August 9 –
More rain as we awoke this morning but only drizzle so far. We breakfasted and headed out to explore more of Zürich. First on the agenda: find a laundromat! We checked with the tourist information stand in the main train station only to find out that there is only one in the city (?!?) and it is no where near the city center – or anything we are interested in. So it looks like clean laundry will have to wait until France. We then went to the rental car office nearby to make some changes to our reservation for Saturday. It turns out that we are leaving on the day of the biggest techno-rave in all of Europe! There’s a huge parade through the middle of Zürich and then there are parties all night long. So *that’s* why we couldn’t find a cheap hotel room in this town! So there will be many street closures and we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to get back from the rental car office to get to the hotel so we changed the place of pick-up to be closer to our hotel and away from all the party preparations. Whew!
Then it was museum time! We headed to the Swiss National Museum to see what we could learn about this country. What a place! We could have spent a week there and then probably still not seen everything. It suffered from what the kids called “no flow”: there wasn’t any logical progression through the exhibits which was a tad annoying. You start out in a series of rooms with religious art and artifacts from 800 AD through 1520 and then move on to the prehistoric rooms… There was some excellent displays of weaponry and costumes and a really cool tin soldier diorama of the battle of Morat from 1476. There were even loads of little tin dead guys! Other displays talked about the difference in Swiss life and worship before and after the Reformation. More really cool displays showed interior architecture common in middle class homes in the 17th century. One thing we all learned was that we need to learn more about European history!
Then it was time for lunch and we found ourselves in a European version of the Hard Rock Cafe – the beer was cold and the burgers were good and there was a huge plate of gummi bears from which you could help yourself! Yum! We contemplated visiting the clock and watch museum but became dubious when we found out it was inside a large jewelry store and they wanted 5 Francs each for us to go in…. hmmm….. so we wandered up the Bahnhoffstraße to get some chocolate instead!
We wandered around the old town for a while and visited St. Peter’s church – still in search of a candle to light in Switzerland – and found another alter-less edifice. Beautiful in its simplicity (great chandeliers!) but not a hint of stained glass to be seen.We did some more exploring and found some great views over the neighborhood houses down to the lake. Then we ventured back to the hotel for some down time.
Eventually it was time to eat so we wandered out to find something. An oddity we noticed is that every place we stopped at for dinner (that wasn’t way outside our price range) was mobbed but nowhere did we see families with children. In fact, when we stopped to think about it, we have hardly seen any children while in Zürich! There were a few at the museum today and there was a family at the table next to us at lunch yesterday but otherwise, we have seen hardly any kids! It was beginning to remind me of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! I was looking for the ugly dude with the lollipops who was luring them away! We eventually found a place that met both our stringent criteria – we could get a table and entrees were less than Fr. 50 – and we had a lovely meal. There was even one other person under 18 there! We thought maybe we had misjudged the city and that in fact they did not lock up their kids but then we realized that they were also tourists! So it remains a mystery why we don’t see any Swiss kids in Zürich restaurants…. (cue Twilight Zone music!)
/san/
[Pedometer: 27,507 or about 13.5 miles but no rain!]
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