My baptism in Lake Zurich

What do we learn when we take the plunge?

I’m alive! And busting out of my bathers .. Photo: Tony Lupton

On the last day of a recent European holiday we found ourselves in Zurich with hours to kill before the mid-afternoon ride to the airport — and with the forecast a sweltering 36 degrees celsius. 

I had last explored the Swiss city in my heady late 20s when I flew in-and-out of its efficient and spotless airport, criss-crossing the continent trying to find myself, as they say. Back then I had wandered, alert but aimless, through the streets of the elegant financial district, bought a Bratwurst with Dijon in the medieval old city — I remember wondering if the immigrant sausage seller felt as I did, a fish-out-of-water—  etched into my memory Zurich’s most prominent landmark, the twin towers of the Grossmünster, the Romanesque-style Protestant church near the bank of the Limmat, one of two rivers branching off Lake Zurich. 

On that trip — that journey — the places I visited were so overlain with my intensity and longing it felt like I’d bottled their essence. 

Now here I was again; the city, as far as I could tell, much the same. Me, nearly 30 years on, not so much.