European Extravaganza Days 11-13: Zurich, Switzerland

We arrived in Zurich, Switzerland at 7:00pm on Monday evening. We jumped in a taxi only to have a disastrous taxi ride with a man who spoke little English, got us completely lost, and then continued driving us in circles for 40 minutes telling us that the address we wanted to get to didn’t exist, before finally driving us back to the train station and charging us an astronomical amount for it. Ugh. We then got into another taxi, made sure the driver knew where he was going, and arrived in a little less than 15 minutes. Hooray! Unfortunately, we were supposed to meet Ramon at our hotel at 8pm, and it was now close to 8:30pm. (I forgot to mention: Ramon was meeting us in Zurich! He is studying in Madrid for part of the summer, so he traveled between the end of the London semester and the beginning of the Madrid semester. He went to Belgium first to visit his sister who is studying there, and then met up with us in Zurich, which was nice. Yay!)

So, after finally arriving at the hotel, being told that Ramon had stopped by looking for us, and then getting all checked-in, we headed to our real hotel (in the satellite location). As we were walking down the street, someone called out “Alex!” and we found Ramon sitting outside of a café . He came with us to our hotel, where we dropped our bags and then headed out to dinner. (I swear we do more in these cities than eat.) We ate at a place called the Beerhall, where I had some spaghetti Bolognese and a pint of Swiss beer (which was pretty good). Afterwards, we headed back to our hotel because we were tired from our 9-hour train ride. Sleep is good. (We also had the comfiest bed in the world in Zurich. It was huge and fluffy and comfy. Aaaaah.)

Tuesday morning, we met Ramon outside our hotel at 11:15am. We went to Starbucks for coffee and breakfast, and then went to Banhoffstrauss, the main shopping street/district in Zurich. Alex and I were determined to get Swatches, so we searched for a Swatch outlet. We finally found one and each came home with one (or two, in my case) lovely Swatch watches – yay! (And I know you were wondering, so one of mine is brown leather straps with a light blue/brown watch head that is very classy-looking . The other is rainbow-striped plastic with a fun rainbow watch head and cool hand-written looking numbers. It’s super fun.) After Swatch shopping, we got lunch at a Pizzeria (where I FINALLY found some decent-tasting ranch dressing at the salad bar, and thus had a giant salad for lunch – I was practically licking the plate). We then headed to Zurich’s history museum, where it had many  artifacts from ancient cultures, mostly of which were Chinese, Japanese, and African. We saw some really cool/scary African masks and sculptures, among many other things.

After the museum, it started to rain, so we caught the tram back to Banhoffstrausse to go to an observatory bar where you could see the whole city. Two (incredibly overpriced) bottles of (delicious) beer later, we headed back down to go to dinner. We searched for a long time for a place to eat before finally settling on an English pub. It was really nice because it was full of people who spoke English, and it had real pub food. We each ordered fish and chips, and although not as good as in London, it still hit the spot. It was also nice and comforting to be in the pub atmosphere again after being away from it for so long. I will really miss pubs when I go back to the US. After dinner we went out to a bar for a couple of hours because we weren’t ready for bed yet, and then we said our goodbyes to Ramon and headed back to our hotel to pack and go to sleep.