Most people on the train sleep, headphones in ears, sweatshirts making pillows behind heads. I munch on trail mix purchased from a train station store with our remaining franks--the store was bright and hot and people were in a hurry, so I grabbed buttery cookies, a tube of chips, sugar-dusted candy, a bunch of bananas.
Yesterday we took advantage of the free washers and dryers at Cooper's place, a huge industrial-style building, concrete ceilings and floors, a place which might have seemed cold and aloof were it not for the warmth and generosity of its inhabitants, a handful of students waiting out the break, studying, cooking, visiting friends and hosting them. A Taiwanese guy studying bio-medical engineering whose real passion, it becomes evident, is food: a roast duck dinner cooked for his friends, a cinnamon-tinged pudding slipping sweetly down your throat ("Finish it up, finish it up!"), chocolates from Geneva placed on the table for us to sample. I basked in the warmth of this place after a day spent traipsing through frozen Zurich, toes going numb despite my triple-layered feet, lips almost too cold to smile. Led by a multi-lingual Moldovan and her brother--friends of Cooper--we'd hopped aboard a train bound for the Rheinfall, crunched and slid our way down frozen snow-covered paths to survey vast water in turmoil from the fall ("It's the BIGGEST WATERFALL IN EUROPE! ....It's not that big").
Back in Zurich, visited the city's "old town," saw Cooper's school, an ancient-looking building with automatic doors, climbed to the Lindhof Platz, which overlooks the city, snapped pictures, shivered, hurried back.
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