Switzerland Days 1 - 3

It’s not easy condensing 11 great days into a few short paragraphs, not to mention sieving out fantastic photographs out of 2GB worth of them, but I’ll try, by chronological order. Hopefully, I’ll manage to finish the entire diary, not like jkaiser, who has yet to finish his Taiwan entry from last year!

10 October 2007

Zurich

Took an overnight plane from SIN-ZRH and arrived early in the morning. Since I wasn’t due to meet TJ until late in the evening I decided to have a short tour around Zurich first before proceeding to Basel where we were staying the night.

Like all the cities in Switzerland that we visited, Zurich is a nice mix of old buildings and new development. I walked down the shopping street of Bahnhofstrasse, with luxury brands like LV,
chain stores like Manora and Co-op, occupying old historical buildings. Not having many Swiss Francs with me and since Europe is an expensive place, I managed only to window shop, a pity really.

After a leisurely walk down Bahnhofstrasse, I made it to the sightseeing area, fully of cobbled walkways, cute little shophouses and many churches. Thing about Swiss is they are so mad about watches, that EVERY church has a clock tower. Zurich has St Peters Kirche (with the largest clock face in the world). Also went to Fraumuenster, and Grossmuenster. Churches in Zurich are very spartan compared to the rest of the churches I’m about to see.

Clocktower of St Peter's Kirche

Fraumuenster

Grossmuenster

Since I was alone and jetlagged, I decided to make it to our first pit stop, Basel, to dump my bags and catch some rest. After some confusion (the train station in Basel is very big cos it’s near the borders of France and Germany), I finally made it to the YMCA. It’s really fun to stay there! Though we didn’t manage to talk to anybody, our room (5 bed) was v nice, and the toilets were great. Took a shower, made my way to Basel airport to pick TJ up.

11 October 2007

Basel

Since we were in Basel, we walked around for a while before going to other cities. Being a highly industrialized city, there wasn’t very much to see, and the weather in the morning was very misty, which made the photos not very nice. But we did make it to the Rathaus (Town Hall), and we wanted to see their church Muenster, but part of the façade was closed for renovation. In fact, when we were there, quite a lot of renovation was going on, because spring/summer was the tourist period, and it’ll be way too cold during winter to renovate. We did make it into Muenster, no photo-taking inside, but the outside premise was quite nice.

Rathaus (Town Hall)

Marktplatz (marketplace)

Muenster

Berne

The capital city of Switzerland. A medieval city which is also a UNESCO heritage site, it is to me, sheer delight. Though it was undergoing major renovation works around the train station and city centre, once you get past the drilling towards the old town area. One of my favourite areas in Switzerland.

The Zytglogge is one of the city’s most enduring symbols, a clock tower. Check out the bears!

Cobbled streets of Old Town

View from the Nydeggbrücke, on the way to the Bear Pits.

The Bear Pits (Baerengraben), it has real bears in it! Berne is crazy over bears, their city mascot.

Lucerne

Another 1 hour by train away from Berne, our base city for the next two days. More about it in the next day’s entry.

12 October 2007

Mount Titlis

You haven’t been to Switzerland if you haven’t visited the Swiss Alps. Since it was only the beginning of Autumn, most of the Alps are covered in lush greenery, and trees in different shades of autumn gold, red and browns. That means that there wasn’t going to be snow unless you headed way up. Mount Titlis is 3,238 m high, so there’s definitely going to be snow there. So up we went, plus it boasted the world’s first rotating cable car, and comes highly rated by Yun (a lot of Swiss tour packages in Singapore go either to Titlis or Pilatus).

We made our way to Engelberg, (1 hour from Lucerne) and then made it up to Titlis in three stages: Engelberg – Truebsee, Truebsee – Stand and finally Stand – Titlis. The whole cable car journey up to Titlis took 45 min, and we took a short stop at Truebsee first before heading up.

At the entrance of the cable car

Lake at Truesbee

Glaciers seen from the rotating cable car

Things to do up on Mount Titlis.

1. Attempt to eat Movenpick Swiss Chocolate ice cream on the mountain top, then run indoors to finish it cos it’s way too cold outside. The ice cream was yummy! And the freshly made cone was delicious!

2. Take photos

3. Take photos with fake snowman

4. Take more photos of Swiss Alps

5. Take the sky flyer, which is a kinda chair lift which allows you to see more glaciers.

6. Get your feet frozen when taking the sky flyer (really very cold can, and I was only wearing one pair of cotton socks with my adidas trainers)

7. Lick the snow

8. Sitting pretty

9. Food! Veal sausage and veggie soup (both quite salty though)

10. Visit glacier cave

11. Go 147 feet under stone and ice

12. Worship the snow Buddha.

Engelberg

Enough with the mountains, we headed down, wanting to catch the 2.15 train back to Lucerne to complete our sightseeing of Lucerne, we ran down, but unfortunately missed the train, and had to wait an additional one hour. Thankfully we did, so we had some time to explore the lovely Engelberg, a charming little village! Since we had time to spare, we had more ice cream!

Lucerne

We can’t stay 2 nights here without exploring the city, and since it’s our last night here, we had to do something about it. We walked around the Old Town area, explored the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrueke), it has triangular panels in it telling the history of Lucerne, though unfortunately many of which were destroyed in the fire.

The Jesuit church and it’s ultra glamourous rocco interior (pink marble and white cornices!)

Hof church

Finally, we went to the supermart, bought ourselves some salad, dressing, ravioli and sauce, and cooked ourselves this yummy dinner in the hostel to reward ourselves. =)