Schweiz, part 2: Zurich and zebras

Well, ignore the "zebras" part, but I thought I should stick with the alliteration. As planned, here is the second part of my journey through Switzerland --

Zurich is, of course, a larger city than Basel. When we arrived on Saturday, we quickly exchanged some euros into francs, and then went to the tourist office to find a hostel. Good news, there was one. Bad news, it didn't open until three o'clock, and there were no guaranteed places. It was around 1 or 1:30 at this time, so we trudged off into the city to kill time until three. We found an open-air market of jewelery and scarves and sat in a café. A man representing some environmentalist party gave us pretty sunflowers. Also, whilst sitting at the café with out flowers perched beside us, a random Swiss woman came up to us and began talking in rapid Swiss German, for at least a good four minutes. Kira and I simply pretended to understand -- nodding and smiling and laughing and looking at each other in hilarious incredulity -- while the woman gestured to our flowers and then to outside. At one point, Kira even responded, in English, "Yes the weather is nice today." The woman -- perhaps senile, perhaps drunk -- then began to SING to us for a bit, waving her hands as if trying to get us to sing along. She then left, leaving us bewildered and laughing.

When the time came, we went to the hostel (City Backpacker), and climbed at LEAST five flights of stairs to make it to the receptionist. After a tense twenty minutes of searching to see if three beds were available... the receptionist told us there were not, in fact, any free beds. Bugger. However, he very kindly telephoned another, slightly more expensive, slightly further, but rather nice hotel for us and told us if we could make it there in thirty minutes, they'd hold a room for us. So we booked it across town and found a nice, cozy room awaiting us. We watered our precious flowers -- which had been drooping slightly -- and relaxed before heading out.

First we went to Grossmünster church, which was a spearhead in the Reformation. In fact, Zurich is made up of Protestant churches which are distinctly different from the cathedrals I have seen elsewhere in Europe. They are incredibly plain, in the vein of Protestant thinking, but nothing like American protestant churches; instead, they are huge and looming, so that their starkness and emptiness is that much more startling. Anyway, in the crypt of Grossmünster stands a statue of Charlemagne and his two-meter sword, which we all attempted to pull out à la Arthur Pendragon, that merry king of England.

To save money -- Switzerland is ungodly expensive -- we went to a co-op and bought a pizza to cook. And then after dinner, we took some champagne, wine and chocolate (Lindt chocolate in Switzerland = heaven) and went to the Opera house to enjoy the evening. We ended up meandering to a random dock along the river, and then we tried to get into the Oktoberfest tent (but it closed to newcomers after 11), and then meandered around Zurich because, well, we were in a random foreign country and could.

On Sunday, we discovered that absolutely nothing is open in Switzerland. We wandered down the famous shopping street -- a bit like M Street on steroids -- only it was almost deserted. We wanted to visit some more churches, but there's this silly thing on Sunday mornings where people gather in them for some reason. So first we went to a tourist shop to look at those silly tourist things, before heading to Framünster, a Protestant church with the most beautiful stained glass windows by the artist Chagall. I secretly took pictures, shh.

We then went back to the opera house, as we had decided last night to try to get tickets to "Die Zauberflöte" (The Magic Flute). It turns out that for students, tickets were only 18 francs (roughly 16 dollars, methinks), and due to the fact that it was not a packed crowd, we managed to sneak into rather superb seats. The opera house itself is beautiful, and we looked out of place since we only had one pair of jeans each and hadn't really showered in two days. The opera was amusing and wonderful, despite an overly wordy and confusing English summary in the program (I finally understood on the fifth read-through).

 After the matinée, we went back to Grossmünster to climb one of the twin towers, leading us to a spectacular view of the city. After a small dinner, we took the train back to Basel, and another back to good old Strasbourg, where I ended the wonderful weekend with a steaming hot shower. But really, I'm still a bit amazed that I can just spend the weekend in a foreign country, with only a backpack, some money, some linguistic skills and preferably a guidebook.

Dear Eleanor, I hope that you are soon better. Sad as our states are, it is comforting that even separated by distances as we be, we are still sharing colds together.

Alison, sick in Strasbourg