December 1, 2015

The morning came…unfortunately.    It was sad to wake up knowing this was our last morning here – for a while, right?  I have to keep telling myself that because I am so very afraid I’ll lose that passion, but the truth is, if I don’t move here, I will be filled with that horrid regret of never having tried, and I can’t spend the rest of my life like that.  A neat thing – such a neat thing, was that this morning, somehow after years (no exaggeration)  of looking, I found Jana – my old high school swimming buddy – on Facebook.  This is the neatest thing about Facebook, the connection to people who would have otherwise been lost.  She is about to get married, too, so I most likely would never have found here.  I love the way Universe works.

We had a little bit of time and I didn’t want to sit of hours at the airport, so the kids and I headed off to Wasserkirche, which was built about a thousand years ago.  Underneath, in the crypt, one can see the layers of original building.  It is things like this that make me appreciate Europe so very much.  I am walking on areas where hundreds and hundreds of years have passed; time has crept slowly through these grounds, which makes them so sacred to me.  I am not naive – I understand the death and destruction that comes with such a holy space.  We went to Gross Munster, which is where Charlemagne, not Richard the Lion-Hearted (not sure how I confused the two) is said to have built a holy place in the late 7^th century in honor of Felix and Regula, the “founders” of Zürich.  I love history.  We climbed to the top of the tower, which made me realize a couple of things: A) My fear of heights is getting to be ridiculous.  And B) The Boy seemed to be not doing so well.  It wasn’t long after that I noticed B) was dead-on.  This kid was suddenly not doing well at all – to the point where I was really worried as Kaiser is his insurance.  He was sick, then laying down for a bit as I went downstairs in the hotel to see about what I needed to do. I calmly panicked, my mind going a million directions at once.  Mags took the helm and watched him.  

He threw up a couple more times in the next 45 minutes, and then – as if nothing, he was ok.  Not exactly bouncing up and down, but he rarely does that, anyway.  We checked out and headed to the airport…and got there as the gates were already closed.  Again.  Second time.  My heart sunk.  This feeling is becoming all-too familiar to me and I simply couldn’t understand it.  I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve been late  and I have never missed a flight.  This is two trans-Atlantic flights.  We were directed to the ticket agent in a different terminal where  Maggie collapsed onto a chair, and   Soon, I headed back to two kids playing Farkle and I sat beside them.  I told them about the transit hotel I had been told about and we headed off, Maggie in the lead.


Ethan and I joined her, then I headed off to the ticket agent to see what I could do.

After passing through another passport checkpoint (which we went through a few times), we came upon the hotel, which was a relief. Right there – looking at the tarmac, we had a room with three beds.  A few games of Farkle again, and we left for dinner.  Swiss Chalet was the restaurant we chose – very decent prices and very good food.  

Back down to our room – Zimmer 6 – where we used our free our of Wifi, then one by one, we all went to shower in the gender-separate bathrooms.  This Swiss certainly know how to use water pressure.  It was spritzing so hard much of the water went right our onto the floor, inches away from my one-set of clothes.  As I was drying off, I bent over to wrap my hair in a towel and inadvertently started the water shooting everywhere again.  Mags heard me squeak from her shower stall and wondering if I was ok.  F course I am.  Just making life more interesting.  We watched a bit of a German “Extreme Makeovers” show before trying to sleep.   I was terrified, going over in my mind what had happened that day while combining it with a fear of heights from the Gross Munster tower.

Pictures: View from Gross Munster...my fear of heights is back full-force; Wasskirche catacomb; view from Gross Munster; exiting our transit hotel room; The Key