Saturday April 18th 2009:
Chiasso, Lugano, Milano – Pta. Garibaldi.
Rough morning, long night. What is this idea of time? What is it that makes us consider time itself as a diminishing resource? Is not time eternal, without count, without a defined beginning and end? I must believe so. Clocks, timezones, time itself. Time is a measure invented to discover and chronicle our movement through existence. How is it then that you can “lose an hour”? The time has passed regardless, the movement is the same, how can you alter the count?
So strange.
7 am alarm goes off. 7:10 alarm is still going off….7:15 alright, I get it. I wake up, stumble to the shower. I’d gone to sleep at 3:45 the night before, slept on a couch around 2:30 in the morning and up at 5 the day before…that and bed at 2am and awake at seven on Wednesday…I was running a touch low.
Out of the shower and to the station. I’ve got a train to catch. Hop on the train and off I go, stop over in Monza, pick up a traveling companion. It’s off to Switzerland, Chiasso the Italian/Swiss border town and then Lugano a beautiful city built into the cliffs surrounding northern Lake Lugano.
In Chiasso I visited the Dogana (customs) in the train station, police station, at the physical border, as well in the custom’s office. Apparently, as soon as Switzerland joined the Schengen pact they destroyed every last remaining official stamp allowing immigration into their country. After all, only airports and international ports would have need of checking in non-Shengen people.
Without stamp and lacking the fulfillment of my touristic desire for a stamp we continued on to Lugano. Lugano is a town (56,719 inhabitants, a total of 130,000 people in the agglomeration) in the south of Switzerland. It is in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, which borders Italy. The city lies on Lake Lugano. Its warm summers and the fact that in recent years it has attracted an ever growing number of celebrities, entertainers and successful athletes, has gained it the nickname of the “Monte Carlo of Switzerland”. It is the 9th largest city of Switzerland by population.
My companion and I spent the day together visiting Lugano and enjoying the clandestine beauty of a city built into the lake. I’ve uploaded pictures on Facebook of the trip. Take a peek.
We headed back to Chiasso, picked up a commuter train to Milan, and I headed home to sleep. Little did I know that after dinner and reading the final two books in C. Descry’s series I’d get to bed after 2am.
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