May 24, 2009

Subject: So breathtaking I forgot to eat...
Date: Sunday, May 24, 2009 4:20 PM

It's a long weekend, and so guten morgen from Zurich!

Today was a looooooooong day -- I'm still not sure whether I'm awake or sleeping right now. And I dont know how much I ate today. So that's the summary of this trip report :)

The really loud "MOooooooooooooooo"'s that they used to play on the shuttle train from Zurich airport Terminal E to Terminal A has reduced in volume. I was waiting for it but then was a bit dissapointed when they didn't really play it on full volume. oh well. No traditional "Welcome to Switzerland" this time!

Everything has been just perfect today -- the flight from New York, although lifting off from the runway 1 hour after leaving the gate, arrived in Zurich right on time! And this time I did my "arrival ritual" before actually landing -- by the time the plane landed I was all set to go! Customs was a walk-through, there was nobody at the rail counter so I validated my Eurail pass in no time, bought a Visp-Zermatt train ticket (not covered by pass), and then sat around waiting for the 8:40 AM departure to Visp.

The weather was perfect -- that was one thing I was worried about before leaving, the forecast was for rain but today was just perfect! The train for Visp arrived right on time (this *IS* Switzerland after all, not Italy!) and reached Visp right on time, with the views exceptional from Bern-Thun and pretty good from Thun-Spiez. After Spiez there's a long tunnel almost all the way to Visp, so that was a good time to "prepare for arrival" -- standard ritual.

The connecting time in Visp was 8 minutes -- no problem since the arrival was on schedule. The other train is a tourist train -- big windows, extra windows on top to look at mountains, and surprisingly uncrowded! The views here are just fantastic all the way to the town of Zermatt. I was clicking away on both sides of the train and probably attracting more attention than I care for!

After arriving in Zermatt I started walking towards the Matterhorn (peeking up from in between the buildings) -- perfect sunny day, and I dont know how much I walked but most of it was uphill or up 120 steps (counted on the way back down later). Lot of great photo ops too from everywhere in town! The mountain is just amazing... towering over the town! This was my first visit to Zermatt. I had gone beyond the end of the town, then decided to walk back and take the gondola up... 50 francs! But well worth the price!

The gondola goes up to 2909 meters (actually it goes even further but they had closed off the last section of it). By now it was about 2pm or so, and it finally dawned on me that I should eat something. There is a cafeteria on top, but all it had was overpriced salad plates and muffins etc... had the overpriced salad plate while looking at the cliffs on Matterhorn. Unbelievable people have actually climbed that thing!!

After that "lunch" I roamed around a bit over there, taking pictures of all the mountains all around (full 360-degree view) and the tiny tiny speck of land down below that was the town of Zermatt. I slipped and fell on the snow a few times and even had my feet sink into the powder all the way up to my thigh once, so that was fun trying to climb back out... Fortunately a couple of people there helped me out and nothing happened to me or the camera!

I wish I could have had more time there on the top, but I did have to come back down again -- it was supposed to be a 4-hour train ride back to Zurich.

After coming back down I started looking for open restaurants (lots of Italian ones) but none of their outdoor menus listed any desserts so I kept passing on them all... finally picking up a "Matterhorn pastry" (basically a big glob of chocolate mousse) at one of the shops and taking it to-go on the train back to Visp.

Well, now things became complicated. After eating that mousse I fell asleep on the train, and woke up just as we were leaving Visp. The next stop was Brig and I got off over there. Then a train from Brig to Bern -- fell asleep on this one too but at least I woke up before Bern. Then instead of taking a connection back to Zurich, I decided to go to Luzern (old favorite) for a NICE dinner....

Hmmm, fell asleep on THAT train too, and was woken up by the conductor when we were approaching Luzern station (that was the last stop on the train so he was telling me to get up).

Luzern is wonderful! It's an old favorite of mine, and it has become somewhat of a tradition to always spend at least one evening of any Swiss trip here just "hanging out" by the lakeside. The restaurants have nice desserts, but really its more about the setting than the quality of the food! The swans were all out and about... the mountains in the distance were covered with snow... the sun was setting (9pm) so that made the lake twinkle orange... perfect end to a perfect day!

Dinner was half a pizza and 3/4th of a rose wine (I spilled the other 1/4 in the lake and no I was not drunk) and later a gelato from a different restaurant which was finished while walking to the train station. I should have run for at least 2-3 minutes, because when I got to the train station I saw the train to Zurich pull out... then ended up staying there for 1/2 hour for the next train...

Two more trains from Luzern-Zurich Hbf, Zurich Hbf-Zurich Flughafen ... reached the airport around 11:30pm, took the hotel shuttle (FINALLY remembered where to go for the shuttle pick up -- my last 4-5 trips I could never get this right) and checked in here around midnight.... now I'm awake (I think) and waiting for my flight back across the pond in 9 more hours...

That is until I come back to Europe for my birthday and again Switzerland over the July 4th weekend :-) ... maybe I'll do the Bernina Pass that time.

Or Mont Blanc.

Or maybe something else.

I'll send the link to the pictures later -- I haven't uploaded them yet.