We're taking the bus from Milan to Frankfort today. The bus comes into the Milan station about a half hour late, and we’re off!
We have two of the jolliest drivers. They seem to be Russian, or of some similar nationality, playing accordion folk music on the radio and conversing in a Slavic-sounding language. They are chattering non-stop the whole day, giggling and hee-hee-ing like a couple of junior high schoolgirls. Honestly, they hardly take a rest to breathe.
They manage to keep their humor when we get stopped at the Italian border. We thought that the EU status meant that border checks were unnecessary, but this is not the case. A customs agent comes on board, collecting our passports. One poor sap acknowledges that he has no passport at all. He is from Mali. The agent takes him off the bus and orders his luggage off too. They join several other agents who seem to be operating out of the trunks of a couple cars parked to the side. Quite a conference ensues. Another woman is eventually called off the bus as well. This conferencing all takes at least an hour, faxing and emailing and phone calling. Finally, one agent comes back with our passports and lets us go, minus a few fellow travelers. The bus drivers have an absolute party going over the episode like two kids caught playing hooky, reliving their ordeal over smokes in the boys’ room.
The drive through Switzerland is breathtaking. We pass narrow lakes bordered by incredibly steep mountains, where people have cut farms and vineyards into the nearly vertical hillsides. There are clusters of neat villages, people sailing on the lakes, cows and sheep in the green pastures, rocky peaks along the horizon, trees burnished red and orange with fall colors, everything so idyllic it seems staged for a portrait.
In Zurich, we have another delay as we sit in traffic for no good reason, spending an hour to go the few blocks through the city to the bus station, where no one seems to get on or off. The city seems nice enough, though.
We come into Frankfort at 11:30 PM, in the rain, after leaving our apartment in Milan at 7:30 AM. Our hotel is right across the street, a clean, quiet place that we stayed in last May. We have a little déjà vu coming into our room. The weather is almost as we left it, cool and drizzly, with the same view out of our window. Are we starting over?
1 Video Included
Milan to Frankfurt
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