Zug, Switzerland - Dear readers, I write to you today about trains and train stations in Switzerland. These are two things Hannah and I have become very familiar with you in our brief time here.
The Bahnhof Exception
Switzerland closes down on Sunday. Department stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, and even most restaurants are closed. In posting their hours, many stores will simply put "ruhetag" (rest day) next to Sunday, where as other days they might be "geschlossen" (closed). Sunday is the day of rest here and that's taken rather seriously. To illustrate the point, the following things are outlawed (in some municipalities) or otherwise frowned upon on Sundays*:
- Recycling
- Mowing the lawn
- Doing the laundry
- Washing your car
* This list is likely incomplete.
But, for H and I the biggest challenge is the inability to engage in basic commerce on Sunday. Meal preparation is the primary concern, but discovering a scarcity of any basic household good on Sunday can be a real pain. And god forbid you run of out toilet paper on a Sunday.
There is, however, a loophole. For reasons not at all clear, stores located in bahnhofs (train stations) are permitted to run wild on Sunday. The stores inside maintain normal hours, making your local bahnhof a island of laissez-faire liberalism in a sea of commercial puritanism. But - you might be wondering - what can one actually get a train station? Well, our train station here in Zug (population: ~31,000) includes:
- 7 restaurants and coffee shops
- 3 grocery stores
- 1 convenience store
- 1 pharmacy
- 1 flower store
- 1 beauty salon
The Family Coach
H and I were rushing to catch a train last week. We ran up the stairs and down the platform and hopped on the first car we found - and just in time. Out of breath, we made our way to an empty seat. Facing us in the next set of seats was a mother and her sleeping child. Sitting across the aisle from us was a young couple with their two children. The three parents looked up at us as we entered the car and exchanged a glance, and then paid us no mind.
We had hardly taken out seats when a great cacophony arose in the area behind us, which was strangely obscured by a wall in the middle of the train car. Laughter, screaming, crying, yelling: a maelstrom of uninhibited and rapidly oscillating puerile emotions. There must have been half a dozen children running wild back there, completely out of control. Children would occasionally emerge from behind the wall as little shrieking bantams, sometimes tripping over themselves as they stumbled down the aisle, sometimes drooling, sometimes with fingers in their noses, sometimes eating the contents that that finger had extracted from their nose. We had never seen such chaos in Switzerland.
As it turns out, many of Switzerland's trains come equipped with a "family coach": a specially designed receptacle to quarantine this pandemonium from the rest of the commuting public. According to the Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (Swiss federal railways): "All double-deck InterCity trains on long-distance routes include a Ticki Park family coach. The middle part of the upper deck of these coaches features a playground area decorated with imaginative jungle motifs where your little ones are free to play to their hearts' content. A number of tables next to the upstairs playground area are fitted with the exciting board games 'Jungle Hunt' and 'The Snake Game'."
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| Chaos containment zone. Fisheye photo courtesy of sbb.ch |
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