Switzerland: The Language, the Capital, and What Everyone Gets Wrong
So, they want me to write about Switzerland. You know, the postcard version. The one with the snaggle-toothed Matterhorn, the chic ski slopes in St. Moritz, and trains that run with the precision of a luxury watch. I’ve got the source material right here, a glossy travel piece dripping with breathless prose about the “world’s densest rail network” and how Swiss law demands every tiny village be connected. It’s a beautiful fantasy.
And I’m sure the view from the Gornergrat train, climbing over 10,000 feet to stare at thirty different 13,000-foot peaks, is spectacular. Offcourse, it is. The article quotes some expert, Everett Potter, who calls the Glacier Express “a Swiss train set come to life.”
A Swiss train set come to life. Give me a break.
This eight-hour ride from Zermatt, Switzerland to St. Moritz apparently has an “Excellence Class” with plush white leather seats, a rattling bar car, and five-course meals. We’re talking mint pea soup and braised Simmental beef while you cross the Oberalp Pass. It’s a radical concept, the expert says, a train that exists “solely for sightseeing.”
It all sounds… nice. A little too nice. Like the kind of trip you see in an ad before the video you actually want to watch. A perfect, hermetically sealed experience where you glide past primordial forests and cerulean lakes, completely detached from reality.
Because before I could even get to the part about the Bernina Express heading to Italy, I hit the real Switzerland. The one we all actually live in.
It wasn’t a towering massif or a deep ravine. It was a blank white screen with a simple, soul-crushing message: “A required part of this site couldn’t load.”
JavaScript disabled. Check my connection. Disable ad blockers. The usual litany of digital excuses. This perfect vision of a country where every town is connected by public transport couldn’t even connect its marketing page to my browser. The journey to the UNESCO World Heritage Rail Route was blocked by a single line of broken code. I guess there’s no funicular for that.
This is the modern experience, isn’t it? A beautiful promise locked behind a technical failure. You want to see the GoldenPass Express, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and Italian design by Pininfarina? Too bad. First you have to wrestle with your browser settings. You want to plan a trip from Geneva to Interlaken? Nope. The page is broken. You can’t get there from here.
After finally getting the damn thing to load, I scrolled past the part about the Jungfraubahnen burrowing through the Eiger mountain to the “Top of Europe,” and hit the other gatekeeper. The real tollbooth of the 21st century.
The Cookie Notice.
Suddenly, I wasn’t in the Alps anymore. I was in a fluorescent-lit office in a building with no windows. I was reading about “First-party Cookies” and “Third-party Cookies.” About “Strictly Necessary Cookies” and “Interest-Based Advertising Cookies.” Forget the four official languages of Switzerland; this was the only language that matters now—a dense, unreadable legalese designed to bore you into submission.
The travel piece talks about the Centovalli Express, a hidden gem that follows the divide between the European and African continental plates. But the cookie policy talks about a different kind of geography, one that tracks your every move. Social media platforms “have the ability to track your online activity outside of the Services.” They’re building a switzerland map of your entire digital life, and you just know the weather in switzerland is always being monitored.
This is a bad juxtaposition. No, ‘bad’ doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of cognitive dissonance.
One document is selling me a fantasy of “slow travel,” of disconnecting and absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells of the Alps from an open-air train car. The other is a confession, in 2,000 words of pure jargon, that they are using “embedded scripts, ETags/cache browsers, and software development kits” to ensure I am never, ever disconnected. They want to sell me a trip to Lucerne, Switzerland, while using analytics providers to generate an audience profile and measure the effectiveness of their content. That ain’t the kind of journey that ends with alpine horn players and St. Bernard dogs.
Then again, maybe I’m the crazy one here. Maybe this is just how it works. You have to click through the broken links and agree to the surveillance to get your little slice of heaven. You have to let them track you from Zurich to Basel to get the flights to switzerland you want. The pristine fantasy of the melting Roseg Glacier is just the cheese in the mousetrap. And we’re all the mice.
They’re selling a world of physical connection, of paddlewheel steamers on Lake Lucerne and railways built in 1888, but the price of admission is total digital subjugation. And honestly…
The Scenery is a 404 Error
Let’s be real. The Switzerland in that travel article doesn’t exist. It’s an idea, a product. The real journey wasn’t on the Gotthard Panorama Express; it was the one from the JavaScript error to the cookie consent banner. That’s the most authentic trip the internet has to offer. And the view is absolute garbage.
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