Zurich

Okay, I am finally feeling a little bit more like myself. Jet lag is no joke. I wasn't sure how to start the travel tales, but I ended up deciding to start with the beginning (a very good place to start). We arrived, exhausted, in Zurich on June 7th. We had flown through CDG and then a small little plane into Zurich. Surprisingly, since the hour long flight was international, we were still served a meal. Our hotel was a walkable distance from the Bahnhof (train station) and very close to the Bahnhofstrasse. It was up a rather intense hill, which made lugging our bags to the door interesting. The hotel was called Hotel Kindli and had an attached restaurant (that we ate at for lunch on Saturday). 

The Swiss are apparently more patriotic about their flags than Americans, it seems, because they flew their flag absolutely everywhere. That was actually one of the striking things about Switzerland. You couldn't look in a single direction without seeing the Swiss flag.

This was the restaurant at the front of our hotel. Pretty cool, huh? I have no idea what the words say.

Zurich, as well as several other Swiss cities, had lots of fountains throughout the city. Which apparently sprouted clean drinking water, as we saw people drinking directly from them. Not something I was willing to try. Although, I must say that the tap water in Switzerland was fantastic.

I honestly have no idea what the story behind these flags was, but they were cool. This is the street leading to our hotel.

There was a lot of wealth in Switzerland, and especially Zurich. We saw many very fancy cars. J really enjoyed that.

St. Peter's church, Zurich. This is the largest church clock face in Europe. The Swiss are all about their clocks. More on that later...

This is one of the famous hotels in Zurich. The cost for hotels in Switzerland was steep. We stayed in some nice places, but even still.

The Limmat river runs through Zurich and divides the city.

The Grossmunster church.

We walked up to the Grossmunster, which had some pretty impressive architecture.

We were getting pretty worn out at that point, so we went to dinner. J and I decided to split a pot of fondue. At this point, I discovered that I am not a huge cheese fondue fan. J loved it and ate the whole pot. Yes, I know I am weird for not liking fondue. After getting what would be one of my only nights of solid sleep (I'll explain that one later), we walked around the Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world's most expensive shopping streets. This is because of all of the jewelry and watch stores.

You probably can't read the price tags, but they ranged from 1,000 CHF (Swiss francs, 1 CHF ~ 1 USD) to around 70,000 CHF. Needless to say, we did not buy a watch over there.

Train station.

J and I got a good kick out of this sign. If you are a Game of Thrones fan, you will get the reference, especially with the recent Red Wedding episode. We decided that might not be the best place to do banking. :)

We saw a lot of banks and "private banks" in Zurich and all of the major Swiss cities.

Since it was Saturday, there was an open-air market, which seemed to be the Swiss equivalent of a yard sale. People were selling all sorts of things. I was tempted on a few pieces of china, but I decided it would be too difficult to get them back to the U.S. without breaking.

Lake Zurich.

Bride (who seemed to be having a cigarette break. Man, the Europeans smoke a lot).

Kind of hard to tell, but lots of German cars in one parking lot.

Zurich ended up being a rather small town, that was easy to see in the one day we had there. All of the historic parts were easily walkable. After lunch, we set off for Luzern/Lucerne, which I will cover in my next post.