A couple months ago, my friend Cecilia visited me on her way to starting a months-long European adventure. Cecilia's one of my oldest Pomona friends -- we met on the first day of freshman year! -- and she was also my first independent travel buddy. For fall break our freshman year, we headed to Mexico, taking a Greyhound bus to San Diego, walking across the Mexican border, and standing in front of a Tijuana McDonald's, where a grizzled man told us in English, "If you're lookin' to have fun in Tijuana, this is not the place." (We were actually waiting for Cecilia's cousin Alejandro and then continuing on to Ensenada, but never mind.) Cecilia's relatives and family friends live in a pretty astonishing number of places, from California and Mexico to Italy and Spain and also, as it turns out, Zurich, Switzerland, where Cecilia's dad's cousin and her family kindly hosted us for the weekend and showed us around their beautiful city.
And oh lordy, is Zurich ever beautiful. Frankfurt's got a river; Zurich has a river and a lake, both of which you can swim in. (This is something I care about deeply, in case you hadn't noticed me harping on it all summer.) Not only can you swim in the lake -- we did, on Sunday! It was a little chilly, but a little hypothermia never hurt anybody. This nasty cough I've had all week is all Germany's fault. Swimming in a Swiss lake can only bring health!
Cecilia's relatives spent a whole day leading us all around the impossibly cute old city center, treating us to pizza, taking us on a boat ride* to the Chinese garden, and showing us the best museums in Zurich as part of Zurich's Night of the Museums, during which we went to two museums, ate curry, and watched a modern dance striptease so unfortunate that people left the room midway through. Art!
I think I can pretty well guarantee that I will never be able to repay Cecilia's relatives' hospitality, so I'll have to pay it forward instead -- once I live in a lovely house in a Swiss village just over the mountain from a beautiful city on a lake, that is.
*The boats that run on the river Limmat and on the lake are part of Zurich's public transportation network, and are included in the price of a day transportation ticket -- as are Zurich's two funiculars. How cool is that?!
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