Zurich - Ouch, this place is expensive!
Friday, July 29, 2005
At the moment we are on the train and to be honest it’s a bit of a shitter. But at least the windows go down on the train and there is a pleasant breeze in through the cabin. The hostel flyer said ‘Easy to book, hard to leave’, and that is exactly how we felt about, Well, Germany in general really – for the most Germans are really helpful and friendly (apart from the post office in Munich but that is a whole other story really). The hostel was very good after the first night, there was a room off to the side that was for two people and the main room had another 5 beds in it. We got the 2 bed room the second night and from there it was as if we had a private room, that we had to share the bathroom with 5 other people – and believe me that’s easier than a whole floor. We both have had good feelings about dorms as you meet a lot of lovely people from all walks of life – the only people that seem to be an issue is Asians, for some reason they seem to want to dominate there whole area which is hard in dorms, and there are bathroom issues, but it makes life interesting.
So we as I said we are on the train at the moment, and it’s about lunch time so I’m going to have a beer and a bite to eat.
At the station we had to get a room somewhere, but we got to the tourist information counter only to be told that it was a long weekend because of ‘Swiss Day’, basically like turning up to Christchurch on show weekend and trying to get a room! But we managed to get separate rooms in a hostel not to far out of the city (Apparently they didn’t have mixed dorms). So after navigating the S Bahn system and getting off we noticed that the map we had only showed about a third of the streets on it and did a bad job of those. Luckily as we we’re standing on the corner of a street, a couple of Brits walked past us and said ‘are you looking for the hostel?’, they nicely gave us a really long list of complicated instructions as in Zurich there are also lots of walkways that have street names. It’s a really good system but man if you had a map with everything on it you wouldn’t be able to read the dam thing.
When we got to the hostel we found out that, they did have mixed dorms and had done a shift around to accommodate us in one. But the hostel really was in the middle of nowhere, and food was beginning to be an issue. We could eat at the hostel but it was 16 Franks per person (around NZ$18). And this is what we ended up having to do as a thunder storm hit, and we couldn’t make out the public transport system. But in fact we could see from other people’s plates that the servings were huge, so we decided to share… and with the 2 buns we had left over from lunch there was more than enough Chicken Stroganoff & Spaghetti to go around.
When we got back to the room we found that the two Brits that had helped us were in the next bunks so we started talking and before we knew it, 11:30 rolled around and it was time for bed.
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 am,
