Zurich Day 2
08 September 2017
Our kitchen wasn't particularly big, just a couple of electric burners and a sink, but I was still really happy to have it. Breakfast came courtesy of our shopping trip last night. We had some ham and cheese with rye, Nescafé latte packets, yogurt and muesli (this is Switzerland after all), and I also cooked up some eggs. I love how they don't refrigerate their eggs in Europe. That would freak out some people back home for sure, but they are so fresh and of such high quality here, and eggs are naturally designed to last a good bit after being laid anyway. Chickens in the wild don't have fridges that I know about.
Using the last bit of time left on our 24-hour transit ticket, we hopped a streetcar up to the Löwenstraße to go to café Sprüngli. This is one of the Swiss coffee shop/chocolatiers that is worth the hype in my opinion. I got a café mélange, which was more whipped-creamy than the mélange in Vienna, more like the Viennese Einspänner. Beth got the hot chocolate with a shot of espresso dumped in. We sat outside the café just watching the people go by as we enjoyed our drinks. I think one should always take a bit of time out of their trip for this. Just sit and watch, sit and reflect. And have good coffee.
So we have been working on our German. We have been coming frequently to Germany and the surrounding German-speaking countries, and honestly it has started to feel a bit like we’ve found a home, especially in places like Vienna, Nuremberg, and Dinkelsbühl where we visited on the last trip. I think we would like to settle in somewhere in this area, so learning the language has become a good bit important. We feel we have been getting on fairly well with it, though admittedly we are best with reading, then listening, lastly speaking. But we feel we can hear a lot and understand what is being said. Of course, most of our time was in Germany or Austria. Here in Zurich I’ve heard people refer to “Swiss German”. I’m not sure how different this is than regular "Germany German", but I have noticed people saying things that we can’t pick up at all, even when we are in a situation where we should be familiar with the words. One that has really stuck out is when we walked into a shop, or here at Sprüngli when greeted by our server, they said something in greeting and we have no idea what it was. Not a clue.
The Zurich central train station is said to be one of the nicest, cleanest train stations in the world. We couldn't really disagree. There were lots of good eats down there, good stores, and more good people watching. We found a nice grocery store and picked up a few more things – pretzels and more Haribo gummis for the car ride tomorrow, croissants to have with breakfast, and some other odds and ends we needed. We wandered through the station a bit more and fell upon a shop called Beers of the World. Works for me! They had a respectable little section of US crafts, but it was nice to see so many other countries represented- especially the ones you don't normally see. Denmark... check! Norway... check! Estonia... a whole shelf! They had a large supply of Swiss craft beers (I had sure hoped so), and we picked a couple to sample. We eyed up the big bottle of BFM's Bon Chien (an epic Swiss-made Flemish-style red sour if you never tried), but picked up one from the same brewery we haven't had instead. We then browsed the Belgian section, looking over the usual Chimay and Lindeman's and LaChouffe, and some of the others that...
STOP EVERYTHING!!!!!
Right there, sitting innocently on the shelf just apart from its Belgian brethren, we found a bottle from our favorite brewery in the world! One that is near impossible to get back home, that we had in Brussels and fell in love with, and that we always dream of finding again. There it was!
Beth scooped up the Mort Subite bottle and held it high like a trophy. Lambic Geuze. Memories came flooding back from that awesome art nouveau café, the deep bellowing voice of the server calling out "Geuuuuuze" for each draft ordered. The Lambic Blanche may have been my favorite, but this will surely do. We packed our bottles securely in our bag, and happily strolled through the rest of the station munching on our gummis, dreaming about when to crack open our prize. It's funny, really... something as simple as just seeing a logo on a bottle can bring back so many memories of good times. There we were in an underground section of a train station in Zurich, and years-old memories of Brussels come rushing back to us. Funny how that works.
I guess it's about time to come clean and admit our Haribo addiction. Gummi Bears are of course the standard go-to, but Haribo makes such a huge variety of other things as well. Here in or around Germany we can find so many kind that we don't get at home. By this point on the trip we were on our second type opened, and we had another waiting in our backpack that we just picked up. Those gummis were padding the Mort Subite though, so they had to wait. But as you read the rest of our tale, just assume we are snacking a bag of gummis as we go along...
Behind the Zurich station and across a narrow bridge was a nice little peninsula-park called Platzspitz. It was so peaceful walking the tree-covered pathways, almost unimaginable that the huge central station was just right there across the river. We walked along the path and looked out over the rivers, checked out the art deco style gazebo, and found a pretty building that actually turned out to be the bathroom. They sure do it right over here! The trees were huge, and their thick branches twisted and draped over the pathways like leaf-covered roller coaster tracks, providing shade and a forest-like ambiance in the heart of the city. We got up to the part where the park comes to a point, and serves as the split between the Sihl and Limmat rivers. We sat along the wall in a shady spot under a tree, watched the people take breaks from their day, and read quotes from James Joyce that were inscribed upon the stones in the wall. Apparently, he wrote a bit about this river, possibly taking his inspiration from this very spot in the park. As we headed further up along the riverbank we noticed all the chestnuts scattered across the ground. It was so tempting to just scoop them up, but even with our little kitchen we didn't really have the time or means to do anything with them. There is something so primitively exciting about finding good fresh food free in the natural world. Hopefully there is someone here who will put them to use rather than just letting them waste on the ground.
A bit out of the way from the main tourist part of the city is an old viaduct. A train runs along the top with a walking path paralleling the tracks, but the spaces in between the pillars were converted into shops with one section set up as a marketplace. The Markthalle im Viadukt is a cute little city market- with grocery stalls, bakeries, seafood markets, and a nice group of food counters. The fish looked so fresh, and some of the prepared stalls smelled so good. We had one night left in Zurich and our apartment with the mini-kitchen, but we were going out tonight and couldn't get what we really wanted there. Our attention was drawn to the produce vendor though, and we just couldn't pull ourselves away. Everything looked wonderful! Bins of mushrooms and heirloom tomatoes sat among bunches of super green lettuce, and there were baskets of giant lemons and amazing berries that all beckoned us to buy. They had the small grape tomatoes in six different varieties that we just couldn't resist. We took a few of each, and added in a small carton of fresh johannesberries (red currants). We strolled through the market eating tomatoes like they actually were grapes, and were absolutely blown away with how sweet they were. Perfect afternoon snack!
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