Nine in the morning came fast for someone who had only been asleep since 1am, and check-out at the hostel was ten, which did not leave much room for anything except moving. I showered, packed, and walked out the door with a plan: catch the bus to the train station. The bus did not wait for me. I ended up walking three blocks instead, caught the S5 into Zurich Hauptbahnhof, and went straight for the lockers, because I had already read enough about that station to know they fill up if you wait past mid-morning. Bag stowed by half past ten, day officially started.
It was Sunday, which in Zurich means most of the city simply does not open. The exception, reliably, is the Migros inside the train station, which is how I ended up eating the same breakfast two days running. After that I wandered the Old Town, quiet in the particular way a city gets when half its doors are locked, and then boarded a Lake Zurich cruise that came free with the ticket I already had. An hour on the water, nothing to decide, which after the last two days felt like its own kind of luxury. I had thought about riding up to Uetliberg after, but the math on getting there and back ate the idea before I could commit to it, so I let it go and took the tram back toward the station instead.
The wrong stop
From the Hauptbahnhof I caught a train out to a Frau Gerolds Garten I had read about, and somewhere between boarding and arriving I got pulled into a phone call that mattered more than paying attention to the stops. By the time I looked up, the train was empty, the platform outside the window looked nothing like a station, and I was sitting in the middle of a rail yard trying to work out whether I had made a mistake or whether this was somehow normal.
It was the mistake. A driver walked over from the next coach to find out why I was still there, and once she saw my face she laughed before I could even explain it properly. The doors would not open here, she said, but the train would head back the way it came in about thirty minutes, and I could get off then like nothing had happened.
A conductor laughing at me in the middle of a rail yard might be the most honest welcome a city has given me on this whole trip.
Thirty minutes of sitting in a stationary train in a Swiss rail yard is a strange kind of waiting, mostly silent, mostly funny in retrospect. When it finally rolled back toward the platform I did not so much as glance at my phone, and got off exactly where I was supposed to the first time. The beer garden itself turned out to be no trouble at all. I ordered its least popular drink, a juice, and drank it slowly, like I had earned it.
Twenty minutes to boarding
Back at the station my phone was down to nothing and I did not own a power bank. Fnac had a small outpost inside the Hauptbahnhof, more phone cases than actual electronics, and nothing in stock that could help me. So I went back to the lockers, paid to open mine, dug out my charger, and paid six francs again just to put the same bag back where it had already been sitting all day. I did not mind. By then the locker room had filled in properly, more than two hundred boxes and not one free, and I was glad I had not waited to see how that story ended for someone else.
