Zurich —> D.C. —> PDX

September 8, 2015 at 9:46 pm (Uncategorized)

Shit, our vacation is over. Our final day was spent on a train from Munich to Zurich, with brief stops made throughout southwest Germany and even one in Austria. Hayley excitedly declared she’s thus been to Austria; she has checked it off her list.

 

We arrived in Zurich at about 5 p.m.; prior to arriving we’d had every intention of figuring out how to get into the old city and walk around a bit, our last hurrah. Instead, hungry, thinking primarily of home and the start of school for the girls and the return to work for us, we checked into the airport Hilton Hotel and holed up for the night.

 

But not before Dave and I ventured out one final time. With the girls verily drooling with pleasure over being horizontal on beds, eyes glued to phone screens emanating light from stupid, mindless games (Best Parents Ever!), Dave and I hit the outskirts of Zurich in search of a “take-away” restaurant creatively named Chinese & Fast. Trip Advisor gave it a great review.

 

Adjacent to the grocery store we first happened upon – so we (read: Dave) could load up on crap for the plane — we passed an Islamic center. Seeing it – which was clearly a thriving place, given the number of people outside and its full parking lot – reminded us of what we briefly witnessed in the Munich train station.

 

Sept. 7 was the day a huge influx of refugees from Syria were allowed in to Germany and Austria, via Hungary, whose government made it abundantly clear it didn’t want the poor, dispossessed, exhausted masses from a country that since 2011 has seen 4 million of its residents flee, according to a “New York Times” article published that day.

 

While waiting for our train to depart, I watched as a local reporter interviewed via an interpreter a number of Syrian-Muslim families who seemed giddy with excitement to be let in to a country that would have them, that would welcome them. I understand that Germany alone is welcoming 800,000 refugees this year, hoping to spur the rest of the European Union to follow suit. Likely, the majority of the 28-member-nation EU will not take Germany’s lead.

 

We were truly excited to bear witness to a phenomena in modern European history that we otherwise would only have read about back home, in some article printed adjacent to one about, for example, the U.S. Open, or forest fires. I’m not discounting the import of one of tennis’ greatest tournaments or the seemingly endless fires in the tinder-dry West. But being a witness to history was very powerful.

 

Alyssa expressed her thrill at Germany’s decision, and Hayley asked a number of questions about the ongoing ISIS-refugee-closed-borders issues. It seemed very fitting they’d learn such a current event outside the classroom only two days before the classroom is where they’ll spend the majority of the next nine months.

While I’m so incredibly sad to leave Europe and so moved to have been able to spend the last two weeks here, something I won’t miss (at least from our experiences) is the European construct of customer service. While in the grocery store – where the aisles were labeled in German, French, and the local language Romanische, which sounds like a very ugly amalgam of French and German – we received our telling sendoff.

 

Waiting in line to pay for our goods (after very careful label reading, relying heavily on my French and every last German vocabulary word [read: 10] I picked up on this trip), the checkout woman literally chewed out the customer ahead of us. She then screamed across the entire store for her checkout colleague to come join her, to figure out what seemed to be some dispute over a cleaning supply’s packaging and pricing.

 

The two women bickered gutterally for at least a minute, all the while the clearly local customer just stood there with her wallet open, waiting for the final pricing information. Dave and I could not contain our surprise at the very rude exchange we’d just witnessed.

 

But we recovered quickly as the first checkout lady then turned the focus of her wrath on us. Based on her new string of guttural speech, it finally dawned on Dave and me that the produce I’d selected (four random carrots, three bananas, and one nectarine) were to have been individually weighed and affixed with a sticker noting their weight and, thus, price. The lady clearly had pushed her tourist-(ra)dar power button and so knew we hadn’t a clue what we were supposed to do.

 

In her non-subtle way, she psyche-whispered a phrase that clearly sounded like someone clearing their throat while intoning “OH MY GOD!”, and she left her post to storm off and weigh and label every one of our burdensome fresh items. After she’d handled all of them, returned to her clearly horrid post, and rolled each one individually down her short conveyor belt, you can bet that, once back in our room, I washed each vegetable and fruit (save for the bananas) very thoroughly.

 

And Chinese & Fast was pretty decent. But were I to write a review, I’d note the chef there had a heavy hand with the salt.