Matt and Lisa's Adventures

9 January 2024

Up early (hopefully for the last time in this trip) for our flight to Zurich. The airport was strangely quiet and we breezed through check in with no queuing. We did have an annoying wait for a bus to the airplane, again – what is up with not using air bridges! Flight was 1h45 and nice and smooth. 

Then train into the city centre was where we started seeing just how expensive Switzerland is. We tried to not talk or think too much about the prices considering we were only here for a little over a day and the holiday spending had been going well up to this point. But everything is just so expensive that you end up discussing it even when you don’t try not to. 

We were able to check into our hotel which was great as we needed to put on some thermals. It was definitely a temperature change compared to Madrid. At 1pm it was -2 degrees but thankfully it didn’t feel all that cold so you long as you have all the layers on. 

First stop was a hot chocolate from a local chocolatier which was very nice. 

Lisa in her research had found an awesome science museum (called the Technorama) on the outskirts of Zurich. Zurich is all about trains rather than metros – it takes a bit of getting used to but is also a much more comfortable way to travel. However, the trains were crazy  expensive and it appears to be based on the honour system as there are no ticket checks when accessing the trains. The risk is that you travel and they do a surprise ticket check – from what I’ve read the fines are very high. Lisa wanted to risk not paying a few times on our trips but I’m too rule abiding for that!

It was a bit of a mission to get to the Technorama but once we got there it was awesome! They had lots of experiments that you could do and interact with. This made it a very hands on museum and lots of fun to do. There wasn’t a lot of reading as there were just so many experiments to get through! Normally Lisa gets bored and we go our separate ways at attractions like this but this time we did science together! It was so much fun!! There were lots of different areas related to mechanics, electricity, water, nature, chaos, light and mirrors. They had an electricity demonstration halfway through with lightning flowing through people – very cool but unfortunately it was in German which did make it a little hard to follow. 

The Technorama was very quiet and most of the other people were children with their parents. But I didn’t let that stop me from embracing the opportunity! We spent nearly four hours there and that was with Lisa continually pushing me to move onto the next exhibit to make sure we got through everything before it closed. 

When the Technorama closed we caught the train back into the CBD. Our hotel offered us a welcome drink upon arrival so we took advantage of that to get a free beer. We knew that dinner was going to be expensive and it was very cold outside. Therefore Lisa didn’t want to do our usual story of wandering about town trying to find a suitable restaurant. We did some research while in the warmth of our hotel bar and once again we returned to Italian cuisine finding a nice place across the river. It was a short, but cold, walk there. The food was very good – we had carbonara and lasagna and shared the two dishes.

10 January 2024

We hadn’t bought our cereal from Madrid and so had to venture out for breakfast. We had a hard time finding anything and so fell back to reliable McDonald’s. Ironically by the time we arrived they had stopped serving breakfast so we had to have apple pies instead of crossiants or McMuffins. I also ordered a hot chocolate but they gave me a cup of warm milk and a sachet of chocolate powder, needless to say it wasn’t very good. 

We then had a walking tour of Zürich with our guide Maria. 

• Zurich has over 1,200 fountains. The water in these is drinkable and comes from the mountains and springs. There is one fountain where on occasions they pump wine instead of water. They did this on the first of January for people who were up early. 
• Maria said that Zurich city rarely gets snow and so the current snow fall was a bit of a surprise. The city did look amazing in white but we could have done without it and were did a lot of careful stepping as we walked. 
• There was a church that used to be a nunnery. It was founded after a magic deer guided two lost girls to safety. 
• Switzerland was very late in giving women the vote, taking until 1971. There was one region in the country that was even later – taking until the 1990s!
• There are four official languages in Switzerland – French, Italian, German and Romanesque. Romanesque is only spoken by about 26,000 people and is similar to Latin. Most people can speak English as well. At the parliament MPs are expected to talk in their native language but to be able to understand any language – this would make for hard going!
• We saw a large clock on a church. It was unusual as the Roman numeral for four was IIII instead of IV. The story was that people used to “get confused” and when they saw the hand pointing at a V they thought it was 5pm and therefore time to knock off work for the day. By changing it they prevented that excuse for claiming a shorter working day. Apparently this is done on a few clocks around Zurich and even on some Rolex watches. 
• The church also had lookout windows and someone used to sit there to spot fires. They didn’t do a very good job as another church had two steeples that burned down!
• Private homes aren’t allowed to have air conditioning, only public buildings and stores. This is to limit energy usage and help the country maintain its environmental credentials. It does get very hot in August and so houses have shutters on the windows so that people can at least keep the direct sunlight out of their houses. 
• Most people don’t own their houses as they are very expensive. Maria said that a standard two bedroom house outside the city centre would go for three million Swiss franks. That’s nearly six million
• Kiwi!
• There are bunkers all over the country that were started in the sixties when there was concern about a nuclear war. All houses are required to have one or have access to one. They are normally in the basement and are required to have a sealed door and air filtration system along with enough food and drink to last for several days. A few years ago there was public debate as to whether to continue requiring these but overall the public still approved of this. Seems like a really weird thing to have!
• All Swiss adult males are required to do military or social service. This can either be all at once over a nine month period or three weeks each year. Most people opt for the second option and have it as a bit of a holiday in the country side. There is also the option to pay to get out of the service but that is frowned upon. 
• All males that start their military service are given a rifle. Each year in August they need to report in and prove the rifle is in good condition and they can still fire it accurately. This leads to the weird sight of lots of men walking and biking around with their rifles while wearing shorts in the summer heat
• The lake in Zurich flows into the river which then winds its way into Germany and feeds into the Rhine. There is no discharge into the lake or rivers and so it is very clear and safe to drink. Maria said that in summer people would often swim in the river and float along it. That didn’t seem appealing with the water temperature now but would probably be appealing in the heat of summer

For lunch we went to a nice cafe to have a quiche. Then it was onto the Lindt chocolate factory tour. We had made a real mistake with this. We had purchased the Choco-delux-tour but we didn’t read our train time correctly and so we were going to be too late. When we arrived we managed to sweet talk the lady into letting us do the standard audio guide tour earlier which was a relief as we were very keen for chocolate. 

The tour was very good and very informative. It provided details on:

• The cocoa plant. How it is grown and where. The plant needs to be grown alongside other plants as it does not like direct sunlight
• How the plant is harvested. It can be harvested all year round and it is an art to identifying when a particular pod is ripe and ready for picking
• The seeds are then dried and fermented. They are initially white and need to go through this process in order to brown up. 
• The cocoa is the crushed and combined with water. It is then processed several times to smooth out the powder and get it to the right consistency
• We learned about Rudolf Lindt and his invention around processing the chocolate for a lot longer. He accidentally left his equipment running while he went hunting for the weekend. Upon returning rather than the chocolate paste being worse it was in fact far better. This was a key development in chocolate processing. 
• We learned about the history of chocolate making in Switzerland and what makes Switzerland such a good place to make chocolate
• We then got to taste liquid chocolate – dark, milk and white. All of which were delicious
• We were able to try finished pieces of chocolate and were able to takeaway eight different flavors of Lindt balls. 
• They had a pilot protection plant setup that we could follow along with
• We finished up in the cafe with a fancy hot chocolate each. It was delicious

Overall the tour was fantastic. We got to learn a lot but also made sure we got all of our chocolate tastings!

 

We arrived at the Munich bus station at 1am and it was a good twenty minute walk in -5 temperatures to the hotel across footpaths of ice and snow. It felt really freaking dodgy. Then we struggled to find our hotel after walking past a couple of homeless people on deserted streets. Finally finding the hotel and seeing someone waiting at the front desk was a massive relief. We were four hours later than planned but we had made it without any major impact to our journey and the change cost had been less than the excess on our travel insurance.

Overall thoughts on Zurich:

• Very expensive. Everything was very expensive. I’m sure that’s fine if you are earning Swiss franks but for the rest of us it was just painful
• Very clean and tidy. Although there was more graffiti than I had expected
• Trains were good for traveling and more upmarket than a metro. But again, expensive
• Dominated by chocolate shops, watch shops and everything classy. Did not see a lot of lower end stores apart from one Copenhagen Flying Tiger. 
• Swiss generally had very good English and were easy to communicate with
• Very solid feel to the architecture but not particularly spectacular or interesting
• Glad to have been here but wouldn’t stay for longer