Life Without a Printer

I wanted to get to the mountains of Switzerland before the weather turned too cold, so this past weekend I did an overnight trip to Bern and Interlaken. A group of four of us booked our train tickets online Wednesday night and we planned to leave Friday morning at 7:45am. I planned to go to school before class on Thursday night to print my tickets as a back-up in case we couldn’t print them at the station—and it turned into quite the fiasco. Thursday was a holiday in Geneva so most of the city was shut down, including the computer lab on campus. No big deal, I thought, until I read the fine print on the tickets (using the computer in the classroom which was not connected to a printer) which said that you HAD to pre-print your tickets and you could not get them printed at the station. I thought of two other options:

1. Print them at an internet café—FAILED. All cafes were closed due to the holiday and if there were any open, they would be closed by the time I got out of class at 10:30pm. Most likely they wouldn’t open early enough in the morning before we were scheduled to leave, either.
2. Print them in the office of my dorms—FAILED. The lady in charge was off due to the holiday.

I walked all over campus looking for someone that could unlock the computer lab, but campus was like a ghost town (all undergrad classes were canceled). Luckily, when my teacher got there, he let me go into his office and use his printer. Whew.

So what was this holiday, you ask? Switzerland is a very decentralized country and each canton (what we would consider a state or county) has its own official religion. There is no separation of church and state here—the head officials of each canton’s religion are paid via tax dollars. The neighboring canton to Catholic Geneva is Protestant Lausanne, and a long time ago Lausanne created a holiday to pray for the lost souls of the Catholics in Geneva. Geneva reciprocated, and the holiday to pray for the lost Protestant souls of Lausanne still exists today. Lausanne and Geneva are only about 30 minutes away, and each have many distinct holidays. Our professor told us it’s sometimes hard to work out a schedule if you and your husband/wife work in different cantons, or if your children go to school in different cantons, because no one has the same holidays!