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Zürich, Switzerland
The title of this entry refers to how I saw Zurich. It was pretty expensive, pretty annoying to get around, pretty entertaining with signs saying, "Fahrt" everywhere, pretty much nothing to do, but nearly everything there was just pretty.
The EuRail passes finally worked! Our journey from Rome to Zurich was pretty smooth other than the Italian border control searching Alex for drugs, but there is not much to that story considering they didn't find anything. Once we arrived in Zurich we converted money to the pretty Swiss francs, reserved seats for a train to Munich, and found our way to Winterthur where my mom's coworker's sister, Laura, lives.
Laura's daughter Melissa picked us up at the train station and helped Alex and I get settled. We had an air mattress and another regular mattress set up for us in Laura's other daughter's room from when she lived there. The apartment was small but had everything we needed including a dishwasher that was so good one apparently does not have to rinse their plate before putting in. I guess that isn't too interesting to most people but it blows my mind.
The next day we left the apartment and went to Zurich in the late afternoon and went to see what the city had to offer. This is the one place we've been to so far where things looked further away on the map than they actually were. We saw all the architectural sites we wanted to see and went to the Kunsthaus museum, but didn't go in to the exhibitions.
So then we walked around a little making our way to the university to see if there were inexpensive places to eat or drink. No such luck with that, the places around the university were just as pricey as everywhere else, so Alex and I headed back to the train station and stopped to eat along the way.
The meal we had was nothing to rave about, but the apple juice I got was delicious. It was carbonated and tasted better than the American juice I am accustomed to. I would rank it 3rd in apple juice number 1 is Japanese which is by far the best.
After eating we decided to finally take advantage of being on a continent without open container laws, so we grabbed a six pack and sat on a bench on an island in the middle of an intersection and entertained ourselves. Eventually I had to use the bathroom really badly, and no public toilet was in sight so I went to the Starbucks across the street. There was a man waiting for the bathroom who noticed that there was a code to get in. He got it from the counter, which was helpful because I was not about to buy a 10chf coffee so I could have a place to pee. The code is 4711 just in case anyone reading this is in Zurich about two blocks from the train station and has to use the men's room.
The next day Alex and I went to see Reichenbach falls which is the site of Sherlock Holmes' vanquishing of Professor Moriarty and his own presumed death. It was a three hour train ride through the Alps with beautiful views of the Swiss countryside.
When we finally reached Maringe no one we spoke to knew how to get to the falls. Even at the small Holmes museum the person at the desk sold Alex a combined ticket for the falls lift and the museum and was only able to point and say that way. After walking in a big circle around the town we found the lift to the falls. I got a ticket up and I decided I would walk back after.
We got up and the falls were pretty cool but not the most impressive, what was impressive however was the view of the town. Alex and I made our way to the top and then to the site of the Holmes- Moriarty fight. While there we had a photo shoot of us fighting using the selftimer on Alex's camera. Even before we started we knew it was a bad idea, the metal barrier was a little less than waist high making it pretty easy to fall. Alex had been annoying me so I pushed him off and made it look like an accident then headed down the mountain back to town.
Once I got through the forest part of the mountain there was a field with a house or two and what I like to call a Swiss minefield. I had no choice but to walk about half a kilometer of grass with cow and sheep crap littering the ground. I don't mean like every meter or so, I mean every step I made had to be carefully calculated to keep my sneakers the most clean.
I got to the road and made it down the rest of the mountain to the town. Nothing really interesting here, it turns out Alex survived so I just sat around waiting for him to see the museum and I got some weird Goldfish that were "Original" flavor but were like half pretzel and looked strange.
We returned to Zurich around 9 at night and looked for a supermarket so we could do our public six pack. Once we bought one we went to a modern sculpture between two buildings. I was on the phone for a few minutes with Andrea who had just been awarded sweetheart of Sigma Pi and was, let's just say, not so easy to hold a conversation with.
When we decided to leave Alex wanted to go to the Hooters, we think the only Hooters in Switzerland. So we got there, it was in a part of town that contained many strip clubs and if there was ever going to be a homeless person in Zurich, he or she would probably have been here.
The Hooters was just as disappointing to me as every Hooters I've been to. Decent quality food at a price that would make you believe otherwise with waitresses who think they are better looking than they are just because they work at Hooters. The only consolation to this meal of incredibly expensive nachos was the nostalgia of watching a live college football game at around midnight.
And now the sad part of the story...
We left Hooters and headed toward the train station, I checked the schedule and we had 10 minutes to catch the Winterthur train or else we would have to wait another hour. I said this to Alex and I hurried up while he didn't. The train got there and I didn't see him, but I figured he would get on so I got on myself. Uneventful trainride and then got off at Winterthur station and I looked for the connection to Seen. There was none. The trains to Seen had stopped two hours before.
I looked around the station for Alex, but he was nowhere to be seen. I asked someone how to get to Seen and they said it was really far, no help, so I called Laura and she said the only logical way to get back would be to take a cab. So I was alone at the train station and I didn't want to take a cab without Alex, but then I also didn't know if he was here, in Zurich, or if he found his own way back. My plan was to wait for the next train to come in from Zurich which would be about half an hour, but then when I got back to the track I saw Alex walking by himself. I got him and told him the situation and we took a cab back to the Seen train station where we could walk back to Laura's from.
Sunday was not so eventful. Alex and I slept in and then stayed at the apartment most of the day until about 5 o'clock when we accompanied Laura to her office to help move some things and then to the supermarket in the airport mall.
For dinner she made us a traditional Swiss meal called Ractelette which features ractelette cheese and a ractelette grill. Basically one puts the cheese on the grill and waits for it to melt while setting up his or her plate with potatoes, tomatoes, sausage, other vegetables, and whatever tastes good with cheese. It was an amazing meal, we ate until there was nothing left and no room in my stomach. After eating Alex and I watched The Incredible Hulk seeing as it was the only movie on in English, which was more than enough entertainment for me considering the day/ night before.
On Monday Melissa dropped Alex and I off in downtown Winterthur where we walked along a main shopping strip, stopped by two small parks, and found a gift for Laura. At dinner the night before Laura had mentioned that she would like a cat, but she wouldn't want to keep it indoors all the time; therefore, our goal in a gift was to get her some sort of cat.
We went into a toy store where they had some stuffed animal cats, but they were expensive WWF toys, so we moved on. Then there was a cosmetics store we walked into because there was a cat statue in the front window. It was affordable, but not the prettiest thing to put in one's home, it was also a little big. Finally we went to a store that had a lot of art and basically home decorating accessories, mostly from the middle east, where we could not get away from cat statues. This store was a gem, there was nothing that logically matched its price tag as in I would expect to pay almost double for most of the things I saw, especially considering it was in Switzerland. I would have gone to town buying things if I didn't have to take them all with me across Europe and if I had more than ten francs left.
This night was pretty easy going again, Alex and I were alone and we each made our own dinners and stayed in.
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