Okei Wapi ?: April 2012

Domodossola, Italy, 31st March 2012

Introducing the newest featuring star of Okei Wapi : ATS.

We are led to believe that the woman next to him was not repulsed by his "early morning face", but was simply tired herself.

I went to school with ATS but hadn't seen him for quite a while. When he said he was coming to visit, the mind immediately started whirring and a plan was hatched to go up to Liechtenstein. The weather forecast a week before departure painted a glorious picture - 23 degrees, blazing sunshine. As the week went by, a slow collapse took place and the night before departure we were assured a grey, rainy day, with a top temperature of 12 degrees. After a long, searching discussion in a Geneva whisky bar, we decided to go for it anyway. The next morning, however, we got up too late and missed the bus which would have made the connection to our train from Geneva central station. The plans were rehashed in a hurry and so, an hour later, we found ourselves on a train bound for Italy.

Switzerland's train network is wonderfully efficient and relatively speedy although there is a price to pay for these comforts and any trip traversing the country costs the equivalent of a small house in most neighbouring countries. Thankfully, a ticket exists which allows the bearer to use the entire Swiss railway network for a day for the bargain bucket price of 35€. Unfortunately, these tickets are only available to Swiss residents. But, fortunately (especially for a pair of unemployed bums such as ourselves), these tickets do not feature the holder's name on them and so I got hold of two such tickets through slightly suspicious means (thanks Joana !!). The Swiss railway network extends over the country's borders at some points and we planned to use this technicality to our great advantage by sneaking over the Italian border to Domodossola. The 5.30am bus had maybe slipped through our fingers but at 6am we were out, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and on our way.

All aboard

The ride down towards the Simplon tunnel and Italy is probably quite nice - as it was, we rode the rails, looking out of the window with glazed eyes, suffering from our crack-of-dawn awakening. We soon shook ourselves awake, though, as we reached Domodossola and stepped out, blinking, into the bright sunshine. I'd thought the first town across the border would be fun to visit although it was only as we left the station that I had absolutely no idea what the place was like. No idea of the size, of what was there, of whether it was interesting or not. After 15 seconds of trying to work out if it was worth being here at all, we spotted the first good sign. A pizzeria, just over the road from the station.

We sat at the terrace, waited and waited, and decided that the waiter probably couldn't see us. After all, we were the only people on this windswept side of the restaurant. We moved to a terrace by the door and he came out. We conjured up our best Italian to indicate that we wanted a menu.

"Menu ? Pizza ?"
"Ahh! per mangiare !" he exclaimed, gesticulating towards his mouth.
"Si ! Si !" We were getting somewhere.

He ushered us inside and placed us at a table. We wondered why it wasn't possible to eat outside but ordered a couple of glasses of sparkling wine which, amusingly, was served on tap. He delivered the glasses, and fired out a few sentences at a speed which, seemingly, only Italians can muster. We missed about 98% of the sentence but worked out that something would happen in 15 minutes. The gaps were filled in with guesswork and we concluded that the kitchen wasn't yet open but that we'd be receiving the menus soon. The minutes passed, the sparkling slowly went down. After half an hour, we didn't have the menus and the glasses were empty. I returned to the bar and pointed at the sparkling wine taps and was subjected to yet another barrage of Italian. It appeared that we were in the wrong room and so we were ushered a further 20 metres to another table where, it would appear, food could be served. The guy waved us through to the other room but stopped dead at the entrance, seeming to fear some kind of immigration problem if he crossed the threshold.

Ah, a good nose, nice bubbles... and from the tap, if I'm not mistaken ?

A woman on the other side took us into her care, placing us at a table and spraying us with yet more incomprehensible volleys of sentences. She then smiled and went off to hunt for menus. We took is as some kind of greeting. It's been a while since I've been to a country where I had no idea what was being said to me and I always feel slightly moronic when this does happen. If I'm being spoken to in Armenian or in Xhosa, it doesn't bother me as much. But Italian is so similar to French that I feel I should understand it. Instead of asking politely if my interlocutor speaks another language, I just smile and nod. Miraculously, this doesn't land us in any hot water in Domodossola, and we are served with menus exactly as we wanted. The pizzas were delicious and cost about the same as a small glass of tap water in Switzerland.

When in Domodossola, do as the Domodossolans...

Domodossola will never be a huge tourist magnet, I imagine, purely due to its size. But it does have a charming little old town (all five streets of it) and many pleasant terrace cafes. It was at one of these that we stopped and ordered a Spritz. This delicious cocktail of Aperol, Prosecco and sparkling water was first discovered by my parents in Venice (of course it was known to the Italians prior to that - I use the word discover in the same sense as people describe the Americas having been discovered by Columbus) and I was determined to share the beauty of this refreshing beverage with ATS. In another charming twist, the waitress brought us our drinks and a free platter of snacks, probably worth about twice as much as the drinks themselves. As soon as we'd arrived, it seemed, it was time to leave. We'd planned to meet M in Lausanne for a wild night out at 6, as she was coming straight from work. We popped into a supermarket and bought a bottle of Aperol and three bottles of prosecco (and some plastic cups... just in case) and hopped back onto a train, Switzerland-bound.

Domodossola - you can check out but you can never leave

The 6pm meeting didn't prevent us from stopping in Montreux, a city which is known mostly for being full of money and for being home to a Freddy Mercury statue (and, at one point, to Freddy Mercury himself). We wandered up and down the promenade by the lakefront, admired the scenery, and found a bench to polish off a bottle of Prosecco in plastic cups - a classy act anywhere in the world but particularly admirable in a place like Montreux. We moved on.

View of Freddy in Montreux

View of Montreux

View from Montreux

And a view of a bench in Montreux, housing two classy young gentlemen.

The night in Lausanne was pleasant but slightly less long-lived than we'd imagined. A nice evening the presence of Agou, a friend of ATS's and his Lebanese housemate Kassem (who Agou had called out specially to admire my Hezbollah t-shirt) was followed by an attempted beginning at a night out. ATS and I had been up since the break of day, however, and M had been at work all day. Following her usual protocol, she fell asleep at the table and the two heroes of the day were left to carry her off to the train station.