It’s two a.m. and I’m awake again.
You’d think that after walking around for sixteen hours in a foreign city I’d be exhausted. And I am. But sleep eludes me.
The pull of time, past, present, future, swirling around me stirs up so many thoughts. It’s like trying to sleep on a moving bus full of drunken sailors. Come to think of it, there appear to be some tipsy songsters outside the hotel at this moment, their merry voices cannoning off the stone walls in old Geneva.
I haven’t traveled a lot in my life. Always wanted to. But other dreams got in the way. Now I’m here, wide awake in a city loaded with Swiss Army knives, cuckoo clocks and chocolate, and I have no sense of time.
Depending on what block I wander through, the architecture places me somewhere between the 12th and the 20th century. But the confusion resulting from my unabating jetlag and woeful lack of foreign language skills has kept me reeling night and day. The shops are crammed with watches. Time is a big deal here, but I’m not in synch.
My computer insists on keeping Seattle time. And to make things more interesting, the cell phone I bought here speaks to me only in French, German or Italian.
It’s a curiously intoxicating environment. Of course that may be just the sugar rush from all the pastries. Whatever. I’m having a wonderful time feeling blissfully disengaged from the Fox News stream.
Here, the Rhone River glides serenely under the bridges, while the buses, trams, bicycles and pedestrians move about the city like cogs in some well-oiled machine. Except for me. I tend to stop and stare a lot. It must be time for some more coffee. Maybe a nap. Definitely some pastry.