Current status: sipping red from the bottle while slavedriving over laundry, all avec my belle fleur, Kathleen Mackenzie Dange. We are missing our lovely sister Meg...she is nesting in Zurich while Kit and I are dragging our haggard selves around a freezing Geneva. Tomorrow, a joyous reunion of three in the Geneva train station, equally frosty in temperature. This time tomorrow we will be together foreverrrr and Barcelona-bound. The sole intention for Spain is to treat our broken bodies with as much soothing and luxurious rest as humanly possible. Massages have been mentally scheduled for this city since day one of our travel extravaganza. I am holding my breath. My shoulders are frailer, my feet more repulsive and my legs more bruised and battered than in all of self-history...backpack scars, etc. Nevertheless, there is a smile curving over my lips. Movement and newness is good, good, intoxicatingly good. Steaming hot showers are even better...in the dead of last night, Katie and I crawled into our Genevian (Genevan? Geneveuse?!) hostel like smashed insects, barely discernable as ourselves. We both fled for the showers like wild-eyed women, dirt/sweat/tear-streaked after a bleary fourteen, fifteen hours a la train. Haggard Harriet and Haggard Hannah we were...but that scorching water streaming over my body revived me to the point of a blossoming contentedness...praise the Lord and the stars and the galaxies and all that is sacred. Delving into yesterday's debaucherous events un petit peu...it is no farfetched fairy tale that the French love their strikes. How beautifully convenient that they should decide to declare one just as us sparrows were poised to take wing from Paris. Chaotic. Kit and I cursed fully and scandalously for 2-3 minutes' time, and then drew the deepest breaths and forged forwards like wide-eyed soldiers, not really knowing what the hell we were doing. The result? Dawn to pitch-dark midnight running from train to train, city to city, country to country, cab to cab, language to language. In a matter of a single day, we streamed, whirlwind-style, Paris to Salzburg to Bern to Basel to the Geneva we had been weeping for all the while. All in the time frame of this, I ate a drop-dead disgusting sandwich, finished my (incredible) book, ran my iPod dry and engaged in copious amounts of thought. We laid eyes on our first snowfall while leaping onto a train in Basel...and my heart fluttered, bird-style, in sudden and paralyzing longing for home.
Anyways and anyhow, we made it here and have been thoroughlly laying lower than low today. The Swiss alps are stunning. Everything is sickeningly expensive. Oh and we saw swans, closer than ever before, on the edges a shatteringly windy lake. Buying Parisian Vogue is a complete rip. And I had the loveliest conversation with my maman this afternoon. That is it and that is all.
Embrace one another for me, all of you.
Rebecca L.B.
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