Five hours trying to find a hotel? No problem for us. Three days spent in the most ridiculously overpriced, and not to mention pretty boring, city in the world? That calls for trouble. I’ll talk about both of these situations in today’s post!
I’ve mentioned it several times already I’m sure, but my wife and I originally planed to fly into Rome and road trip around Italy and up into Switzerland, we even planned to stay a day in Liechtenstein! Renting a car in Italy is easy, right? After all we did it on our honeymoon a year earlier without any sort of issue. Oh yeah, I had a European license a year earlier I had gotten in Germany before deploying to Kosovo! Oops….
Anyhow, the original plan would have landed us in Rome where we would have stayed a day or two (having seen all the major sites during our honeymoon) and then we would have driven to Cinque Terre (a place Ziqin said she just had to see!), and of course would have seen the leaning tower of Pisa on the way, then over to Venice for a couple days, up to Zurich in Switzerland, seeing Liechtenstein on the way (I thought it’d be cool to be able to say I’ve been to a country with only 40,000 citizens), over to Zermatt where we’d see the Matterhorn and even do a little hiking, then down to Milan for a day before we flew to Paris.
As you know, we couldn’t rent a car so we switched to using trains. Well you probably aren’t interested in the routes we took, so just suffice it to say that we eventually made it to Cinque Terre and we planned to take the train from there to Zermatt, where we had actually already paid for a hotel. When at the train office however we found out we couldn’t get a train to Zermatt from there! We would have to take a train first to Milan and then switch trains to go to Zurich, from there we should have been able to get a train to Zermatt (which didn’t happen, but we’ll get to that in a minute).
So we boarded the train for Milan, once we got to Milan we would have two hours before the train to Zurich left, so we decided to go out and grab some lunch! We walked around, we had eaten plenty of Italian food over the past week or so we had been in Italy, so we were looking for something else. What we found was actually a place that sold kebab and pizza. Ziqin ordered the kebab, for some reason I ordered the calzone (I guess I hadn’t eaten enough Italian food after all).
Anyhow, our food came and we realized we weren’t going to have time to eat there! So we decided to take our food to go. However, the chef refused to let me have a to go box for my calzone! He said it had to be eaten in the restaurant. As soon as he was out of site I took a plastic bag and started putting it in, he angrily said “Fine, I’ll put it in a box for you. Look at her food,” he said pointing at Ziqin’s kebab, “that was meant to be taken to go. This calzone won’t taste right if you take it, it should be eaten here! If I had known you were going to take your food to go I wouldn’t have let you order that!” Apparently taking my calzone to go would go against the guy’s culinary integrity! I thought it tasted fine when I eventually did bite into it on the train to Zurich.
So we boarded the train, and Ziqin and I enjoyed looking out the window and seeing all the beautiful scenery! Ziqin and I passed the time by playing rummy and speed with the cards I had brought. Other than that the ride itself was fairly uneventful. Our plan was to get off in Zurich and immediately find a train to Zermatt so we could still get to our hotel and see the Matterhorn!
However when we got off in Zurich and looked at the prices we realized it would have cost us about $500 USD to get to Zermatt and back! That certainly didn’t seem worth it for only going for a day. The hotel we had paid for over there was only $80 a night, so we decided to just eat that cost and go find a hotel in Zurich! Hello, it’s Zurich! Who hasn’t heard of Zurich? It must be pretty cool to see, right?
We left the train station and started wandering around, looking for an ATM because we didn’t have any Swiss Francs, only Euros. This is a city known for its banks, right? Finding an ATM should be easy! It took us at least an hour of wandering around to find an ATM. Our phone didn’t really work here, service ended at the Italian border. We eventually found an ATM and then we decided to eat some dinner, it had been a long trip from Milan, and we were hungry again! We found about the cheapest restaurant we could find, they all looked so expensive! We each got a salad and a drink, and the bill came out to the equivalent of $50 USD! Holy crap this place was expensive! Must have been a fluke, right? We found a hotel for the night on Hotwire, and went there for the night. The hotel was nice! We stayed there for one night, we already had booked a hotel for the next couple nights way back before we ever left Beijing! It was actually pretty amazing how closely we were able to maintain our original plan for locations we went to, considering we switched to trains.
Ziqin said the Swiss money looks like a bunch of guys who are telling us to give them their money back!
The hotel was amazing, but who really cares about that? The next day we headed out to checkout this city! The city was very clean, and most everyone could speak English, and there was some pretty scenery, not a lot though. We saw some old church, and a very pretty lake where Ziqin fed geese from her shoe! We also saw lots of $50,000 watches and purses in the store windows, and everyone drove BMWs or Mercedes vehicles it seemed!
So that was day one looking around Zurich. We didn’t eat at any other restaurants during out stay there, we just went to grocery stores to buy food, but even there the prices were ridiculous! We never really got out of even a grocery store for less than $20-$30 for the two of us for a single meal.
The next couple days we just hung out at the hotel for the most part, I had to do some work, and so did she. She tutored a student via Skype, and I did some web development for my current employer.
All in all, we don’t recommend going to Zurich, it is known for its banks, and not for being a tourist city. There are so many other beautiful places to go in Switzerland, it just so happened that Zurich was the easiest to get to by train.
We eventually took the train from Zurich back to Milan where we would stay for a night before catching our flight to Paris the next day. Back in Milan we enjoyed much better prices for much tastier food! But before we got to the food, we first had to get to our hotel!
We followed the map of the train routes and took the train over to where we thought our hotel was, way out in the outskirts! It wasn’t there, so we kept riding the trains and subways around trying to find it, we even asked several people, all of whom gave us either bad directions, or directions we couldn’t understand because they didn’t speak much English. I dragged our luggage, and we wandered around everywhere! We eventually decided not to go to the hotel we had booked (this one we didn’t have to pay for in advance) and we booked another hotel that was supposed to be nicer. They even told us how to get to the hotel! We had to take a couple more trains, and then we walked over two miles from the train station dragging our luggage to get to the hotel.
We were so exhausted! It had been five hours since we got to Milan, this was by far the most lost we ever got during our 30+ days of traveling around Europe. Once we got to the hotel we found out they had a shuttle! We could have just called them and they would have picked us up, why hadn’t they mentioned that when I was getting directions? Oh well, we did take advantage of the shuttle to get back to the train station so we could ride into town to check it out and eat some good food! But I believe I covered all that in a separate post about Milan!
So I will just end by saying, Switzerland is beautiful, but Zurich is boring! Go to Zermatt instead, or so I hear, we haven’t been there yet ourselves 
And also, man am I verbose or what! If you made it this far, thanks for bearing with me!