Ooh, the chocolate!

Switzerland was really a cool place. I really need to plan a hiking vacation to the mountains for next summer. The air was clean and fresh and the chocolate was to die for. And the view of the snowcapped mountains from the taxi was almost too tempting. The taxi driver tried to convince us to skip work and go sight seeing instead. On a beautiful sunny day, we almost accepted.

So, instead of going on a nice hike in the mountains, here is how the trip went down. My flight from Amsterdam was delayed, and it was packed with tourists. When you are traveling for business, there is nothing worse than a plane full of tourists to remind you that you are NOT on vacation. The Japanese tourists were especially aggravating – they are very impatient and tend to push in line. On the plane, I was letting the other people in my row get seated before I took my aisle seat. A Japanese guy tried to push past me, but I wouldn’t let him. He even indicated that he needed to get past me to get to his seat. I told him I would be out of his way as soon as the others were seated. He looked totally frustrated. But the kicker is that nobody was behind him – the rest of the passengers were on a second bus that had not even arrived at the plane!

When I got to Zurich, I got some cash from the ATM. Switzerland uses Swiss Francs rather than the Euro. One Swiss Franc is almost exactly one US Dollar, so I wanted 100 Francs. The cash machine gave me a one hundred Franc note. I walked over to the bank to see if I could get smaller bills, but she assured me that the 100 is the most commonly used bill and I would not have any problem using it. That was my first indication that Switzerland might be rather expensive. The next was the 100 Franc taxi ride to my hotel. It only took 20 minutes. Wow, good thing the company is paying!

At the hotel, I noticed that all the TV programs are dubbed into German (probably Swiss German, which is different than regular German, but hardly important when you don’t understand either one). The only English language programming was CNN. So, if I go to Switzerland for a vacation, I need lots of money and a good book.

At work, we learned some interesting things about Switzerland. Every house must have a bomb shelter and emergency food. Even if you are building a brand new house, you better plan to build a bomb shelter. Things run pretty much right on time in Switzerland. The taxi drivers that we arranged to take us to and from the hotel were always 10 minutes early. We saw a storage room that was completely organized. Bottles and jars were neatly lined up with their labels facing front. It was definitely different from all the messy store rooms I’m used to. The Swiss people eat a lot of cheese, but they don’t drink milk like the folks in Holland. I saw lots of people riding their bikes and most of them had helmets on, again a contrast to Holland.

In the evenings, we had a little time on our own. The first night we shopped for chocolate. We found the local chocolate shop and bought small amounts of the terribly expensive chocolate. Then we went to a grocery store to buy some less expensive stuff. When I got back to the hotel, I tried the expensive stuff and it was beyond fabulous! If I hadn’t already spent $60 on chocolate, I would have gone back to get more.

The second evening, we borrowed the hotel bikes and rode around town a bit. The taxi driver had given us directions to a restaurant that we could ride to that was on a lake. When we arrived, we laughed out loud. The lake was more of a pond and the restaurant looked like the snack bar for the mini-golf course. So, we just rode around a bit more and then went back into the town center for dinner. Of course, I should tell you that I did not have my bike helmet with me, so I was living dangerously. And, at one point we decided to take a side street just to see where it went. Well, that side street went straight up a hill. After biking in Holland, neither of us was doing very good on the hill. We had to stop a couple times to catch our breath. Good thing we had mountain bikes with lots of gears! As we got to the top, we realized that there was nothing to see, so we rode back down. Down is always more fun than up! But at least we earned our dinner and it was nice to get outside to enjoy the weather.