Switzerland is dirty!

Just thinking back over last week’s travelling, I realise that Switzerland was one of the biggest surprises of the trip.

I had always imagined that it was a country which was highly efficient, ruthlessly functional, extremely polite, and utterly spotless. My experience was that it was very few of those things. I entered or left the country four times and only had my passport checked once and that very cursorily. I wandered for hours looking for someone to point me in the right direction for trains which had no signage to indicate where they might be going and ended up having to guess. I sat behind some giggling Swiss girls all the way across the Atlantic and came to the weary conclusion that they were no different to any other teenagers.

However the biggest surprise of all was that the country just felt grubby. Far from being able to eat your dinner off a toilet floor, not that I would have wanted to try that, the stations and restaurants and airport all just felt tired, like a home that is past its best and is no longer being invested in.

Now, I don’t want to start an international incident, that was just how it seemed to me. It has made me reflect on how the reality does not always live up to the reputation. It’s true of countries and of organisations, and it is true of people. I suppose that we sometimes feel that we can’t control our image and so we just leave it and focus on who we are, and that is good I think. However there are times when we buy into the modern myth of ‘spin’; that if we can boost our image people will not notice the reality, at least for the time being. This, surely, cannot be the way of Christ?