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My favourite looking church steeple
With the biggest clock face in Europe This is where all the beautiful and the wealthy live. It is a beautiful city with a stunning lakeside location, and bordering mountains, very similar to Queenstown. The lake is amazingly clear - and cold. It made us think of home, looking out over the glittering big expanse of water.
There are beautifully sculpted drink fountains all over town pouring out icy cold presumably fresh spring water. It’s just what’s needed in this hot weather.
Cars are the main mode of transport here, and no expense has been spared on those cars. The speed boats on the lake are equally as flashy. The majority of the cyclists here are the lycra wearing kind or fully kitted out mountain bikers.
The shopping has been refreshingly different although expensive. All the chains we’ve been used to seeing are absent (yay), and there are a lot of good boutiques. All the big name labels (Channel etc) have a presence here at the lake end of the shopping strip Bahnhofstrasse which we could only afford to window shop at. Every second shop also seemed to be a watch shop, but I guess it is Switzerland. The only shop I noticed selling swiss
army knives was the one tacky souvenir shop. The best boutiques were in the old area (another UNESCO world heritage site).
It seems as though shopping was the main tourist attraction here (other than a dozen or so not very exciting sounding museums), which suited us fine, except that one of our three days here was a Sunday and they were all shut! We spent the day wandering around, window shopping, and planning our attack for the next day. The one attraction we were interested in seeing was some recently (1980s) discovered ancient roman baths. We had trouble finding it as no map pinpointed it or showed where the street was, even google maps. After going round in circles we finally spotted the 2 metre wide alley between shops that was basically grilled flooring over a lot of old rocks. It required a lot of imagination and the pictures on the walls to visualise how the baths would have been.
One evening after tea we stopped at the ferris wheel near our hotel. It seemed like a good idea until we were getting to the top of it on the first round and I suddenly realised how high
we were. I was hoping the kids wouldn’t notice that our little pods could be spun around like those spinning rides at playgrounds. It did give us good views over Zurich though.
The food and menus had a noticeable difference to those in France. We were always offered English menus which was helpful given the big long unfamiliar German words. Veal was the preferred meat, and is particularly tasty with their lemon sauce. I also had a memorable lunch when we first arrived of prawns cooked in passionfruit with melon and coconut rice.
It was a nuisance to us that Switzerland was not part of the euro (which we hadn’t known), and we had to withdraw and get familiar with their swiss franc. It had unusually high values of coins so we were left with more money than we had realised at the end. To use up our left over coins we bought 7 bars of Toblerone on the train.
The Switzerland scenery was refreshing to watch on our train trip through to Lyon, passing through Bern, Geneva and Lucerne. Lots of lakes, mountains, vineyards, and even farms with cows (with bells around their necks).
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