2013-03-09 47 8

Location

A woodside on the Forch.

Participants

Plans

Take the Forchbahn from Stadelhofen at 3.20pm, leaving 20 minutes to walk to the hashpoint.

Expedition

That much for the infallible accuracy of Zurich's public transport. Calamus was sitting in the number two tram to Stadelhofen, looking utterly disgruntled. The driver had just announced that the tram was running two minutes late as a consequence of a demonstration in the town center. "What's it about?", Calamus asked. "International Women's Day!", the driver happily replied, pointing to her Clara Zetkin shirt. "But that was yesterday!" "Well, you can't expect Swiss women to leave their businesses on a Friday. The first world economy would collide." While she was probably right, and Calamus was absolutely in favour of IWD, nothing changed the fact that Calamus was going to miss Auntie Frieda. And other than just about all of her colleagues in the city, Auntie Frieda had a waiting period of a full fifteen minutes. Auntie Frieda is, of course, a train.

When he reached Stadelhofen, Auntie Frieda had left. Calamus bought some honey Magenbrot at a nearby stall and waited. All there was to see here was the Opera House, the station building, which architect Santiago Calatrava had recently redesigned and everybody except for Calamus seemed to like, and a fountain that was switched off due to the cold. When Auntie Frieda left, Calamus didn't look back.

Auntie Frieda, being a narrow gauge railway, is a hybrid between a tram and a train. Therefore it uses the tram rails in the city, receiving its own train-like rails when it crosses its borders. Calamus ate his Magenbrot and watched two schoolboys practising Russian vocabulary. Their intonation was criminal, and meaning-altering in many cases, but Calamus was off-duty.

When Calamus arrived at the Maiacher, it had turned 3.55. That meant he was going to have five minutes left for a walk for which he had planned to take twenty. He didn't even try; He disliked running uphill, and it was steep. He reached the point, he made his pictures, and didn't return. The algorithm had guided him to this path, and he wanted to see where it led.

The path led to a pyramid, and on the pyramid there was a brazen flame, about twenty metres in height. Cold. Dead. Around the monument, on the flame's socket, was an inscription: "This monument the people of Zurich built as a token to their victims, claimed by the World War 1914-1918 for the homeland's protection". Since its neutrality had been declared "for the good of everyone" in the 15^th century, peace-loving Switzerland had never been involved in a war, except for some internal religious disagreements. But WWI had conincided with the Spanish influenza, which cost a lot if lives, obviously in the defense forces as well. Not a single person died from actual military actions during that war. But apparently, as chances for building a military monument were rare in this country, they'd wanted to have one as well.

Calamus followed the remainder of the path to the village of The Forch, where he missed Auntie Frieda by a minute again. After some waiting, he returned to Zurich.

In the train, a few elderly ladies debated about how complicated technical devices had become. "You know, I bought an Android tablet some time ago, and you know how my fingers are all shaky, I couldn't hit those tiny virtual keys! So of course I tried to plug in my USB keyboard, and it wasn't compatible! I had to write a driver wrapper myself! How can they expect their stuff to sell if they treat their customers like that?" "But dearie, you know that there are dedicated keyboards for tablets?" "I couldn't possibly throw my trusty keyboard out, it was poor Ueli's one before his liver cought up with him!" "You don't have to give it away, she was just saying you could use another one for daily tasks." "Yeah, you'd say that, with your husband who's still using a typewriter!" Calamus was able to escape before the discussion escalated and the ladies took out their walking sticks.