I’m writing this on the train to the Zurich Flughafen.

I spent yesterday wandering the old city, this time with Christine’s camera. I went to see the Peterskirche, which has the largest tower clock face in the city, and I took the tram all the way down the river to the opera house on Lake Zurich. As expected, I saw many of the lake’s famed swans. In the Fraumuenster cathedral, I was able to see stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall and Giacommi (sp?). The bright colors and shapes that Chagall loved translate so well to the stained glass medium. His common motifs: angels, horses, ladders, goats, crucifixes, musicians and instruments (and many others) are all in the five window panels. Each panel is primarily a different color: orange-red, royal blue, green, yellow, and cyan blue; but then small swatches of shapes in contrasting colors are interspersed in the glass. The center panel, which is mostly green, has a Christ figure at the top and a Virgin Mary below. My favorite panel was the royal blue panel, which features an angel (partially in deep maroon) embracing a distraught-looking man standing below zig-zagging ladders, upon which men are climbing to heaven. Photography was not allowed, so I made a sketch that does no justice to Chagall, and I’ll scan and post it later.

I went back to the Café Voltaire, to take a few pictures of the artists’ space, and then wandered up its back alley to find the houses that Goethe and Lenin lived in.

After walking through the old city for a few hours, I was quite cold, and so I went to the Kunstmuseum. This museum houses an amazing collection of European art. The thing that is so striking, when I go to museums in Zurich or Paris or London or Milan, is that the general collections are so comprehensive. In the states, you’re lucky if the museum has one Mondrian, or five Gauguins, but in Europe, each museum has entire rooms devoted to the great masters. My favorites so far are the Cubists and Futurists, but I also love the Farb-ists (will insert the correct term later). I saw an Anish Kapoor piece that stuck out, which appeared to be an abstracted, giant royal blue rose bud. There was a large painting, of an Italian painter and another man, that was painted in the 70s. It was meant to look like a photograph, but the most interesting thing was the pearlized quality of the men’s long, curly blonde locks. I’ll come back and detail the pieces that I made a note of.

Later in the evening, Christine and her colleagues took me to a jazz club. I was astonished at the scene – everyone there was young, and hip. Apparently, jazz musicians here are all young hipsters! A lot of the electric guitar chords reminded me of a band I like, CSS. Maybe this is a new European jazz movement, which influenced them?

I’m on the plane now, flying over the Alps. I never expected these mountains to be so angular, and completely white, and to have such rugged, sharply defined ridges, dividing the mountains into white halves and black halves. On the mountains that are less steep, I can see gray patches of pine trees, which have attempted to creep up the slopes. The valleys are filled with snow, and bits of cumulous clouds are nestled in crevices at the top of the peaks.

Christine lent me her copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, and I have needed to read it, especially since I’m going to attempt to write about the current Zimbabwean cholera epidemic, in my current ‘project’. I loved the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I’m sure I’ll appreciate the same in this book. My battery is about to die, so I’ll be reading until I catch sight of the Mediterranean

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And now I’m writing from our studio in Athens. It took us almost two hours to get here on the subway .. yes, we’re far from Swiss efficiency now.

We had a fantastic dinner, at a restaurant near the Acropolis called ‘Gods Restaurant.’ I got a Greek salad, and a large class of delicious, cloudy Ouzo, and we shared some stuffed vine leaves (that came with lemon slices). Christine ordered tomatoes stuffed with rice, and delicious baked potato slices. Our waiter brought us some complimentary halwa, which was a cinnamon-flavored delight.

Later, we walked around the buildings of the Acropolis, which stands out beautifully against the black night sky because it is lit from below with warm orange light. We are calling it an early night, since Christine has sprained her knee again, and I am feeling slightly sick. Hopefully, we’ll sleep it off, but we are both reading for a little while in our cosy studio living room.