trip report: Susannah's day off

There are many fabulous things about Switzerland, and the unbelievably amazing public transit system is one of them. Say, for example, that you have a day off and you want to go exploring. $75 (SFr. 75.-, to be precise) will buy you a ticket valid on all the trains in buses in the whole country for the whole day. So...off I go!

8:38 - I left the house to walk to the station. Stopped by church because I realized last night that I left my script for the kids' service, and maybe some other papers? on the lectern. I thought it would be early enough that they'd still be there...but no, everything was already set up for first communion practice today and my papers were nowhere to be seen. Swiss efficiency strikes again. Moving on...

9:05 - S5 train from Zürich Alstetten. I had to run to catch it because the temporary overpass that they built to replace the old underpass, which is under construction, is itself under construction (!) and only has stairs in the direction that puts you too far down the platform to catch the short trains.

9:10 - arrived at Zurich main train station. Ran quickly up two sets of stairs to...

9:12 - RegioExpress train to Chur

9:13 - in a moment of what-was-I-thinking, I asked the guy sitting across from me if he was someone he very much resembles, whom I have never officially met but would like to and...noooo, he's not that guy, but he is interested in chatting and telling me about his business selling supplements...

9:41- supplements guy had to get off the train to go attend an all-day training at supplements headquarters, whew. I opened my theology book, which I brought with because I'm way behind in my reading. Less than a page later, I realized that the scenery outside was more compelling than the history of the Church from the perspective of liberation theology, and anyway wasn't this supposed to be my day off? Book henceforth known as dead-weight-in-backpack.

10:43 - Arrived in Chur. I had never been to Chur, and for some reason I had imagined it to be kind of dirty and Italian, with a scary baroque cathedral. Clearly I have not been paying attention for the past eight years because Chur is in Graubünden, NOT Italy or the even the Italian part of Switzerland and NOT central Switzerland (home of seemingly countless hideous church interiors). Chur, it turns out, has a graceful pedestrian-zoned city center with beautiful classic buildings, lots of traditional art, and a modest cathedral, old but with tasteful modern touches like this beautiful black organ.

A boulevard in Chur. I'm hopelessly ill-informed when it comes to architecture, but I feel like this could be in Paris.

Ditto this garden.

Here's the cathedral in Chur, as seen from the seminary up the hill. It's beautiful.

11:59 - realized that I was hungry for more than the snacks Dan packed me, so I bought a bratwurst with bread, hold the bread. But I only got a chance to eat half of it, because it was time to get on the...

12:08 - PostAuto 171 to Zillis. PostAuto are the iconic yellow buses in Switzerland that deliver passengers to all the mountainy places that trains and city transportation networks don't reach. Apparently, there are a lot of these in Graubünden, because the bus station in Chur is huge.

Part of the award-winning (!) PostAuto station in Chur.

12:45 - arrived in Zillis, my intended destination for the day. In Zillis there's a church with 12th century wooden ceiling panels depicting the life of Jesus, the life of St. Martin, and terrifying sea creatures. (!) I'd heard about this from our priest, who is a big fan of church tourism in general and Romanesque architecture in particular, and I thought it sounded interesting. And you know what? It was really, really cool. It's impressive in pictures, but somehow different and better in person. One isn't supposed to take pictures, but you can find some on the website above or a few more on Wikipedia here. I spent two hours looking at the exhibit about the panels, visiting the church, eating the rest of my bratwurst and most of my snacks, and walking a little way down the trail I would have taken back towards Chur, had the weather forecast not predicted heavy rain.

St. Martin's church in Zillis

On the back of the church there's a huge painting of St. Christopher, to protect travelers along what used to be a trade route between Italy and Germany.

In the tourist information center there's an exhibit about how the paintings were made. The technique is suspiciously similar to icon painting, with perhaps some more freedom for the artist, because as far as anyone knows the ceiling panels weren't directly copied from anything.

What I learned today in Zillis: at this time and in this region (far from any ocean), it was believed that each land-creature had an equivalent sea-creature. Here on my ticket: the sea-elephant!

14:45 - left Zillis on the next Postauto 171 coming from Chur. This bus goes through the San Bernadino tunnel, the grandfather of the current Gotthard, and the scenery would have been breathtaking, had it not been pouring rain. As it was, I alternated between trying to look out the window...

San Bernadino. I didn't see much.

...and being impressed that the on-board information screen showed us news headlines and ads in three languages: German, Romansch, and Italian. In a cycle? Depending on where we were? That I couldn't work out.

16:20 - By the time we arrived in Bellinzona, the screen was definitely speaking Italian and rain had stopped. I'd never been to Bellinzona either, so I spent an hour wandering around a little. It's Italian-ish in the way I had expected Chur to be, complete with loitering Mediterranean-complexioned youth. Also it's looks like something out of a fantasy novel, with big thick city walls and fortifications and castles.

In Bellinzona: castle walls, a big plaza, and an entry to the parking garage.

View from one castle over the city (on the left is the church Collegiata dei Santi Pietro e Stefano) and towards another castle.

Behind this door lurks...probably a storage room for the tourist information office or something, but it looks properly fortified no?

17:13 - got on the EuroCity train back towards home, through the Gotthard tunnel. This time I did not talk to the guy across from me, who was older and tall and serious-looking but listening to pop music at such high volume that the beat through his headphones was annoying and I gave up on a second attempt to read my book and put my own headphones in to listen to a podcast.

A quick view of the Urnersee from the train.

18:27 - arrived in Zug, where I decided to change trains - this route was ten minutes slower, but it took me directly to Altstetten instead of through the Zurich main station.

18:35 - left Zug. Does anyone know a source for a good discussion about the climate friendliness of public transit? There's lots out there to the effect of "a bus can hold so many more people than a car!"...but for public transit to work it has to run regularly, and run even when very few people are taking it, so surely this cancels out some of this theoretical benefit? My personal train car back to Altstetten did not feel very climate friendly, is what I'm saying.

19:15 - arrived in Altstetten, bus towards home

19:30 - home! and immediately attacked by my daughter, who in my absence had turned into some kind of a crazy mute animal creature. An hour later, she was still acting bizarre and not speaking in complete sentences, so I decide to look up the time of the month, and sure enough, my period is due in four days. From which I conclude that PMS can start before your period starts (can anyone confirm this?), and that puberty is going to be kind of rocky in our house.

There you go - trains, buses, churches, cities, castles, bratwurst, and a hormone-addled pre-teen. All in one day! Happy Mother's day to me! 💕