i didn't try the chocolate so don't ask

In honor of Jesus and his magic dead person powers, I took a trip to Switzerland over the long Easter weekend to visit my friend Kimmy who studies in Lugano.  I thought it would be nice to see a familiar face after suffering what feels like years of avoiding eye contact with storekeepers and flipping through my phrasebook for the right word.  If you're ever considering taking a weekend trip to Lugano from Rome, don't.  Lugano is beautiful (duh, it's the Swiss Alps), but it's near impossible to travel there in less than ten hours.  My trip home consisted of four buses, one of which I nearly missed but didn't because I chased after it like a lovesick Ryan Gosling as it pulled away from the curb at four in the morning, manically waving my arms in the rear view mirror, running and pounding on the luggage compartment and spitting hair out of my mouth.  I was then forced to catch my breath and take a spontaneous but necessary $100 taxi, a flight with violent turbulence, and a tuna-can packed subway ride.  I also dropped and shattered my host mother's iPhone 4 while digging out my passport in the airport terminal but I'm trying not to think about it gay rights are totally cool let's all get married tomorrow who's with me?

Because I'm an unlucky little booger, my bus was stopped at the Swiss-Italy border, which apparently never happens, and I was pleasantly harassed by a blonde policeman for an uncomfortable fifteen minutes.  This shouldn't have been an issue, because as an American citizen with a passport, I have up until 90 days to legally travel the European Union without being considered a sneaky immigrant.  However, when I first arrived to Italy, nobody stamped my passport.  After stepping off the plane I kept expecting to be shooed off to some sort of scary office with strong men and black hats that fit weird, but instead i just followed my fellow plane-people to the baggage claim and left.

Now there are two sides to this shitty coin.  Because nobody ever stamped my passport, there is no legal record of me ever arriving in the European Union, which means that my "90 days of travel" can technically be forever as long as I lie about when I arrived to whoever checks my passport.  So with flawed logic, I can potentially stay here until the day I die.  However, it's also a huge pain the ass to explain to each and every person that cares why my passport isn't stamped, and there is no real guarantee that I'll be let into any country I like without proper documentation.  Also I may have some trouble coming home.  I don't know, maybe I'd do well in prison.  I could cut off all my hair with a fork, smoke stolen cigarettes while squinting and get myself a bitch.

Aside from waking up one morning and immediately racing out the door in my socks to shit in a damp tree-bush so that I wouldn't disturb Kimmy's roommate as she showered in their only bathroom, which I now realize was much too considerate, the trip went really well.  The people in Lugano are happy.  They make their own bread and spend sunny days at parks with castles.  It's one of those places that inspires you to be a better person, you know, to stop shitting in tree-bushes and call your mom once in a while.

On my last day, I took a solo four-hour hike up Monte San Salvatore with no water.  If it weren't for the small dirty patches of snow every half hour I would have tragically collapsed due to dehydration, and been carried down the mountain by a muscle man with ocean eyes OH THE SHAME...  I used my survivor skills acquired from eleven years of girl scouting (thank you, thank you, i'm not a hero), to brush off the top layer of tree debris and scoop out some clean (let's just pretend) snow, which I greedily tossed into my panting mouth by the handful.  I went above and beyond to make sure that no passerby's saw me do this, holding each clump of snow behind my back while "enjoying the view" for two to three minutes before slurping the evidence from my palms.  Despite my best efforts, I'm pretty sure an all-too-confident Japanese father and son super-hiker-duo saw me desperately smash my head face-first into a pile of ice in a particularly weak moment of the climb as they raced around the corner with their rubber capped sticks and pedometers.  After all, my self-invented ice-face smash was not without a warrior call and my crouched position on the side of the trail as they passed by reflected that of a guilt-ridden pug after peeing in the house, ass curled under hunched shoulders and eyes wide.  Oh god.

At least I showered today,
Kay