatas bravas—which I believe were lovingly battered in crack cocaine before being presented alongside a sauce made from the happy tears of a Spanish unicorn.

Next, we walked through the entirely fake-looking and overly picturesque streets of Zurich’s Old Town, where I bought a fabulous pair of shoes (to be pictured later, maybe tomorrow), and gazed about wonderingly.

Then to Cafe Odeon, which was the first place EVER TO SERVE CHAMPAGNE BY THE GLASS. Before then, it was a bottle or nothing—back when people lived in caves, and such. We each had a glass of bubbly to celebrate our freedom from tyranny.

Cafe Odeon was frequented by Albert Einstein and James Joyce, and the DaDa movement was born there. Trotsky, Lenin, Mussolini, and Mata Hari were all regular patrons. I’m not sure whether you can tell from the above picture, but I am thinking about revolution, blood, espionage, and bending a people to my will.

Later I sampled perfumes, bought a snakey wooden ladybug for Simone, humored a strident young person in order to take one of her pamphlets for my vegetarian husband (Bloody animal heads, strident German about FLEISCH!), walked until my feet burned, and then I collapsed onto the train beside my mother. Zurich is beautiful. It was perfect.

TO BE CONTINUED…