Everyone told me Switzerland was expensive. They were right. But the best things — the lake, the mountains, the light — those were free.
Everyone told me Switzerland was expensive. My parents said it. My friends said it. The internet said it with alarming specificity: "Budget at least 200 francs a day." I had a hundred. Per week.
I was doing a semester abroad in Lucerne, which meant I had a student ID, a tiny room in a shared dorm, and the kind of budget that forces creativity. What it turns out to force, mostly, is slowness.
The first thing I learned: the lake is free. This sounds obvious, but it took me a while to understand what it meant. You can sit by Lake Lucerne for as long as you want — morning, afternoon, evening — and no one will ask you to buy anything. In summer, students swim off the promenade. In autumn, the mist sits low over the water until ten in the morning, and the mountains emerge from it gradually, like a thought you've almost finished thinking. I spent more time on that lakeside than I spent anywhere else in Europe, and I spent nothing.
The second thing I learned: Switzerland has a half-fare card. For a hundred francs, you buy a year of travel at half price on every train, bus, and boat in the country. On my budget, this was everything. It meant I could take the paddle steamer to Vitznau for six francs instead of twelve. It meant Pilatus, Rigi, the Glacier Express — not impossible, just carefully chosen. I picked one trip per month. I went slowly.
The Migros supermarket became a kind of ritual. Swiss supermarkets are, genuinely, excellent. The bread is from that morning. The cheese comes from the canton one valley over. The day-old section — marked with a yellow tag — is where I did most of my shopping, and there was nothing sad about it. I'd buy a half-price loaf, some cheese, and a bottle of Feldschlösschen, and I'd eat on a bench by the lake while the swans ignored me.
What I remember most, though, is the Tuesday mornings. My seminar started at noon, so I had time before it, and I started using that time deliberately: coffee from a bakery, then a slow walk across the Chapel Bridge, then along the lake toward the train station.
The hundred francs were always gone by Friday. I'm not going to romanticize that part. There were long weekends where dinner was cheap and I stayed at home instead of taking the train and didn't buy the coffee I wanted. Switzerland on a student budget has edges to it.
But here's what I know now, looking back: the constraint forced a kind of attention I wouldn't have paid otherwise. When you can only afford one boat trip, you look at the water very carefully. When you can't afford the tourist restaurant, you find the local one. When you have nowhere to be and nowhere to spend money, you sit by the lake until you know it well enough to miss it.
I missed it before I'd even left.