Zurich!

I maybe shouldn't be as excited as I am about our Zurich excursion since technically we will be working there for the next year but it was a great success!

We got up early this morning, packed a picnic lunch and headed down to the train station to meet up with Maureen. Maureen will be the one training us starting next Monday.... She offered to help us navigate the train in today which was very awesome of her!
She ended up getting off two stops before us (on a side note we saw our first Ikea in a smallish town that sounded like Diteikon). We arrive in this massive central station and it took us a while just to reach open air, the station is pretty huge. If I remember I'll take a picture of it to show you.

Neither of us did any kind of reconaissance before embarking on our adventure so we had no map and no idea where we were... Don't worry, it was awesome!

The buildings are gorgeous. Apparently no detail is too small when it comes to contruction here. All the windows and doors are in themselves artwork.

We started walking and then finally decided it might be safest to find a map so we went into the first hotel we found, a best western, and pilfered these buisness car sized maps of downtown Zurich. Then we were set!

First we headed for the lake which we followed along until we had a really great view of the Alps in the distance.

The first bridge across the river that joins the lake in the centerish of Zurich has this massive intersection on the far side of it. We had a little trouble navigating the crosswalks at first because we wern't sure if we had right of way or not. It turns out the are crosswalks across roads that involve cars but there are trains ( probably acctually closer to trams) going everywhere. Every other corner was a four way crazy train crossing and there were no crossswalks! Some roads had flashing train pictures, if it was flashing, don't walk. Mostly though we tried to tag along behind people who sortof looked like they had some idea what was going on.

The point I was trying to make about the above mentioned intersection was that there is a circus in town! WE checked it out because we were thinking if it was cheap, we might go but we think(everything was in german) that it only ran a 6pm so we passed on it today, but maybe another time. The cheapest tickets ( nosebleed seat equivalents) were 20CHF, which isn't to bad. We did manage to grab some pictures of the menagerie though!


The park that we ended up in had the most beautiful colors of flowering bushes of which i took many pictures. There was also a lot of massive modern art strewn amongst the gardens.

We walked back towards the old town center along a slightly different path and got rained on a little but we were to stoked to be bothered.

The old town area was a series of hundreds of tiny winding streets with adorable shops lining everything. Shutters on every window and cobblestones everywhere. I acctually feel kinda bad for some of the kids I see carrying skateboards around, them having to deal with insanely uneven roads.

We went into one clothing store( I love all clothing here! With all the amazing things in the stores I find it kind of strange that a huge majority of the young women here seem to all wear skinny jeans, leather bombers with big scarves, ankle boots and a leather slouch bag. not that that isn't sweet style but still...) Anyway, this one clothing store had some beautiful clothes but we were talking 300CHF for a tank top. a nice one i'm sure but i made me uncomfortable just thinking about breaking something in there. I found this one really cool mural nearby though....

Another obvious difference i found was the cars. There are Porsches everywhere, and in this photo we see a Lexus, a BMW, a Landrover, and Mercedes just chillin.

...And then we bought icecream! I don't know if icecream is one of switzerland's claims to fame but it was amazing! just thinking about it causes embarassing amouonts of salivation...

Last but not least we picked the right train home on the first try and we were home in 16 minutes! Man o man are we lucky! Oh did i mention we took a quick trip to germany last night to get groceries? No biggie...ha!

olivia,
just bummin around switzerland!