Europe Vacation - Zurich

Our next stop was Zurich. To be honest, I knew nothing about Zurich. I only knew it was in Switzerland and going to Switzerland seemed awesome. Switzerland, by the way, is country #19 together. I should have done a little more research about the place, though, before we went. We did have some friends who went a couple of weeks before us and informed us that it was expensive. While we completely believed them, I didn't know just how right they were.

Again, I really knew nothing about Zurich. After doing some research, I found that most of the "tourist sites" were within walking distance of each other downtown. There was also a mountain that we could go up. Perfect! It wouldn't take long to sightsee. That meant that we could spend some time working on homework and not feel too guilty.

Because of our friends, we learned that our EU SIM cards would not work in Zurich. Bummer! I thought we would be able to roam, but that was not the case. Oh well. We've gotten by before. Plus, airports usually have free wifi. Before getting to Zurich, we pulled up a map and directions of how to get to our hotel from the airport. We went from the airport to the main metro station (with some slight aggravation). Once we got to the main metro station, we were really confused about tickets. They are like Paris in that you pay by zones. We didn't know what zone we were in and didn't want to spend more than necessary. We looked at the map and realized that we weren't really that far from our hotel, so we decided to walk. It was a nice afternoon anyway. It turns out that the hotel was a little more than one mile away.

On the walk, we passed by a Burger King. We looked in to see what a meal cost (a good indication of what prices were going to be like). The Swiss Franc is pretty much 1:1 to the USD. As we were walking by, we saw that the average price for a value meal was about 15 Francs!

It turns out that the metro was super easy and convenient! About 100 meters from our hotel was a stop and it even a person selling tickets instead of just a machine. The lady we dealt with was super helpful and saved us more money than if we tried to buy the tickets ourselves.

Downtown Zurich is picturesque. It's so clean and quiet for being a major city. This "big" city is almost quaint. We walked by a few churches but decided not to go inside. I think after seeing St. Peter's Basilica, I would have been a little disappointed. We did see St. Peter's Church (Zurich) which has the largest tower clock face in Europe. So that was cool. We took a stroll by the river and stopped to have a brat and beer. It turned into an afternoon of people watching.

On another day, we took a gondola up Uetilberg Mountain. Our plan was to walk 1.5-2 hours to the top of Uetilberg, but we never made it. Once we got up as far as the gondola went, there was a restaurant with a nice view. We decided to spend an hour or two there drinking over-priced beer and apple strudel. We did talk about 20 minutes toward the peak but turned around and took the gondola down again! Haha! It was a beautiful day, but we just were not in the mood to hike.

Zurich was a relaxing place for us. However, it is not a place we need to return to. However, I do want to return to Switzerland to experience the Alps.