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The old city of Zurich has narrow winding streets, tallish buildings, and lots of churches — the usual old world stuff. The lake and river are very clear clean — people are fishing from the bridges and we assume they plan on eating their catch. There are fresh vegetable markets on the street. We suppose they are the Saturday markets.
Reg discovers that old Levi jeans are selling for 79francs! We could have financed out travels if we had thought to bring some.
The weather today is cloudy and 70ish. Reg is in jeans and a jacket today rather than the light summer clothes. It even spittled rain for a while, but not enough to get wet. Reg walks back from downtown following the route of our tram. It's a pleasant walk but quite far.
Our friend Martin, who we visit later on this trip, has suggested that we take the boat tour on the lake. We three end up doing it together on the last day before we leave for Hamburg. There's also a mountain peak near Adliswil, where we are staying, and on a good day you should have a great view of the city. However, when is there a good day? Today isn't.
Kate and Cindy had a full day at the conference and we met back at our hotel around 6:00. Reg even got to nap a bit in the afternoon. The girls have been up since 8:00am or so as they've taken a 8:45 shuttle bus to the conference. They are both pretty wired and we have a few drinks (of our Duty-Free supplies) in our room before deciding on dinner. Some of the boys from the conference are downtown for dinner at a club. We hear later that it was mostly a bar with not much dinner.
We were going to eat at our motel restaurant (the Jolie Ville) but it seemed awfully smoky so we wandered down the street a bit to a big Mövenpick restaurant with a huge chicken statue out front. There's not much of anything near our motel so this will have to do. The restaurant is ever so busy and the maître de ("herr uber") tells us there are no tables. The supposition seems to be "Go away, come back another day!". The usual friendly Swiss attitude.
But we persist and ask to wait at the bar. "Sure", he says. It's a tiny bar more for serving drinks for the wait staff than for customers sitting but we hunker down with some drinks. Kate and Cindy order some Swiss white wine from the Mövenpick cellars (it has a frog on the label). It has a nice nose but it's very thin. If there are good Swiss wines we've yet to find them.
When we are seated for our dinner the menu is in German only with very little that we can fathom. We know this restaurant specializes in chicken, but what of all this on the menu is chicken? With our phrase books we can figure out the potato soup, salad, beef steak, but not much more. So we appeal to our waiter for some help with the menu but he doesn't speak any English. So he summons a colleague who can help. The colleague translates the menu to us and explains several dishes. For example: "carpaccio" is thinly sliced meat and it's always raw, "lochs" means salmon as in bagels and loxs. "Yes, ok. But which of these are chicken?", we ask. Well, it turns out that pretty much everything else either is or has chicken — even the lasagna!
Reg orders the specialty — a chicken roasted especially for you in the herb of your choice. He orders a 400g chicken with rosemary. There is a bigger size but he figures that will do. Kate and Cindy have potato soup and a green salad as they're not so hungry having had a biggish lunch at the workshop (the salad consists of some chopped up iceberg lettuce and a slice of tomato — pretty minimal). The salad hardly compares to the Greek salad we had on our first day at the train station. Nevertheless their dinner's cost about 10 francs. Reg's dinner, at 21 francs, should be much more substantial — after all it's a whole chicken!
The waiter puts a big bib (i.e. a napkin) around Reg's neck and serves his chicken ("roasted especially for you with the herb of your choice"). This is quite the disappointment. A 400g chicken is about the size of a pigeon. If you had eaten the egg rather than hatch the bird you would have had more to eat. And, to top it off, the chicken is served bare with nothing else! Just some rosemary sprigs baked with it. This was not quite the deal we were expecting. It's definitely not the Swiss Chalet we have back home — it costs so much for so little.
However the desserts look great. They keep coming out with these ice cream concoctions piled high. Perhaps the desserts are the real deal at this restaurant.
You will recall that we went to this restaurant because the one in our hotel was quite smoky. It turns out the Mövenpick was quite smoky as well. People seem to smoke wherever they choose — probably to control their hunger. When talking to Jurgen a couple of days later, he told us that the rate of smoking had gone from 31% to 37% in Switzerland. Some of the newspapers were attributing the change to there being too many smoking regulations (not that we've noticed any regulations!). Apparently, the Swiss, being a "freedom loving people", reacted to the smoking regulations by more people taking up smoking! That sounds like a pretty dumb thing to do. We thought the Swiss were supposed to be smarter than that.
After our modest dinner we walked back to our motel and met up with our friend Martin Plant (from Edinburgh ARG). We had a drink with him in the bar where we had an English speaking waiter. Kate and Reg stayed up late phoning colleagues back home. None were at home but ultimately they reach Jack and Doreta. They paid dearly the next day for these transatlantic phone calls.
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