Dear Switzerland

Switzerland is a wonderful place, but it doesn't come cheap. On the one hand: majestic vistas, lovely remote areas; on the other hand, thinking to buy a cheap snack out, we paid the equivalent of NZ$10 at McDonald's for two large fries. Daylight robbery! And that was just the tip of the iceberg. However, no more complaining about steep prices – onto the good stuff!

From the Swiss Alps, we headed to Zurich to stay with an old school friend of mine – Sara came to Inglewood High as an exchange student a whole ten years ago now! My word, would you look at the time. Every morning during our stay we all ate a hearty breakfast together; fresh bread and croissants or porridge, with fresh squeezed orange juice! Yum!

We also ... dum dum duuuummmm... picked up our passports, sent back from New Zealand by my kind relatives, with our Russian visas inside!!! Yaayyayayayayyyayay!!! Khalva and ice-cold landscapes, here we come!

On our first day in Zurich, we explored the city. With quite a compact city centre, we managed to see the Fraumunster, St Peterskirche and Grossmunster, where Zwingli headed up the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland.

Fraumunster

St Peterskirche

Not surprisingly, Grossmunster wasn't as grand as other churches we've beheld, with the Protestants' eschewing of ostentation and iconography. The stained glass windows, rather than picturing Mary, Jesus or saints, were composed of what looked like unicellular organisms. Interesting! The feel of the place was relatively homey, though, so instead of being awed, we could imagine actually being part of a church service there.

Zwingli outside

 

We also saw Lenin's place of residence in 1917 or so, before the Russian revolution, and took a lovely walk by the lake in Zurich. Our legs were protesting a bit, even now, from our walks on the Swiss Alps, so we didn't strain them too much.

Lenin's old abode

That night Sara and Jan, her boyfriend, had organised a surprise activity for the four of us; we discovered that we were to be trapped in a room and have to figure the way out by solving a mystery! Our mission was to uncover the men guilty of a recent bank robbery. We had to find various keys and codes to unlock padlocks, through solving different riddles, logic puzzles and generally using our powers of deduction. We had an hour in total, and managed to finish with three minutes to spare! It was so much fun.

We celebrated our victory with dinner at a restaurant, where John and I sampled raclette for the first time, a traditional Swiss dish. We were served (delicious) melted cheese on a plate, and were supplied with baby potatoes, little onions, little gherkins and mini maize cobs. The concept is simple: grab a little food item, place cheese on it, and eat. It was actually very filling, and very yummy.

Capital City #14

The next day we took a day trip to Bern and... riddle me timbers! We did another clue-based activity, called a Foxtrail. Again, we had to solve various clues to follow a trail around the city, getting to see the sights of Bern while exercising our mental faculties at the same time. It was good fun, although frustrating at times, when we couldn't find the clue, or took an alternate meaning from the clue, and spent an extra 40 minutes wandering around the wrong part of town. It didn't help that our paper instructions were in German, but at least John had the English instructions on his smartphone. We ended up taking 4.5 hours or so for an activity that is meant to take 2.5 hours – so we got our money's worth! For the record, we saw a park, a church, walked past some bears (in a bear enclosure – bigger than the ones we saw in Canada), some statues, the river, a government building, and a tent with people rehearsing for a Miss Switzerland contest the next day. They were just setting it up in the middle of the square, and it looked fancy.

 a bear lying around, in the middle of Bern

The Swiss like huge clock faces.

The next day was a Saturday, so Sara was able to take us out for another day trip, this time to a mountainous region about an hour's drive from Zurich. We exercised our leg muscles again with a hike up to a lake, and were rewarded with beautiful autumnal trees on the way, and a picturesque lake with moutains behind it and a restaurant beside it. We loved getting back out into Swiss nature.

autumnal trees

autumnal hues on autumnal trees

the lake in its picturesque setting

so pretty!

We had lunch at the restaurant, sampling some of their delicious homemade ice cream for dessert, and then drove round to the gondola up to the mountain we'd seen from the lake: the Santis.

The prospect didn't look too good from the live TV they had playing at the ticket desk of the viewing deck from the top of the mountain; a big heavy cloud had descended on the top of the mountain, and it looked like all the view we would get was swirling grey fog.

 The unpromising view up from the base of the mountain.

Still, Sara was an optimist, so we decided to go up anyway, to the 2500m high tip, higher than any of the heights we'd reached in the Swiss Alps. It was really cold up there and after a while our hands were freezing. But these were the kinds of views we got:

on the way up

We then drove to a charming little village called Appensell and wandered round, admiring all the pretty facades. We sampled the local culinary delights again at a restaurant there for dinner, where Sara recommended another typical Swiss dish – a dessert this time, noodley-type things made of chestnut, on top of a meringue, with cream on top. It was unexpectedly really good!

a pretty facade

Our last activity before moving on was going to the Zurich Protestant Church on Sunday morning. It was a proper old school service, with a liturgy, hymnals and robe-wearing ministers. The preacher spoke on the tension between faith and science, pointing out how the two coexisted (most of the time) quite happily for ages until recently, and basically that not everything can be explained by science, as some would posit. Not everything that exists can be held under a microscope, and we should be more humble and mindful of how little we really know, as humans, rather than be arrogant about how much we think we know. He spoke from Job, which contains the best question in the Bible, in his mind: God asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Indeed.