Walking around Zurich

Odile struggled with jet lag, heat, dehydration - not sure what created headaches, but she's better now.

After a 4 hour nap, we hit the streets to find dinner.  We passed 3 girls playing alpenhorns in a concrete structure Wasserkirthe (a church canopy area).  The sound reverberated in a beautiful way that this video does not adequately show.

A common custom here for bachelor and bachelorette parties is to walk the streets selling raffle tickets to try to pay for the wedding.  Its a fun thing to do and a group of young women caught us, speaking in Swiss-German.  Once they spoke in English, they explained the custom, took our 2 suisse francs (everyone wins!), and gave us our prize: a small package of tissues.

At the last minute we decided to watch the World Cup 3rd place game from our hotel room.  The heat wave has moved everyone to sidewalk tables, leaving the area with the TV hot and empty.  Not much fun to sit alone in a hot bar, so we moved into our limited A/C hotel room.  Mark disliked the officiating, but FYI England won the 3rd place title.  We will watch the final replay at 6:30 AM Zurich time tomorrow:  USA v Japan.

Today, we started out for a late breakfast at Babu's Bakery: espresso for Mark, cappuccino for Odile with a chocolate croissant and raspberry scone to share.  We ate at a sidewalk table, of course!

Next a stroll through the narrow streets.  Most businesses are closed on Sunday, but we could window shop.

We browsed the National Museum of Switzerland for a couple hours.  Camera must go into lockers, but we learned a lot about Suisse history and a little about the history of Rome and France too.






Not a lot of crime here, but here is a photo of a police car navigating the narrow streets.

   

Breakfast had worn off, so we stopped at Teuschur Chocolates for "lunch":  sharing 2 champaagne truffles, a dark chocolate chocolate truffle, a dried apricot coated in dark chocolate, and 2 others involving hazelnuts and ?.  We forget their names, not that it affected the taste at all.  Best lunch meal EVER!

We wandered back to the hotel to shower and dress for dinner.  We are noticing that people in Zurich are much thinner than those in America.  No one is obese.  Men wear shorter shorts.  Women are very sexy and the only bathing suit worn by anyone is a bikini.  After looking for hours, I could only find one person in a one-piece swimsuit.  How they stay so slim while eating bratwurst is a mystery to us

Another car photo for Cory, an American Camaro (rare here):

.