24 hours of tension and stress when my #Luggage was lost or stolen at a train station in #Zurich, Switzerland with my passport and computer inside, in a country I didn't know and whose trust famed for its extraordinary safety.
This #odyssey I started when I decided to visit my best friend who was on exchange in Lucerne, Switzerland. Plan and buy my plane tickets to spend a weekend with Vicks and see Zurich.
I took a flight from Madrid and landed in fondue country early in the morning, where I met Vicks who picked me up from the airport. Being a very short trip, I only had a carry-on suitcase and a bag with my personal items and my computer.
We planned to spend the day getting to know Zurich and at night take a train to #Lucerne, where Vicky was living. So we decided to store my suitcase in a security locker at the train station. In a hurry and to not carry so much weight, I decided to keep my bag inside the suitcase along with my computer and change it for a smaller bag that I had saved. In this last change and without realizing it, I put my wallet in the big bag with my passport inside the suitcase.
We are talking about a state-of-the-art locker, Swiss!, which worked by entering the compartment you are going to use on the screen, which automatically closes, charges you around 5 Swiss francs and prints a QR code to open it at the end. Anyway, we closed it and went to meet Vicky's friends to walk around Zurich. It is worth mentioning that weeks in advance we had already bought the #train to return to Lucerne at 7:30 pm that day (which was not cheap, nothing was cheap in Switzerland).
We walked through the streets of the city, ate tacos and visited a beautiful viewpoint in the historic center. Our day was spent in rain, rainbows and technical pit-stops for hot chocolate in Christmassy and cozy cafes. Around 6:40 we called it a day and headed to the train station to have time to pick up my suitcase and catch the train.
Everything was going great until we approached the lockers, we presented the QR, I paid an extra 3 francs for having spent a lot of time and we proceeded to open the locker. The image of 6 women looking at a completely empty locker, 20 minutes after our train left, is indescribable.
For several minutes I went into shock, I didn't understand what was happening, Vicky activated her mother mode, and began looking for the receipt and for someone who worked at the station to help us find out what was happening. We did not know if someone had stolen the suitcase, which seemed quite impossible given that it is Swiss and they have a reputation for being one of the safest countries in the world, not to mention that the lockers could only be opened with the corresponding QR that each one had.
We all went into a state of panic, running around the station looking for a customer service position, but to our bad luck EVERYTHING in the station closed at 7 at night (it was already around 7:10) and nobody he understood us. A chaos between that no one spoke German or French, people did not understand how a suitcase was not in the locker, they told us that we had made a mistake, we were sure that we were not wrong.
A woman from customer service (Dietche) attended us, while the three of us spoke to her in English and Spanish and almost yelled what had happened to us and that our train was leaving in 10 minutes. It was at that moment when he asked me what my suitcase contained, that everything fell silent on me and I remembered that my passport was also inside my suitcase. Passport that I needed in two days to be able to fly back to Madrid and leave the country.
Between everyone's crying, stress, worry, and nervous laughter, they told us that the only solution was to wait until the station's baggage office opened the next day at 8 in the morning, we would go to it and present ourselves. a lost baggage report. To top off the wave of feelings at the moment, the employee told us that the locker was most likely not closed properly and that someone had removed the suitcase. This had two possible scenarios: an official found it and took it to the baggage office (which we couldn't go to since it had closed 15 minutes ago) or that the locker didn't close and someone stole the suitcase…
We decided to run and catch our train and return the next morning to Zurich (we had to buy a 50 CHF train for 8 am, around 60 euros🫠) and ask again at the baggage office. The 40-minute walk to Lucerne was full of tension, resignation and fear, somehow I still did not understand the fact that I had lost my passport and my computer, the computer that was less than 1 year old and the passport without which I could not leave. of the country, without at least carrying out a thousand and one procedures (taking into account that it was the weekend and nothing works in Europe, I could not travel on Sunday as planned).
We arrived in Lucerne and took a bus to the girls' residence. Vicky and Dalia had to lend me both pajamas and clothes to wear the next day since I had absolutely nothing. We went to bed praying that my suitcase would be there the next day, but with the resigned thought that there was a good chance that it would not show up and we would have to file a police report.
The next morning we woke up waiting for the call from Dietchie The clerk who had helped us, who told us that she would call us as soon as she came into work and checked the lost and found. At 8 am he called us and with you embarrassed, he told us that the suitcase was not there and that we had to go to Zurich to file the complaint.
40 minutes of travel later and we arrived at the station and in the baggage office we explained everything that had happened to us the night before to a worker, who understood us little and said that these things did not happen in Switzerland. He told us that they had not brought any luggage, at that moment, behind some shelves I recognized the side of my suitcase that is full of stickers and is red, I began to scream and tell the lady that this was my suitcase, I was screaming joy, Vicky and I couldn't believe it.
After a long paperwork to prove it was my suitcase and paying another 20 francs for spending the night in the hold (I know absurd 🙄). They gave me my suitcase, intact, with all its contents, my passport and my computer.
Moral of the story, when our mothers told us never to leave the passport or valuables anywhere, in suitcases or in hotels, LISTEN TO THEM they are right, you should never leave your passport when you are traveling somewhere place that is not with you, of course in some places it is not very safe, but one of the most prosperous and safe countries in the world is not safe either.
And no, to this day we still don't know what happened to the suitcase that night, the officials couldn't explain how a locker could be opened, and they don't know how the suitcase ended up in the office's storage room either, but hey , we recovered it and the trip continued wonderfully... Well until the return, when my train broke down and I almost missed the flight, but this is a story for another time.
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