My 35th Birthday in Switzerland

Last year, I stumbled into Geneva like a man walking into a well-made watch—everything precise, everything ticking in harmony. Four days was all I had, just enough to taste the air and realise I hadn’t even scratched the surface. Switzerland isn’t just mountains and lakes; it’s a place where snow crowns the peaks like a blessing and the water is so clean it reflects your face with an unsettling honesty. The towns feel hand-painted, the streets lined with quiet perfection, and time here is not wasted—it is respected. Now I’m back, older by a year, hungrier for the country’s undercurrents. Zurich will be my base, but the real gift for my 35th birthday will be in the journeys outward—to the smaller places where trains whisper through valleys and life feels both deliberate and infinite.

My trip to Switzerland began the way too many stories in the aviation world do — with a missed connection in a place that already feels like limbo. Dubai was a haze of heat and glass, the air thick enough to slow your thinking. Knowing the industry didn’t help; it only sharpened the edges. You stop being a passenger and start reading the omens: the delay, the missed boarding, the dominoes falling. I finally understood that ignorance is bliss. Emirates took care of the bills, but my neatly plotted itinerary had been amputated. At the counter, a Filipino ground crew listened to my pitch — push my return flight back so I could have nine days in Zurich instead of a frantic dash through the Alps. She grinned, tapped a few keys, and handed me back the rest of my trip. I stayed in a hotel near the airport, where I dined well and refused to step outside into the oven.

The next day, Zurich — precise as a Swiss watch, framed by lakes and mountains like a postcard that dared to be real. And here was the twist that made the detour worth it: a ride on the Airbus A380, that floating cathedral of aviation, where I swapped jokes and small talk with two Filipino flight attendants somewhere over Europe. The thing about travel is that the map is a liar — the best parts are never where you planned them to be. Sometimes they’re found in the spaces between flights, in overheated hotels, and brief conversations at thirty-eight thousand feet.

Diego, a friend I first met years ago in Kota Kinabalu, picked me up at the airport and drove me out to Uster, where I would spend the next nine days. After settling in, we went to the Air Force Center in Dübendorf. It was less a museum than a meditation on the weight of the past: the warplanes parked as if still waiting for orders, the missile launchers and radar consoles mute but not silent. Stepping into the JU-Air, I felt its gravity—not the physics of metal and fuel, but the accumulation of stories, missions flown, and losses remembered. For anyone with a love of aviation, it was a reminder that flight is not only about ascension and escape; it is also about what is carried along, what cannot be left behind.

Later, we returned to the house, changed, and went to a vast sports hall where Diego climbs walls with the routine of habit. He does this three times a week, and I agreed to try, without much thought or preparation. The walls looked improbable, sheer and unforgiving, but I surprised myself by making it up a few routes before slipping back down. The experience was less about achievement than discovery—the way the body negotiates with gravity, the mind with fear. I noticed how natural it seemed to the locals, their commitment to striking a balance between effort and leisure, turning exercise into a quiet ritual. It struck me that here, living well meant not grand gestures, but small, steady acts of persistence.

The next morning, we drove south, winding through mountains, slipping past glassy lakes and deep valleys until we reached Diego’s hometown of Vals. A village of barely a thousand souls, folded neatly into the valley, it felt less like a real place and more like a sketch from a storybook—something too picturesque to exist outside of imagination. You half expect Belle to come wandering out with a basket of bread. By nine in the evening, the light still lingered, refusing to surrender. The streets were hushed, the kind of silence that presses on your chest in the best way—after weeks of noise and motion, it was the quiet I didn’t know I was desperate for.

In Switzerland, hiking isn’t just recreation—it’s religion. Kids, grandmothers, accountants, bakers, all of them lace up their boots and hit the trails like it’s second nature. Diego assured me the route we were taking would take us ninety minutes, “like a walk in the park.” Easy for a guy who treats summits like morning jogs. I, on the other hand, was wheezing, gasping at 7,600 feet, legs heavy, lungs protesting. The trail stretched, time slowed, and ninety minutes turned into two grinding hours. But then we crested, and the world opened up. The reservoir lay before us, immense and glimmering, as if to say: all that sweat, all that breathlessness—this is what you came for.

Sundays in Zürich feel like the city has slipped out the back door and left you with the keys. Shops are shuttered, trams run half-empty, and the streets look like they’re waiting for Monday to come back. Diego went off to sweat through his morning, and I decided not to waste the weather. I walked to Lake Greifensee.

The lake was awake in its own way—runners pounding the path, couples sprawled on blankets, kids orbiting parents with half-eaten ice cream cones. It wasn’t crowded, just quietly occupied. I found a strip of rock by the water and sat down. Headphones in, music up, watching the light catch on the ripples. For once, I let the thoughts arrive uninvited and pass without argument.

Nothing remarkable happened, and maybe that was the point. Travel isn’t always cathedrals and clock towers, postcards and bucket lists. Sometimes it’s sitting still, staring at a lake, doing absolutely nothing, and realizing that’s exactly what you needed. A rest day, stolen back from the itinerary.

Growing up in Southeast Asia, where skylines sprout overnight like mushrooms after rain, Europe felt like a counterargument. Here, towers don’t compete for the clouds—most cities frown at the idea of glass scraping the sky. Instead, they preserve what’s already standing, as if the past is too valuable to bulldoze. Zürich is no exception; it wears its history not like a relic, but like a well-tailored suit that never goes out of style.

And of course, the checklist items call your name: a slow loop around the lake, letting the city unfold from the water; a pilgrimage to the Lindt museum, where sugar and marketing fuse into something almost holy. The views are perfect, the chocolate indecently good. You can call it tourist bait, and you’d be right—but it’s still worth the bite.

Zürich will empty your wallet with the quiet confidence of a casino that never loses. The Swiss franc swells with the smugness of a banker, yet somehow you don’t mind. The trains move with the accuracy of an atomic clock, the coffee hits you like a small act of violence, and the city gives you room to breathe. I ate well, drank better, met friends I’d missed and strangers I’ll never meet again.

Birthdays usually drag me into that familiar spiral—time running out, life thinning at the edges. But in Zürich, the message was different. The city whispered to slow down, watch the lake, taste the chocolate, and raise a glass before the trail disappears behind you.

Nine days in Switzerland, and it felt both like a lifetime and a fleeting moment. I hadn’t expected to enjoy it this much, and perhaps that was the lesson—that at thirty-five, on the very day the Swiss themselves celebrated their founding, I found myself quietly celebrating my own. It wasn’t just about seeing mountains and lakes, or ticking names off a map. It was about old friends, the comfort of their company, the unexpected stories of strangers, and the reminder that we measure our lives not by what we collect, but by what we hear, share, and hold on to.

For years, this trip had been no more than a distant dream, too improbable to take seriously. But dreams have a way of becoming real when you let them linger long enough. Standing there, in all those towns and lakesides, I felt both the weight of the years behind me and the strange lightness of knowing that, against odds, I had made it here.

At Zürich Airport, waiting for departure, the truth of endings revealed itself most simply. The sun slid down the horizon, staining the steel and glass with a brief brilliance of orange and red before dissolving into shadow. It was a performance with no encore, a light show that faded just as quickly as it had come. Like the trip itself, it reminded me that everything—joy, wonder, even beauty—has its limits. That is what gives them their meaning.

And so I left, knowing I would return, though not in the same way. Because the Switzerland I carry home will never be the Switzerland I find again. Places are never finished, only interrupted. What remains are fragments: a conversation, a taste, a view from a train window. Travel changes you, but it also reminds you: every ending, however brief or bittersweet, is already the beginning of another story.