My friend Liz Aston was in town for a long weekend, and we managed to get out and about a bit, but mostly we just missed buses and trains, because everything runs exactly on time here, and we were always about 30 seconds late. There is little more annoying than trying to get on the train, seeing smug Swiss passengers smirking out at you, and watching the train pull away. We missed our train out to my co-worker’s dinner party, and we missed the train back. We missed a train out to Basel, and then had to wait ages to get a bus out to Weil am Rhein in Germany. But in between missing our transport, we ate, drank, and made merry, and also looked at lots of chairs and buildings (at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein).
I can’t think of anywhere else that you can take a local city bus that will then take you out of the city and across an international border into another city for the regular fare. I also can’t think of anywhere else that has such friendly, helpful people. I asked the driver on our Swiss local bus to Germany which stop was closest to the museum, and when the stop came, he turned around, looked for me, then gave me detailed instructions on how to go once we got off the bus. The ticket seller at the museum noticed that we weren’t in the tour group as it was about to start, so he came to the gift shop (in another building), found us, and brought us back into the fold. The tour guide, on finding out that we had come over from Switzerland, drove us back to a stop on the Basel tram system, so that we wouldn’t have to make bus connections again.
Back in Zurich, we took a little boat ride around the lake, then spent a couple of hours at the Turkish baths in my neighborhood, which I highly recommend, not only for the gross-out factor of seeing how much dead skin you can scrub off of yourself, but also because it’s damn relaxing… On a completely unrelated note, for some reason, I find this to be really funny: http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/41999656.html
I can’t think of anywhere else that you can take a local city bus that will then take you out of the city and across an international border into another city for the regular fare. I also can’t think of anywhere else that has such friendly, helpful people. I asked the driver on our Swiss local bus to Germany which stop was closest to the museum, and when the stop came, he turned around, looked for me, then gave me detailed instructions on how to go once we got off the bus. The ticket seller at the museum noticed that we weren’t in the tour group as it was about to start, so he came to the gift shop (in another building), found us, and brought us back into the fold. The tour guide, on finding out that we had come over from Switzerland, drove us back to a stop on the Basel tram system, so that we wouldn’t have to make bus connections again.
Back in Zurich, we took a little boat ride around the lake, then spent a couple of hours at the Turkish baths in my neighborhood, which I highly recommend, not only for the gross-out factor of seeing how much dead skin you can scrub off of yourself, but also because it’s damn relaxing… On a completely unrelated note, for some reason, I find this to be really funny: http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/41999656.html
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