First stop on the crazy train of this day: I invited Sara (Javasadeh, not Swedish Sara) and some other RandAlg buddies over for a last brunch. We made eggs and some really delicious oven potatoes and bacon and chatted.
Second stop: I had a “last” coffee with Muriel. Still hope I’ll see her again :D We went, for nostalgia’s sake, to the very first coffeeshop we’d hit as language-partners. It was a beautiful French-themed place. We had a couple coffees and talked for a long while, about goofy things like mahogany furniture and big windows, about Bonnie and her attachment to me :D, about books we’ve read or we’d like to read. Then I walked her back to the station. We had a nice long hug, then Muriel stepped onto the train. Then ensued a hilarious two minutes when the train had yet to depart. We kept opening the train doors to throw in another couple of words. I explained in this time a time-honored homeschool tradition. Then, as the doors closed with finality, I carried it out by sprinting after the train waving the whole length of the platform :D What more majestic a farewell, than that forced by the iron schedule of a train, under the vaulted ceiling of a railway tunnel, completed with the burst of emotion of a running wave-off? I could not have asked for more ;)
The last stop on the line today: the Basel Fasnacht. I hopped the train to Basel to meet Jenny. Met her at the station and we stepped out into a wild world, right out of the opening scenes of Spirited Away. The ground was in places a quarter inch deep in confetti. As we wound towards the city center, Jenny filled me in on the earlier festivities–the random poems written in indecipherable Swiss German, the confetti dumped from nets onto people’s heads, the omnipresent yellow flowers nobody had deigned to give her… We encountered “cliques”, or roving bands of musicians. Each clique had its own costume and mask that every rank and file member wore, its own music, and most importantly, its own brightly lit lantern telling a story all the clique’s own. It could be political satire, it could be wild artwork, it could be historical, it could be (and several times was!) Donald Duck and other American cartoon characters. Most of the cliques were 50 or more years old and proudly advertised this. They swept back and forth through the city hypnotically, marching in step.
Jenny and I walked as erratically as the cliques back and forth. We traced a bizarre random walk through the confetti filled streets, following whatever clique played the most entertaining music. We followed one that was pounding out rock tunes on their big drums, dancing behind it like Grateful Dead followers. We got trapped in a narrow alley by hordes of the “Swiss Hackers” clique. I don’t have the energy to describe all this correctly. The lanterns were awesome, lavish pieces of art. The masks were entrancing. Hundreds of marching musicians–sometimes two would be marching against each other and we’d be stuck in the middle and the music would conflict and it would be absolutely wild. There were lots of revelers, often in costume, but none quite as awesome as the clique members themselves.
It was getting late, so we decided to head back. We grabbed ourselves cans of cider and caught the train back to Zurich (After 7 free card for the win!) We had some really great conversation on the way back, mostly about Jenny’s mad experiences–she’d been born in Hong Kong, her family had moved back to England, she went to boarding school, and then off to university in Darum, in each case displaying wild Harry-Potter-like boldness and having crazy, Harry-Potter level experiences. Breaking the rules to stay up late and play the piano and always being the last one found on the nightly boarding school check. Convincing her biology teachers to let her conduct her own experiments and sitting in the back of lectures reading (she envied my homeschooling background!) Living with only girls from teenagehood up at boarding school, to living in a college house with crazy guys walking around naked, having wild parties, and exercising little restraint. Some absolutely insane stuff. We got out at the HB and I hung out with Jenny until she caught her tram, then walked up to Culmann, where I made myself pasta and sat downstairs reading Asimov. One of the very new exchangees was struggling with a difficult kitchen cleaning–she was from China and looked very nervous. She asked me a couple of questions, and I helped a bit with the cleaning. Then she offered to help me cleaning up my own dishes, and then peppered me with questions about the exchange :)
Finally, I got a message from Yeomin. She wasn’t going to be around tomorrow, and wanted to give me a parting present :) I was really surprised! I went up to her room. She said I’d really helped her feel welcome and comfortable with her English :D She gave me two little silk bags, some traditional Korean wheat powder to mix with milk for a breakfast, and a note written in English and Korean. She asked me not to read it just then, so I gave Yeomin a big hug and headed back down to Alexis’s room. I opened the note. She wrote so kindly, I was really touched :D She admonished me to keep on smiling, and I thought I’d oblige. Hit the hay with a big grin on Alexis’s slightly less uncomfortable floor :)