The Day We Sat On A Train

I am currently living in the smallest country in the world (no correspondence will be entered into) and yet on Sunday I somehow managed to spend a good 11 hours in a train without once needing my passport. How is it so?

It all started on Friday night when Reto said to me "let's go to St Moritz" and I said "okay!". One of my hobbies, as a dedicated non-skiier, is going to fancy-pants ski resorts all over the world (and also some in Tasmania which are less fancy-pants and more ghost-towny) and then telling all my skiing friends how boring it was. And so, bright and early on Sunday morning (actually, 7am and it was dark and cold) we caught the train with the intention of heading straight for St Moritz to watch horses run around on a frozen lake. Apparently it's that time of year.

The train trip started out really nicely. In general, I have no problem with sitting in cars or planes or trains or whatever for hours and hours on end, and even less of a problem with it when there is someone lovely to talk to and interesting things out the window.

About two hours into the trip Reto and I decided we would alter our plans slightly and go to Poschiavo (a small town really close to the Italian border) before heading to St Moritz. We were doing this mainly to cross the Bernina pass, what with it being apparently idyllic and a good opportunity. And so we did, and it was idyllic, but it also meant that it was something like 5.5 hours from the time we left Aarau to the time we got out of the train in Poschiavo.

Happily, this was 5.5 hours well spent. Poschiavo is a lovely little town, full of interesting buildings and doorways and laneways and friendly dogs and so on, and the train trip to get there really was stunning, but really, that is all just background compared to the lunch we had. That meal will remain happily in my memory for quite some time. The meals we shared were not fancy (a mushroom risotto and this buckwheat pasta called pizzoccheri), and perhaps it was the extended train trip and lack of other food I had eaten during the day, but they were more fantastic than I can possibly express. A friend of mine has been known to become orgasmic at the mere mention of a certain Indian restaurant in Sydney, and frankly, I can understand what she means.

And so, after a cigarette and a short nap we were back on the train and off to St Moritz. The train trip being tortuous owing to all those pesky mountains that tend to get in the way in Switzerland, it took 1.5 hours and we didn't arrive there until quite late. So late, in fact, that we only had time to see the last 100m or so of the last race of the day being run. Not that I have much interest in seeing horses running around in circles anyway, but it was entertaining if only for the fact that the carriage things (for this was a trotting race) were on skis:

Happily, there was much to be looked at in St Moritz that was not horse-related. Never in all my life have I seen so many fur coats in one place (apart from perhaps at a zoo, but that's a bit different). As you might imagine, my downmarket fake-fur trimmed coat did not really cut the mustard:

The weather, as you can see, was fantastic, and had I been a skiier it would have been a great day for it (from what we could see there were only about 5 people on the slopes, the entire population of the town being down where we were instead). I'm not a skiier though, and hopefully never will be again (although we did spot some people going kite-surfing with snowboards on another frozen lake somewhere in the mountains, which looked kind of excellent) and so I concerned myself instead with the other things that were going on. Barely did we have time to admire the slaughter that must have gone into making the coats we saw, drink a hot chocolate, marvel at the wattle that the outdoor champagne bar was using as table dressing, laugh at people wearing high heels in the snow and complain about how cold it was once the sun went down before it was time to bundle ourselves back on the train (along with all the other downmarket visitors. We watched the better class of people driving off in their unfeasibly large and cosy looking Mercedes and so on while we packed ourselves in sardine-like) for the four hour trip home.

The last 3 hours of the trip back were where it really started to go downhill (both literally and figuratively, hahah). It was dark, so there was no admiring of the view to be done. I had finished the book I had brought with me. The train was kind of packed and so I had all my junk piled up on top of me. I was ridiculously thirsty. Reto had no interesting conversation to make (nor did I, for that matter. We were both fed up with everything). The people sitting next to us seemed to be really bad at crosswords, but owing to linguistic barriers I didn't think it was appropriate to try to help them. We didn't get home until 9pm, and yes, those of you eagle-eyed enough to notice, this does in fact mean that we spent a total of about 3 hours not in the train.

Eleven hours. Sigh. I never want to see the inside of a train again.