And Outside The Rain Fell...

Travelling alone gives you that one pleasure you never get to have when you're travelling with company, to interact with the world.

To skip Geneva this morning with a terrible cough, I was truly disappointed. As in almost shattered. I could not leave Europe without visiting Switzerland, sans all the Bollywood cliches about the place. It still was Switzerland. The snow. The mountains. And my cold. They just wouldn't go along.

The disappointed was hard to shoo away, and having failed to figure out the rather decrepit French Medical system, I knew it was time for some action. The earliest appointment i could get for my common cold and cough was almost a week later! Honey, a little of crushed onion juice (errr.grated, crushed, chopped) and a little too much of turmeric, whipped into a paste, and I had a tasty placebo ready. Some expensive Strepsils too, a ticket bought, assignment slides mailed, vacation mail reminders put in for a selected target, and there, I was off. Running. Backpack in tow. To Interlaken. Taking a circumvent route all across Europe. I had to see Switzerland.

Alone, this time I chatted up with totally unknown people. And it's weird how you establish connections with the strangest of people. An Indian couple kept me company for most of my first leg of the journey, and we discussed everything, from backpacking (they paid 300€ for my 5€ journey), to economics, to the health care system in India, to entrepreneurship, cranes, Switzerland, education, even Professors at IIM-Ahmedabad. It was really a most delightful conversation.

The second conversation was with a fellow cat lover, this girl who lived in Ulm and study Philosophy for a living, whose cat took an acute liking for me, jabbing it's paw at my muffler (or was it my throat? *in alarm!), with embarrassed smiles from it's owner. And we discussed Nietzsche, (something I've been reading for my tormential pleasures of late). Thus Spake Zarathustra. And we discussed the Rhine, Mark Anthony, Goethe, No Country for Old Men and even Nanu-Nina. Apparently, we are not its only fans. She was a delightful conversationist, and her English was flawless.

This is one of the few things I can never do, strike up conversations with random people when I'm with someone else. Probably it's because I'm rather content with the things I have, probably it's in some parts shyness, i would never know. And i do not like exchange cards, email ids. It is somehow nice, to leave it this way. To leave it as one amazing conversation in my memory, rather than trying hard to make conversation when we are a million miles apart. It's just not me. Maybe I'm losing a great friend this way, but that's that, i'm content. Weirdly, the philosopher girl agreed to me. Weirdly, we did not ask each others names. Weirdly, if i ever need to find her, i'll need to find a cat called Mimo in Ulm. Many of course wouldn't agree to leaving things hanging like that, and I respect that. But for me, a perfect conversation sometimes needs to be just a memory that would one day fade off.

Onwards to Interlaken. SwissLand, here I come.