After Sophie and I spent our last morning in Zurich watching cartoon network in german, we took the speediest and most efficient and perfect and clean public transit (trams and a speedy boat taxi) to the lake, where we swam to a tall waterslide and jumped off a high dive with some very cool looking middle schoolers who were crowding the docks and the beaches like sea lions on the santa cruz wharf. Being around middle-schoolers gave me a weird sort of middle school anxiety again; i got the feeling that I myself was in middle school and was supposed to try to act really cool then i pulled myself out of the lake and onto the wooden dock and looked down at the boys who came up to maybe my waist and I realized they are swiss thirteen year olds... and I am twenty two, a fact that sometimes slips my mind. Age is only a number in a lot of ways.
Anyway, we completed our final day with two terrific jumps off the high dive, complete with screams and flailing, the perfect end to our trip that could very well be entitled "jumping off european things" or something of the sort. We spent a lot of time in water, that is, when we weren't working on farms or eating like big fat queens. That night at Astrid and Brad's house we thought about drinking from their array of fancy liqueurs but were all feeling too sick from having seriously overloaded on swiss chocolate for "dinner" (it was accompanied by a light salad). So we lied around in the candle-light bedroom, listening to the song "summer lovin'" from Grease which is officially Sophie and my favorite movie, we must have watched it ten times this summer and sang all the songs on the train and while we were laboring away at the hay bales trying to make the time pass...anyways, we listened to summer lovin' while we looked at the photos of our journey, which was particularly poignant when we got to the photos of us walking through an old italian graveyard as John Travolta and Olivia Newton John sang "summer fun, somethin's begun..."
The next morning we woke up early and said our goodbyes and then twenty five sleepless hours, two mini bottles of wine, two soggy pasta dishes, six cups of orange juice and a few classic chick flicks later we arrived in LA. My amazing fantastic momma had prepared the most delicious carrot cake in the world from scratch because she thought it would be a nice american treat, not knowing it is Sophie's favorite cake. Then mom made us tamales, another thing we had missed, and we put on some scabies cream one last time (this one smelled like sulfur) and passed out immediately. A perfect end to a perfect summer.
Fin.
Epilogue:
Sophie left the next day, but only after getting some everything bagels with herb cream cheese, eating japanese food, getting her photos developed, and of course, watching Grease one more time. It is always bitter-sweet watching Grease because it is so great and John Travolta is so cute and charming and such a fantastic dancer and then we remember he's a scientologist and our dreams are shattered, again... it's still very difficult for us to come to terms with that fact. Now I am having a weird sort of separation anxiety from Sophie. I've been literally no further than 50 feet from her this whole summer, every hour of every day so it was strange dropping her off at the airport. But it was a wonderful honeymoon and i will see her in two days and then we will go back to our regular friendly marriage.
The culture shock coming back was there, but not as badly as when i studied abroad. THe big cars and the sloppy clothes were definitely noticeable, and it is still very strange to hear people speaking american and knowing that they can understand me when i talk so i can't just talk about someone's silly haircut while I am standing next to them. Eating a taco was better than I had imagined, but I miss speaking italian so badly even though it's only been a few days. It's all very bittersweet, as endings always are. I think for us it was the perfect time to come back, any shorter and we would have felt cheated out of the full experience, but any longer and we might have become worn out from the nonstop travel adventures. It's hard not having a home base. But what a perfect two month journey it was.
ARRIVADERCI!
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