Changes

My day started early for Italians, and at a pretty standard time for everyone else. I had a 10.10am train to catch, which meant leaving the hotel by 9am, which meant finishing breakfast by 8.30am, which meant getting up by 7am. I showered and dressed, had my usual double espresso and gialletti pastry, did a final check of my little room for any stray Lego or underpants, checked out, then dragged by heavy, Italian shoe-filled bags to the train station a kilometre away.

At the train station there was a notice that tomorrow there will be a nationwide train strike… so a perfect time to leave the country for a few days. Win! Under grey and murky skies I rode out of Milan on my way to a long weekend in Amsterdam, visiting a friend up there. The train was a smart new intracontinental one, almost eerily silent and smooth as it hummed its way up to Como and across the border into Switzerland.

In many ways rural Switzerland was a lot like rural Italy, only with more vertical bits and the edges of the laneways neatly trimmed and free of rusted out farm machinery. We ducked and wove through the mountains and around lakes until we arrived in Basel, where I only had ten minutes to change trains. But bless their cold well-organised little hearts, the Swiss send pertinent station information to the train before it arrives in the station, advising which platforms likely connections will be departing from. Five minutes after my arrival, I was sitting in my seat on the new train.

From Basel we crossed over into Germany, and suddenly morbid obesity existed again, along with shapeless fleece hoodies with comic strip characters on them, quite often on the same people. Was it really just this morning I was surrounded by fine merino sweaters and people with the body shapes to wear them?

Switzerland may have been dull but at least it had mountains. Along the Rhine valley, Germany is a scenic puree, never quite urban, never quite rural. It’s just small villages or housing developments, fields in which fruit trees or cereal crops are ruthlessly organised, or sudden bursts of industrial sheds with Spachenborst Ltd or something written in large letters on the sides, interspersed with concrete yards filled with branded vans or specific-looking but mysterious vehicles.

At Mannheim I changed for my final train, which actually left from the same platform as the one I’d been on, but there’s a strange German process of having two different trains depart from the same platform at the same time, and it took me a while to parse how that worked and stand in the right spot. Then naturally my train parked itself halfway between the two spots, because… I don’t know. Maybe the train driver wasn’t German and couldn’t understand their system any better than I could.

Still, I scurried along the platform and successfully got onto my final train, six hours after I’d left Milan. Unfortunately this was a train heading to Amsterdam, and the thing that all trains heading to Amsterdam have in common is that they’re carrying the sort of tourists who want to go to Amsterdam: boisterous boys planning to get drunk and take drugs, and middle class American white girls, who are also planning to get drunk and take drugs, but with a lot more intergroup discussion at penetrating volume. Also giggling.

The poised quietude of the Milanese was a distant and fondly held memory. In honour of them, and to drown out the other passengers, I listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Via my noise-canceling headphones, which valiantly tried but only occasionally succeeded in canceling their noise.