A Semester Abroad (14 page)

When we were done with the pastries, the tuxedoed waiters swooped around us, taking the plate, pouring the rest of the tea.

Now we felt a part of this cosmopolitan world. I pretended that tonight we would be dining in the finest restaurant and be able to spend as much as we wanted without regard for the budgets all our parents had imposed on us. I wished that it wasn’t a hard, small bed I would sleep in but one made of feathers that I could fall into after a good hot shower.

I knew that all of those things were impossible, would be impossible for any of the traveling I could do as a student. And while I didn’t have any five-star luxuries just then, at least I ate the right pastries.

When we called for
il conto
, we were charged for each individual pastry.

The next morning catching the train was not as easy as Thomas Cook or Olivia led me to believe. Still not sure of the layout of the city, we ate dinner close to the hotel, barely able to keep our eyes open. We were in bed by ten with our guidebooks and journals, promising to have more energy after a good night’s sleep. I thought about rallying us out to some place in the nightclub section of Let’s Go, but I realized that I wouldn’t be doing it because I wanted to. I would be doing it because I wanted the story of a night in Milan.

But if we had gone out, perhaps we would be able to figure out where we were on the Let’s Go map instead of making wrong turns back to the station in the morning. How had we navigated it so easily the day before with eyes crusty from train-sleep? We saw a bus coming and got on that, manipulating our giant precious backpacks through the sleepy commuters. We had to transfer. All of this was more confusing because each of us was translating the Italian directions we got differently. All our limited knowledge put together only frustrated us in figuring out what we were supposed to do. And because none of us knew each other well enough to admit that, we were annoyed with the other two.

With three minutes to spare, we got to the
ferovia
. We checked the
binario
on the big board, stamped our tickets and ran for it. The conductor saw us and waved his hand for us to hurry. The train pulled away five seconds after we were on it.

But we still weren’t done. We hustled through the aisles and cars of the train with our big backpacks. We walked through first class. We walked past Italian
militario
who looked us over and whistled, making comments to each other in their dialects. There were no compartments on this train, but luckily we found one of the tables with four seats surrounding it.

I peeled off the sticky layers I was wearing and heaved my backpack on the rack next to the other two. The three of us sighed at the same time. And then we cracked up and slapped each other five. We made it!

“That was a bitter minute,” Suzie said.

“I can’t believe we made it,” I said.

“I’m still in shock.”

After our tickets were checked, Suzie brought us cappuccino from the dining car. She handed out packs of packaged breakfast sweets. “I’m somehow doubting these will be as good as yesterday.”

After our quick snack, we played cards and then we started letter writing and journal entries. Eventually we stopped to stare out the window at the beginnings of Switzerland. I couldn’t believe we made it, not only to the train but to the country.

In Lugano, they have a funicular. None of us knew what that was, but it was our first stop after changing money and checking our backpacks for the day in the station. We only planned for a day in Lugano and then to Luzerne in the late afternoon. Olivia got it all figured out, and Suzie and I gave the okay.

A funicular is almost like a train car that travels on a cable up a hill. And for Olivia, who was afraid of heights, it was a little scary when we took it up to the Piazza Cioccaro. We sat in the first car. Olivia squeezed Suzie’s hand and my shoulder, while I took goofy pictures with the cheap camera my parents gave me for Christmas.

From the piazza we had to keep traveling up, exploring the city. It was a long, brisk, ascending walk to a restaurant that had a beautiful view of the mountain range. We drank hot cocoa. Olivia felt calmer. Chocolate made her phobias disappear.

We could kind of communicate with people because they spoke Italian. We might have been speaking better there than we did in Italy.

The mountain air was fresh. And in spite of the cold, we hung out at the table, high up but below the mountains, discussing what we expected from Switzerland. The money was strange. The francs came in paper and coin. Suzie held up one of the bigger coins.

“This is bizarre. It’s worth like $20. I feel like I’m going to lose it.”

“Don’t lose it,” said Olivia. “Should we walk down to the
ferrovia
? We’ve got like an hour

“And miss a ride on the funicular?” Suzie asked.

“It costs, though, and we might get a better view of the city,” I said. I would have taken it again but suspected that Olivia didn’t want to and wasn’t going to admit it.

“That’s true,” Suzie agreed, quickly. She looked at the view and sighed. She was thinking of Kurt.

I wondered if Jonas would love it here. I closed my eyes for a second. Only a second.

“You’re really into Kurt, huh?” I asked Suzie to distract myself.

“Yeah, it’s so weird. I’m not usually like this. It’s just like have you ever had someone who just kind of gets you? No matter what you look like or what you do.” I thought without meaning to of my once-confident walk, my naked lips. Suzie looked at me and it made me scared to answer. But she continued. “He’s so cool.”

When we walked down toward the station, Olivia had the map accessible. We didn’t really talk on the way down. Each of us was in our own thoughts. The air was pure and the cold didn’t bother me. It was easy to get caught up in your head. I thought of Jonas, as usual. I wondered when I would become exhausted by the memory of him. Maybe that’s how you got over someone, just plain fatigue.

When we passed the Piazza Ciocarro again, there was a large crowd. We stopped to peer in. There were signs up that said “Strudel 100 m.”

“What the hell is this?” Suzie asked.

“It looks like a big strudel,” I said pointing to the long strudel on a table that curved around. It was the biggest pastry I had ever seen.

“Delicious,” Olivia said. I listened to the languages being spoken around me. At first I heard German, but then we heard someone explaining in Italian. It was a record-breaking strudel or at least that’s how we translated it. Who knew there was such a thing? But from then on it would always be, in our heads, the record-breaking strudel.

“This is super surreal,” Suzie said.

“No one is eating any,” I noticed. There were people standing behind the strudel table. Each had a knife and a cash box in front of them. “Look, the record-breaking strudel is 5 francs a piece.”

“I will never see another strudel without knowing that I have seen greatness,” Olivia said.

“But can we eat greatness?” Suzie asked. She was a sucker for sweets.

Olivia asked one of the men if she might buy a piece of the record-breaking strudel. He told her that it would be cut at three. Then she looked at her watch. “It’s quarter of 3. Train leaves at 3:35. What should we do?”

“We want to get to Lucerne tonight and this train is the only train to get us there in time to have one fun night out. Yet how can we pass up the record-breaking strudel?” I didn’t want this decision to rest on me. We were talking about a record-breaker after all.

“I guess we might make it if we get the first pieces and run down to the station,” Suzie said. One look in her eye and I knew she needed the strudel.

“It is down hill, but I don’t know,” I said. “We could eat it on the way.”

“We have to,” Suzie said. “Worst comes to worse, we take the funicular back down.”

“But who knows how often it comes.” Olivia said.

As we tried to figure it out, the crowd broke into song. They sang an Italian song that none of us understood, but we laughed. Any strudel of this magnitude deserved a song.

“I vote for staying,” Suzie said.

“Me too,” I said, nodding, looking over at Olivia.

“How can we pass this up?” Olivia said being jostled a little by one of the singers.

And after the song was over, they cut into the strudel and the crowd went nuts, cheering and hooting. I couldn’t tell who was happier, Suzie, whose strudel dream was realized, or Olivia, who held up her watch and shouted over the crowd at us, gleefully, “They did it early. It’s seven of three.”

We collected our 15 Swiss francs, we grabbed our record-breaking strudels and then we walked swiftly down the hill. We all walked the same way–one arm swinging for more power and the other held up, holding our strudel, protecting it with our thumbs on top to prevent the precious victorious record-breaking strudel from being lost forever.

The train station was closer than we thought. We grabbed our bags and waited at the
binario
for the train to come. We still had four minutes to spare. The operation was tight.

When the train came, we hurried onto it, found a car and stacked up the bags on the rack above us. It was as if we were competing in some kind of event of our own. Finally, we flopped onto our seats and smiled at each other’s efficiency. Then we began to eat our reward.

“I think
we
broke the record,” Olivia said.

“I’m so glad that they cut it early,” Suzie said.

“To think we might have never known record-breaking strudel joy,” I said, chewing happily, licking my sticky fingers. In a way, it wouldn’t have mattered if we didn’t make the train. I believe we would have gone with it, rolled into whatever we had to do. But we did make it. And got the strudel too.

I looked out the window. I watched for hours the landscape of Switzerland. It was a beautiful countryside, and it changed from dark lush green to a pure white as we went, from being surrounded by forest to snowy peaks. The train trip lasted about three hours, but none of us were anxious enough to play cards. We were all content to stare out the window and doze a bit.

I was beginning to believe that we were having exceptionally good traveler’s luck, that there was some force looking out for us. Some fate was willing us to be okay. I won’t jinx it, I thought. I will just enjoy it.

When we arrived in Lucerne, Olivia stopped in the travel agency and grabbed a map. She asked Suzie and me if we wanted to be in charge of it, but we knew it was just a formality and declined. She was meant to be the navigator; it was her gig. She already chose the accommodations from the list in Let’s Go.

The woman in the travel agency spoke English and gave us directions to the hotel. We walked over a bridge to get there. There were paintings of goats on the bridge. I wondered if this was like the three billy goats fairy tale and if a troll was waiting on the other side. I didn’t feel scared of anything, the way I did when I got to Siena. I felt ready for a troll, for whatever. But, instead of a troll, it was an amazing party.

We maneuvered our big backpacks through a crowd of dancing drunken people speaking German. The people were red-faced and energized. We weaved through the joyous gyrating bodies.

“Must be Carnevale. They must have that here, too,” Olivia said. There was a smell of roasting chicken. I noticed a sign advertising cheap beer. We didn’t need to know German to understand that. We fell in behind Olivia, who expertly navigated the people onto a side street. She held the open map out in front of her. Suzie and I relied on this, that she could find the way.

The one-star hotel had breakfast and was almost as cheap as hostels and more private. This room had two sets of bunk beds with white sheets folded over pitted woolen blankets. We threw our stuff down on the beds, washed our faces in the sink in the room and went back out to the square. There was no way we were missing out on the fun tonight.

On the street, everyone around us was drunk and yelling in German. A band was playing loud music with lots of horns. We studied our coins before handing some over for mugs of cheap dark beer. We sat at one of the tables surrounded by other travelers. One husky bearded man grabbed Olivia and twirled her around the square.

“Should we be worried?” Suzie asked.

“She’s laughing,” I said, shrugging.

“I think she’s terrified.”

“Oh, it’s good for her,” I said. When I was done with my beer, I got three more and a basket of roasted pieces of chicken. Olivia, back at the table and breathless, finished her beer and took great gulps of the new one I offered her.

“What I really need is water,” she said.

“Bottled water is almost three times as much as beer,” I said, biting into the delicious chicken. “Try this. It’s yummy. So who was your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. He couldn’t speak English or Italian. Just French and German. Just.” She laughed at herself. “Anyway, I couldn’t tell if he was giving me his name or dancing tips. I just kept repeating what I thought he was saying.”

At that moment three of the dancers with linked arms and flailing legs crashed into our table knocking over the remains of the plastic cups of beer. The dancers were laughing and slightly stumbling but apparently apologizing.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Suzie said and then tried again. “
Niente, e niente
.” But neither language was understood. The dancers stumbled back over with more cups of beer. The beers were filled to the top and spilled on my hand as I took them.