Basel to Zurich took under an hour, barely enough to count as its own leg of the journey, and then Zurich handed me a few hours to fill before the next connection. I found a Christmas market first, a vintage Citroen van painted teal and cream and repurposed into an empanada stand, small trees for sale leaning against a fence nearby, string lights strung between buildings too tall for the lights to do much more than gesture at festivity from street level.
I walked the Limmat after that, the old town stacking up on both banks, Fraumunster's green spire and Grossmunster's dome doing the postcard thing against a sky that had stayed the same flat gray in every city for a week now, the river doing what rivers in this part of the world had been doing all trip, holding the whole skyline upside down in water too cold to actually look at for very long. A number 13 tram rattled past near Bahnhofstrasse, advertising a real estate firm that had apparently been in business since 1971, longer than most of the buildings around it looked like they had needed advertising at all. I found a fountain somewhere in the old town with a bronze dragon spitting water into a basin, a boy and a robed figure standing over it like they had been arguing about something for a hundred years and had not yet reached a conclusion, a delivery truck idling in the background as if to prove the fountain had learned to ignore its own century a long time ago.
After two weeks of hostels and strangers' cities, arriving somewhere with an actual person waiting felt like a different kind of trip entirely.
A friend lives in Bellach, just outside Solothurn, and the train there took most of what was left of the afternoon. After two weeks of hostels and strangers' cities, arriving somewhere with an actual person waiting at the other end felt like a different kind of trip entirely, the first bed on this whole journey I had not had to book myself into.
Bellach would end up being less a single stop than a base, day trips radiating out from an actual bed for the next few days, which after two weeks of moving every day or two felt like the closest thing to stillness this trip had offered so far.
