Tour of Zurich…
Saturday, July 30, 2005
After having a really nice breakfast and getting our 24 hour public transport pass (these passes are a little expensive but oh so easy!) we headed out into town. From what we could make out the city had very functional public transport to see everything we wanted to see. Upon getting off the tram into town, we walked through the old city (do you notice a recurring theme here? Every city has an ‘old city’!) and caught another tram to the bottom of the funicular (tram like in Wellington that is designed specifically to go straight up steep hills, similar to a cable car). We checked that we could use our transport ticket, thinking that this was a tourist attraction like in Budapest, but here it’s just regular public transport and the card was fine. WE got to the top to go to the lookout that Maarty had found n the map… only to discover that it wasn’t quite so easy to find once we were actually there… we decided to make the best of it and go for a walk anyway, finding ourselves in the middle of a beautiful national park in the middle of Zurich. Giving up on the lookout, we headed back down as we had been walking for aout an hour and I kinda needed to go to the toilet, as usual (and we had seen one at the bottom). We headed to the flash looking toilet, paid the 1 Frank fee (I’m getting sick of paying every time I need to go to the toilet!!) and discovered that it was a flash self cleaning one! It even dispensed the toilet paper for you… Worth it, I thought as at the train station you pay 50 Euro cents (same amount) and it’s not even clean!
Although we hadn’t thought to bring our picnic set, we thought we’d go to the supermarket to get lunch, as there was one just opposite my new favourite loo. We grabbed the usual bread etc and caught a bus down to the China Garden to have our lunch, among the many swans and other wild life that we found there. We noticed in the map that we were only a couple of minutes walk from a jetty for the water taxi (much like a bus service, only using boats!) and as this too was covered by our pass, we decided to catch a ride. We eventually got to the city (the water bus thing isn’t as direct as the land transport, but a ‘must do’ anyway) and discovered a market. Maarty got a Swiss T-Shirt for 5 Frank, about NZ $5.50, which was a pretty good deal.
WE then headed to a second cable car, for more views of the city (hey, we wanted to get our money’s worth out of the pass! I’m pretty sure we managed to…) before returning to the old city for a bit of shopping before heading home. Fun Fact #3002: Zurich has 1030 fountains… they’re EVERYwhere!
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 pm,
