Switzerland: Skip It

After about three hours in Zurich, I noticed that there was this weird tension, a knotting of the muscles between my shoulder blades. I couldn't figure out why. The next day, in Lucerne, walking around the lake, I realized why: this was a seriously uptight country. The Californian in me was restless. Everything seemed so managed, and rule-bound, and overly concerned with the appearance of perfection. There was no air, no space, no flow, as we Californians like to say. The trees along the path were planted at precisely spaced intervals, and the benches were similarly aligned. I had the feeling that if the Swiss could make their country into a precise (red) square, they would; that the irregularity and unpredictability of nature was rather bothersome to them. I came across the most pristine rectangle of lawn with rectangular beds of flowers along each side. The flower beds were roped off. At first I thought this was to keep people out of the flowerbeds, but when I looked more closely, it was only the tall flowers that were constrained, presumably so that they didn't topple over onto the lawn and create some kind of world-ending chaos. Even the flowers in Switzerland are kept within bounds.

Switzerland is famous for its beauty, and it is a beautiful country, if you like landscapes to be rather like stage sets. For me, I'll take California. There might be trash everywhere, and strip malls, but nothing I saw in Switzerland comes remotely close to the wonder that is Yosemite, the size and grandeur of Lake Tahoe. I don't want to plan my life for the next ten years, I don't want to have people lose their minds if I'm five minutes late, and I like my flowers, like my life, to spill over and out of the careful boundaries I have imagined for them.