Parcly Taxel: I had a lucid dream on my last night in Frankfurt. I found myself in a glistening pool of dark, viscous liquid, calm and refreshing but resisting my attempts at getting out of it. Beside the pool ran a row of houses, each with a different non-pony creature and particularly adapted to their ways of motion. For example, the lamia’s house had many tubes and tree trunks for snaking around.

Suddenly the dark liquid drained around me, coalescing into the Tantabus and leaving me in a convenient standing position. She walked to my side, asking “Would you like to return to Zürich for a night?”

I smiled at the amorphous being. “Yes.”

Her flowing mane and tail then wrapped around me like a veil of silk. I was wide awake the next moment.

Spindle: I learned later on that Princess Luna deliberately sent the Tantabus for Parcly for that exact purpose – to stay in Zürich for one night. After eating the Citadine’s hotel breakfast and checking out, we prepared our train tickets (bought the previous day) for ICE 277 to Basel SBB, which itself incurred a 15-minute delay due to maintenance works on the overhead power cable (enough to oblige Deutsche Bahn to issue delay notifications to passengers). This led into IC 3 direct to Zürich HB, which we got off at.

Parcly: After traversing the expansive rear concourse I let the earth pony magic in my hooves take me to a nearby hotel. I ended up in front of the Swiss Chocolate Hotel, where the Tantabus was chilling out beside a chocolate fountain, gazing gracefully at me while “levitating” a dipstick with the same cosmoplasm she was made of.

“I know you really love chocolate, so have a room here!” My face turned red all over in delight.

Spindle: This cheesy – or should I say milk-chocolatey – lodging stands as a wedge cleaving a narrow Y-junction about 100 m away from the Limmat. We had already visited this doubly rich city once to get impressed; now here a second time on short notice, all that remained was to wander into quieter gardens and retreats, unknown pleasures serving as musical encores.

One such retreat was in sight, the Platzspitz public park performing the opposite function to a cleave: here the Sihl tributary merges into the Limmat just after ducking under Zürich HB. It makes no big fuss about its particular geography or how its trees hardly block out noise from the surrounding roads and rails, though the rails squeal very little and both rivers’ breadths dampen honking to a fair degree. Instead it has just the typical features of a European public park: long sheltered walkways, sculpture fountains, a gazebo and plaques detailing what bird species may be found in the rivers.

Rainbow Dash: Another plaque there commemorates James Joyce’s time in Zürich and how the rivers found their way into Finnegans Wake:

What you won’t find there is that much later the Platzspitz became a drug-dealing ground, on which local authorities initially adopted a hooves-off policy. Of course this just worsened the decay of beautiful trees and the burden on emergency services, so at last the addicts were bucked out of there.

Parcly: My stomach then growled. Between Frankfurt and now there were only morsels of snacks and such entering said stomach, yet it never registered in my mind because it was swimming in greenery. Between my departing Canterlot and now… I had never walked into a supermarket either, which seemed to be a rare sight in European cities. Luckily there was one right next to the Chocolate Hotel, a branch of the Switzerland Coop.

Rainbow: Don’t tell me of the British one!

Parcly: Of course I won’t – the name is generic and the two co-operatives are totally unrelated. Anyway, in one section of the supermarket we found vegan salad bowls, ready-to-eat and just like what I’d seen many times in Japan (I am not vegan or vegetarian in real life), so with a hearty pony smile I proceeded to checkout, which implemented a lifehack: those triangular placards which say “counter closed” elsewhere instead delineate purchases. All in accordance with the co-operative’s slogan Für mich und dich. For me and you.

We ate the bowl, containing falafel and hummus, in the hotel and then ventured onto the Lindenhof, a raised part of the city with nebulous borders settled well before the birth of the Swiss Confederation. I took a long, good look at old Zürich from this vantage point, knowing that I definitely would be returning home tomorrow…

Pinkie Pie: Quit being so sentimental, thinking mare! Even if Luna’s nightmarish creature lured you here into this déjà vu, you’ll always have the photos to look back at, right?

Parcly: Sure, yes, alongside these travel notes (which I typed up all on my phone and kept there until I had time to draw the corresponding picture). But as I noted at the start of this trip, I had never been to any place as far out as Europe before, and so I wanted to bake this last panoramic view of staid, densely packed houses by a steady river as well as possible into my head. A view with my own eyes.

Pinkie: Okie, I’ll leave you at that. [whoosh!]

Tantabus: The genie alicorn doesn’t remember what she had for dinner that evening. Perhaps I rubbed it out of her dreams with my lusciously dark body, or she never had dinner at all in view of her large lunch.

In either case we had the night to ourselves in the Swiss Chocolate Hotel. Spindle sleeping in Parcly’s heart, I flipped the television channels until landing on ZDF and saw a UEFA Women’s Euro semifinal between France and Germany. Parcly was intrigued enough to watch it to its conclusion – 2-1 to Germany – by which time I had seeped into the half-windigo host’s subconscious again, warping and tinkering with her dreamscape as I wished.