Sleeping Among the Pantheon

The man didn’t look like someone I’d regularly trust, but, when a guest of his friend, there was nothing I could but watch and marvel at his wonder. Falling over himself in his weak English abilities, he still didn’t cease his crocodile smile the entire night nor did he bother to move himself from his seat for the five hours I endured my own exhaustion through the mayhem. Because he didn’t move himself, I certainly wasn’t going to do so either; the opportunity to see a biological miracle such as this must surely be so incredibly rare that I’d never chance across something quite like this again in all likelihood. However, despite the miracle that was taking place before me, all I could think was, “Would you please stop smoking so much pot so I can go to sleep?”
This is where I found myself last Thursday evening. It’s been an interesting week, ladies and gentlemen.
I’ll get back to this story in a minute; let me clear up the context of it all. All this week, I’ve been on my summer vacation from class, so I, with 8 friends, rented a van and made a tour of Switzerland. We began by driving to Liechtenstein, then to St. Gallen, Basel, Zurich, and Strasbourg, France. This area is absolutely gorgeous; we were surrounded by the Alps during the majority of the trip, and we also saw most of the coast of the Bodensee, which is the sea that is bordered Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. In Konstanz, Germany, we stopped to see the cathedral from whose tower one is able to see all three countries. Quite a sight, to say the least.
In the first three cities, we stayed in hostels, which are fairly cheap, but still quite taxing when one wants to make a long trip for as little as possible. To solve this problem in the final two cities, my friend Olek from Poland made arrangements for us with Couch Surfing hosts. For those of you who have never heard of Couch Surfing, it’s an international network of people who offer to host travelers in exchange for being later hosted by other Couch Surfing members. It’s a pay-it-forward sort of system. I know, sounds sketchy, looks sketchy, seems sketchy. And if it’s got wings and quacks, it’s probably a duck, right? Ab-so-goddamn-lutely. But what’s life when completely comfortable, eh? Well, it doesn’t yield much to write about. So here I find myself sitting on a couch in Strasbourg, desperately wanting to sleep while my host throws a party around me and my group. Four hours prior to this, we walked into his apartment, which wasn’t exactly on 5th Avenue or anything, but we’re not in Harlem, either. The place was fairly run down (the toilet had to be manually flushed, the shower curtain was held up by a string, there were no two pieces of matching furniture in the house, etc), but the two occupants seemed incredibly nice and easy to talk to, so I had no complaints. I figured we’d have a beer or two with them and then we’d wind down around midnight or so. “Not at all,” interrupted the Fates, in a jovial chorus. The beers went from number one or two for everyone into 6 or 7 for Olek and our hosts while we just sat waiting for the party to end. While we waited, our hosts proceed to call up a few friends and turn up their stereo. Now, I’m usually up for a party, but at this point, I’d not gotten more than 6 hours sleep in any one of the last 6 nights, I was getting a cold, and I had probably walked about 400 miles in the last week (due to my group’s steadfast refusal to buy subway tickets). I was exhausted. I sat on the couch and listened to the conversation between Olek and our hosts, occasionally turning to my comrades to make a face or complain (I know, I was being a total negative nancy, but so was everyone else, so whatever). Eventually, the friends show up and join in, and suddenly a party has broken out. One of the friends, (I believe his name was Antoine or Jacques or something incredibly French) sat down on the other side of the coffee table from me. He introduced himself, but we didn’t much speak as he quickly set to work with his own vices before turning his attention to his French compatriots. This one is the biological miracle I was referring to in the first paragraph; let’s call him Jacques. Throughout the duration of this party, I witnessed Jacques smoke more marijuana than I’ve ever seen anyone smoke in one sitting in my life. He also had a peculiar method, which I’ve since learned is fairly common for Europeans. He sat down and pulled out a pack of Marlboro reds, a pack of rolling papers, and a big bag of pot. He would take out a cigarette, tear it open, and dump the tobacco in his hand. He’d then throw away about half of the tobacco, replacing it with pot before rolling the new mixture up in one of the rolling papers. He smoked the entire pack’s worth of cigarettes (mixed with marijuana, of course) in about two hours. The group finally went out clubbing, and, of course, Jacques was in tow. We woke in the morning to discover that neither our hosts nor any of their friends had returned after the clubs closed. We simply took our things and left. I feel like these people will succeed somehow in life, perhaps in entrepreneurship. They certainly have the cahoneys…that, and a friend who can do a lot of drugs.
However weird this might have been, I really had no business expecting normality, given what had happened the night before. In fact, the behavior of the Strasbourg guys is really quite normal in my view; I was just really tired at the time, and I figured that most people wouldn’t really want to throw a party for strangers that they’d be hosting. Our host in Zurich was not anything I could have ever expected. I’d heard of people like this, but I wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t just urban legends. Raphael proved everything true.
We got into Zurich from Basel around 11 o’clock in the morning and we began our tour of the city. We walked around the city until about 8 o’clock, just seeing the sights and doing what regular 20-25 year old kids do. Olek was the contact person for Raphael, our host, who said that he would not be home until between 9 and 10, being that he had to drive home from Belgium that day. Finally, the time came and we drove to his place. He led us into his apartment and showed us the places he had set up for us in his living room. Despite the fact that he had gone to a lot of trouble to set up mattress with sheets and all for us, all any of us could marvel at were the numerous religious icons that covered the walls and all open surfaces in the room. I could smell the acrid scent of incense upon walking into the place, but that seemed fairly normal until I saw the unusual decor. Then, it just seemed typical. Furthermore, the icons were not limited to one religion; Jesus stared at me as often as did Buddha, and there was a Shinto shrine sitting on the desk in the corner of the room. Gandhi adorned the wall opposite a painting of Shiva. None of this, however, really compared to the contents of the main bookshelf in the room. It was a rather large wall unit, completely filled with books. As I started to browse the collection at the top, I saw the things I expected to see, judging by the rest of his place. There were many volumes on alternative medicine, how-to’s on bringing up your children in the “pure” fashion, political advocacy books for organic living, etc. I was browsing from top to bottom, and, as I worked my way to the bottom, the hippie how-to books slowly but surely changed from “How to Live Purely” to “How to Save Your Marriage.” There may have been an “Not Committing Suicide for Dummies” in there somewhere, I can’t exactly remember, but they were all self help books at the bottom. This wasn’t the end of the odd experience, but I was (sadly) somewhat glad to see that this dude’s “alternative” lifestyle wasn’t what I’d been missing out on as the secret to happiness. Not that I’m not happy, but Rafael seemed to have an eerily content disposition for having 9 strangers arriving at his home at 11 pm.
Despite the lateness of the hour, none of us had yet eaten dinner, and it is customary to use the kitchen of your host in the couch surfing program, which is what we had planned on doing. After getting settled in, we asked Rafael to use his kitchen, a request he was more than happy to approve; however, he next asked what we planned to cook. The entire day, knowing that we would be arriving late and needing rise early, we had decided to do spaghetti with meat sauce, being that it’s so easy and quick. Rafael, however, was not so keen on the decision, telling us he had not had meat in his house in 10 years, much less cooked any. He told us he needed to think about this and asked if we would mind waiting for him to meditate the issue. Rafael disappeared into his room for thirty minutes before emerging with his decision, which was the following: We could cook the meat in his house, so long as we kept the door to the kitchen closed while it was cooking and we would buy the pan from him, being that he would be unable to use it again for himself after the flesh of an animal had been cooked in it. Being that there was 9 of us and he didn’t charge us much for the pan, we agreed and cooked our meal. However, the strange experience was still not over.
After dinner, Rafael began to share with us details of his occupation. Despite his closeness to the Earth and rather hermetic lifestyle, it seems Rafael, at least between the hours of 9 and 5, is a computer programmer. Furthermore, he begins to tell us that his company is close to completing work on a brand new artificial intelligence technology that no one else has. It also seems the system they are developing uses 90% less power than anything anyone else has at this moment and will soon revolutionize the computer industry; he also no less hints that it would be “a good time” to invest in his company if we “wanted to make some real money.” A man who rejects the modernity of the world for a simple, organic lifestyle evidently also wants to be on the cutting edge of new technology and to give out stock tips to strangers; irony’s got one hell of a sense of humor, right? He continued to talk to us for the next hour and a half until we told him that we really had to get up early to leave, and he finally let us go to sleep. The morning went fairly easily, just due to the fact that we had to leave so quickly so that we’d have time to see Strasbourg and all, so there wasn’t too much notable from the morning, other than the fact that he made sure none of us left his house without his business card. I sleep well knowing people like Rafael are out there, takin’ her easy for all us sinners, yet still leading a somewhat productive life with one eye on the future. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I like to think he refuses to leave anything to chance. It’s hard to be certain which religion is truly correct, so ole Rafael buys into all of them. And, in the case that there is no God and no Afterlife, well, Rafael’s not quitting his day job. A little money, food on the table (but no meat, of course), and the prospect of an Afterlife, yet still with the problems of the everyday man, Rafael seems to have an eerily sane view of life through his own eccentricities. I like this. Rafa, you’re ok by me. Just stay away from my kids, aight?