56. Travel: Zurich

Have you ever been somewhere that you’d heard about, and in the cobwebby corners of your brain you had secretly worried it wouldn’t live up to the hype?  You had maybe read about the place in a travel magazine, and thought it sounded too good to be true.  And then you arrive at the airport and once you clear customs you walk through the luggage area toward ground transportation to get a taxi to your hotel and that’s when you see it:  a random postcard display in the gift shop.  And you think, Well, they’re just postcards.  Postcards are airbrushed and photoshopped.  Postcards lie.

You arrive to your hotel and that’s when it hits you:  Zurich is a postcard, only better. 

Postcards do not capture the magic that is Switzerland, a postcard is like someone pointing to a ray of the sun in the sky and saying, “The galaxy is like this.” 

A postcard is like someone giving you a few rocks to hold in your hand and declaring, “Now you know what the Grand Canyon is like.” 

Your mother splurges and takes your family to Zurich one Christmas.  The movie reel of your time there is permanently embedded in your brain.

You ski. 

You sample local food.   

You sightsee.

You even send a few postcards home. 
You find a postcard years later, when you are organizing some stuff in your office.  There it is—Switzerland.  This tiny shred of paper transports you instantly back. 


MOV