First Day - Zurich

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We arrived at the Zurich airport on the morning of Thursday June 2 after a fairly uneventful overnight flight from Toronto on Air Canada. Finding our bags and leaving the airport went smoothly and quickly. We got a cab right away and headed to our motel. The airport is to the north and east of the city center, our motel and the conference are to the south and west of the city center. Contrary to what Elliott has claimed, everyone does not speak English! Our cabbie didn't, for example. However, we communicated as best we could and made it okay, although traffic was heavy at times. It ended up costing us over 70f (the Swiss franc and dollar are very close).

Our conference motel, the Jolie Ville (an oddly French name for a German area), is in the suburbs in the outskirts of a village called Adliswil which is a little to the south of Zurich with the Zurichsee (ie. Lake Zurich) down hill to the east. Reg and Kate sensibly went to sleep for a few hours to recover from the overnight flight while Cindy walked into the village — famously Cindy "didn't sleep a wink!"

Around 2:30 in the afternoon we headed into the Zurich city center by the local/city bus and tram service. That seemed to work pretty well and only cost 3.20f. Getting into the city is easy. We made our way to the main train station at Bahnhofplatz to find out about trains to Interlaken (a colleague has suggested to Kate that we visit Interlaken and Brienz which are to the south and west via Lucerne). We also wanted to get the scoop on using our European Rail passes. 

We had dinner at an outdoor café part which was part of a restaurant at the train station. We all had a Greek salad which was really good! Near the end of the meal it began to rain heavily and we had to try to crowd under the umbrella that only partly covered us.

As predicted by Cindy and Pat, but not by CAA, Zurich was hot and humid. No one told the Zurichers, although the three Canadians were dressed in light summer clothes and sweating, most people we saw were wearing sweaters and jackets! Now we understand why our friend from Switzerland dresses that way. 

Before leaving the train station we stumbled into a post office. Seizing the moment Cindy and Kate got in line to buy some stamps to send postcards back to family and friends in Canada. The plan was to buy 5 for Cindy and another 25 for Kate. On finding out that stamps cost 1.80f per postcard Kate reduced her request considerably. The girls decided that some economizing was needed, so whenever we saw a fancy hotel we would visit the lobby in search of free postcards. None were found although one hotel lobby had free apples!

We walked along the Bahnhofstrasse shopping area and saw many expensive stores — Cartier, Gucci, Rolex, diamonds, banking, etc. Not a K-mart in sight! We continued on down to the nearby lake, Zurichsee, which was very pretty. The water looked really clean but there didn't appear to be anyone swimming. We guess it's too cold! The lake would be fed from the snow fields you could see on high on the mountains framing the lake. 

We decided to head back to our hotel and encountered our first major roadblock of the day. The transit system has these complicated self-serve machines where you buy your tickets. You purchase a pass, the driver just drives, it's an honor system with an occasional ticket inspector to catch those who have failed to purchase a pass. The machines have instructions in several languages (German, French, Italian, English, etc.) but you need to know the name of the stop/area you're going to. We went to buy our passes for the tram and bus ride back but couldn't find any place name that we thought would be the appropriate fare (in the picture above it's clear the stop is "Sunnau"). As we puzzled on this one, it started to pour and the tram arrived. So we got on the tram without our tickets abusing the honor system. "But we're dumb tourists, what could we do? "

We later found out that, "Most tourists don't pay — they just hop on!" Or so says a friend from WHO in Geneva.

We really wanted to pay so when we got to the place where you transfer from the tram to the bus, we again tried to figure out the machine. We even asked some people how it worked but they didn't speak English as was quite common — never believe Elliot. Eventually we seemed so pathetic that one of the non-English speakers came to help us. Then a younger woman who did speak some English came and put in her two cents, eventually suggesting that we asked the bus driver which we did. He seemed to think that we were out of our minds or incredibly stupid but managed to help us get a better grasp of the system.

There's about 100 years of schooling amongst these three travelers (counting folk dance and Mexican cooking classes) and they couldn't figure out the bus system! Oh well, it all worked out well enough and we even talked to one of Kate's colleagues from Canada who had exactly the same experience. Kate added a note to the diary that actually it probably didn't work out — on examining the system again the next day we probably paid for a short trip but when we stayed on two extra stops we went into a different zone and ought to have paid more.

We rode the bus into the village of  Adliswil and walked around the village. We went to an Italian restaurant and sat outside to have a drink. Reg had a local merlot which was vintage last Thursday (they do make wine locally but it's marginal at best). Kate had a beer which was pretty good and Cindy had some bottled water,  "No, you can't have tap water. You have to pay 3.50f to have a glass of bottled water." Are they always this accommodating in Switzerland?

We felt pretty comfortable with our newfound skill with the transit system and had it all figured out how and when we would go out to catch the bus back to our motel. But then a gale force wind came up and a downpour hit the area throwing around the table cloths, tables and chairs, and creating quite a ruckus. We ran inside to seek some shelter and Reg figured out how to ask the waiter, who also didn't speak English, to call us a cab. The waiter knew enough universal language to tell Reg that he needed some money to make the call, so Reg gave him 2f. Eventually, the taxi came and took us back to the motel quickly and efficiently. The taxi ride was about 10f and it cost 5f as soon as you got in the cab

So that was our first eventful day in Zurich, Switzerland. Transit systems can be complicated, the wines are marginal, nothing is free and many things are quite expensive.

Slides scanned and notes composed during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, March 2022 — as if living through the OMIGOD! COVID variant wasn't bad enough! The diary entries were made by Cindy, Kate and Reg at the time.