The first interesting thing I noticed was that there was a cable car that went up the slope of the mountain from downtown to the train station. This made sense as it must be murder to climb these slopes daily. My hostel was located behind the train station, up the slope a little way. The hostel was adequately sized, however it was currently being used by a high school class from another part of Switzerland. This fact answered my question of why so many loud and obnoxious teenagers were all over the place. Fortunately, none of them were staying in my mixed room.
I wandered into town to seek out provisions. At the time of my visit, the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Swiss Franc was almost dead even, so I had figured everything would be cheaper than the Eurozone and on par with the US. Boy was I mistaken. For instance, a Value Meal at McDonalds cost 15 Swiss Franc. And this meal is no different than the ones you would get in the US. The fries are not made fresh just for you, the drink is smaller because of the metric system, and the burger is just as smooshed and pathetic. The supermarket was no better, and I ended up paying about the same as I was in Eurozone supermarkets, except I was getting considerably less product. For the duration of my stay in Switzerland, I ate lean.
The town itself was very pleasant. There was a shopping district I wandered through that had designer everything, and the prices were atrocious and made me ill. I found a very nice park lakeside where I went to eat my lunch, picnic-style. In the park there was even a spot for people to play chess with pieces two or three feet tall. I laid back and stared into a baby blue sky, gazing at clouds as they streaked by. It was a lot cooler here than it was in Milan, and this was incredibly relieving to me. There came a light drizzle so I headed back to the hostel.
The next day I was sitting at a park table outside of my room on the ground floor, surfing the web and listening to heavy metal. A group of teenagers walked by, and one of them stopped to talk to me. He asked me “Do you like System of a Down?” I smiled a big grin and invited the lad to have a seat. Allow me to introduce you to Lucas:
Lucas plugged his mobile media player into my laptop and we started to jam. I even copied over a few albums that I did not have. We talked more about heavy metal and hard rock and he explained how he was on a field trip with his class and that they were all 16 or 17. I asked him if he had any cute girls in his class, to which he replied a few, but that they were all stuck-up bitches; I was not surprised that this maxim was not just an American phenomenon. I inquired as to why things in Switzerland were so damn expensive, and he did not understand that they were so. I then asked him about wages, and what someone on minimum wage makes in a year. I was astounded when he told me 70,000 Swiss Franc. 70k is what someone on minimum wage in Switzerland makes. If you lived in Switzerland I don’t see how anyone could live off of it, but if you happened to commute in from the Eurozone, that really ain’t that bad. He told me he wanted to work with computers in the IT department of some bank, and he said the starting salary was 125,000. So I got the impression that in Switzerland one could earn a lot of money and then spend pretty much all of it in order to live. Prices in Switzerland, by the way, are universal. There are no places that are cheaper than others. If you come to visit Switzerland, bring $$$.
I also found it interesting when talking to Lucas. It was funny asking him questions about worldly affairs, as his Swiss neutrality was definitely showing. I couldn’t pin the kid down on a single issue, and then we started talking about guns. Lucas loves guns. I told him I admired Switzerland for being practically the only country to not outright ban them (the only EU country with any type of sensible gun policy is Finland, and the reason for it has to do with their bumpy history with the Russians). He told me that it was good for the Swiss to have guns, except that they are all not loaded. I didn’t understand this and asked him to go into it a little more. He told me that while yes, every Swiss house is required by law to have a gun in it (I think it‘s some kind of sub-machine gun, but I really don‘t know), they are not allowed to have them loaded unless instructed to do so by the government. Essentially, in a national emergency, the military distributes the ammo, and everybody locks and loads. I did find it cool when he told me how every Swiss citizen is required to do a month of training during the course of the year that involves target practice, emergency response drills, etc. It made me think that the Swiss still have a fortress mentality, but I would feel very safe and secure if I were in Switzerland and either a major natural disaster or a war were to suddenly occur. Overall I’d give Switzerland’s gun policy a C+ (the C for actually having the guns, and the plus for training their people on how to responsibly use them.) Ammo control irks me, though. And yet the Swiss haven’t fought a war since Napoleon invaded. Perhaps this has more to do with them being radically neutral than being armed to the teeth. *shrugs*
I got tired of Lugano after a few days and felt it was time to move on. There really wasn’t much to see in the town, and even though I was having oodles of fun hanging out with Lucas and some of his other hard rock enthusiasts, I had to go. Before departing I left Lucas with a few bits of advice, namely to not trust anyone over 30 and to always blast your stereo on 11. He wrote down my email address and said he’d write if he ever gets the chance to come to the US. I told him that would be fine, and that we could even go shooting if he liked. He became very excited by this prospect. In the end, it was really good to have met him, as the loneliness that comes with traveling had been creeping on me.
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