Fall Break- Zurich

Alright, so there is much to tell regarding the past week and a half. I'll do each city separately, since it'll break things up a little bit, and hopefully make this less confusing.

I was traveling with 6 other Americans, all other students from my program, most of whom live on my floor here at the dorm. We had Friday off, so I spent most of the day packing and all that whatnot, and Saturday afternoon we were off to the airport!

The direct flight to Zurich, Switzerland was pretty uneventful. Unfortunately, I did not have a window seat, and couldn’t watch as we flew over the Pyrenees, but I caught a glimpse of this giant forest of trees when we were landing. You know I did not realize how much I missed trees until I saw that giant forest, with all of the red and gold and yellow… I mean, Barcelona has trees, but it’s Mediterranean, so the trees are either scrubby pines, palms, or these tall thin-trunked trees with really light bark that don’t appear to be doing fall properly.

Well, Switzerland had real trees. And grass. Barcelona has no fields, and the small parks it has don’t really have grass... I guess it was kind of nice to see something that looked more like home. It was also colder- the coldest it has gotten in Barcelona so far has been in the low 60s, and I didn’t think I would miss it almost snowing around Halloween, but apparently I did. We got in to the airport, money-changed (they use the Franc- crazy talk!), and walked across the street to the train station. Zurich doesn’t really have an underground system- it’s a combination of above-ground double decker trains (sort of like commuter trains to burbs in Chicago, except all of the trains actually stay in the city itself) that radiate out from the city center, and aboveground trams that run in the street, but whose routes are really only in certain geographic areas.

Anyways, we had to catch a doubledecker to Wollishofen, walked up a big hill to get to Youthostel Zurich. The hostel was nice and clean, but expensive. We headed right back into the city that night to just wander around, hoping to find somewhere interesting. Outside of the train station it was completely dead, so we kept walking, and ended up crossing the Rathausbrucke and walked toward Lake Zurich. It turns out that’s where all of the nightlife was, so we ducked into a couple of places and stayed for a while. We’re so used to Barcelona and things closing late that we were really surprised to find that bars close there around 12 or 1 am. It was good though, since the next morning we were planning on getting up early to go around the city.

The next morning we got up and took the train downtown to the main train station, the Hauptbahnhof. Since the Landesmuseum- the Swiss National Museum- was right by the train station, we went there first. The museum is in one of the old palaces, and so the inside was gorgeous. They had a really large collection of prehistorical stuff, and then a lot of things from the Carolingian era of the middle ages. There was a ton of stained glass, richly carved wooden doors and ceilings, and a ton of other things from that time period. I would really suggest going there if you go to Zurich- the place is huge and you could spend a ton of time there.

From inside the museum we heard some noise around lunch, which I assumed to be coming from a church nearby. Well someone happened to look out a window of the museum that was facing the park, and saw maybe about 10 people just sort of standing there, playing these gigantic horn things. I had no idea you could make music like that with Alphorns. We pretty much ran outside of the museum to see then, and at lunch in the park while listening to them. It had gotten a lot warmer out, so we decided to walk around Old Town.

I was in charge of Zurich, and had looked up some walking tours before. We started at Bahnofplatz, the plaza in front of the railway station, and walked down the Bahnofstrasse toward Lake Zurich. On the way, we passed by Pestalozzi Park, Paradeplatz, and made a detour toward the water to see St. Peter’s Church. This church apparently had the largest clock on a belltower for all churches in Europe. It’s also the oldest church built in Zurich, having being built in either the 7th or 8th centuries. Because it was built before Gothic and Baroque architecture were the norm, its not that ornate, which was kind of refreshing.

We kept walking, up a few sidestreets as we made our way to Fraumunster. The church was actually having services, so we couldn’t go in, but just walked around the outside. Fraumunster’s also really old, having been built in the 850s, and used a convent for noblewomen. It supposedly has stained glass windows done by Marc Chagall and Augusto Giacometti.

Oh well…We passed by the Munsterbrucke bridge and Grossmunster, the other large church, as we continued down the waterfront to the lake. Near the lake, we sat down for a bit at Burkliplatz to look over the water with the mountains in the background. All of Switzerland was kind of strange, simple because I couldn’t understand what people were saying any of the time. They speak a bunch of languages there- everyone speaks English, German and French, but I mostly overheard German. I mean in Barcelona, everyone speaks Catalan, but you hear Castilian every once in a while.

Anyways, we walked through Burkliplatz to the Arboretum, and ran around in a field there for a while. Afterwards we headed up toward the train station, and crossed the Munsterbruke to Grossmunster. We went inside the church, which has this gigantic ornately carved wooden door, and were surprised to find that there an orchestra playing inside.

Afterwards, we walked up towards the train station again, crossed the Rathausbrucke, and bought some dinner at a grocery store. We headed back to the park next to the Landesmuseum to eat by the water. Since it had gotten dark about two hours before, we headed back to the hostel. We just ended up chilling all night there, since it was freeeezing outside, and Switzerland is super super expensive, plus we had to get up early to catch a train to Lucerne