Last Wednesday night my roommate and I decided that we should go to Zürich, Switzerland for the weekend. Never mind that we would have an hour after our German midterm to get ourselves together and to the train station or that we both had more midterms on Monday. It was a great idea to us!
Well the trip started off with us, of course, running to catch our train. Then we got to the train station with a whole ten minutes to spare so we thought we should go grocery shopping and try to save some money in Switzerland. This left us with three minutes to get to our train. But we made it as the doors were shutting and the conductor was yelling at us in German to get on. We then got to meet our seatmates, sweating holding a giant bottle of wine and two bags of chips, such important necessities that we almost missed our train for them.
But we arrived in our unknown city eight hours later at 9:30pm and then we had to find our hostel. After we had booked our last minute train tickets my roommate and I then realized how expensive rooms were. Our options came down to either couch surfing with a stranger two hours outside the city or staying in a hostel that may or may not be in the red light district…we chose the prostitutes. So needless to say we were a little apprehensive walking to our hostel so late at night. But thankfully we arrived and the neighborhood was actually really nice and where all the nightlife was. So we dropped off our bags, grabbed our free welcome drink, and went to a club around the corner from where we were staying. While we were at the club dancing we met two guys. Turns out they were in a band, Pegasus. My roommate and I were both skeptical. We were thinking: That’s so cute. You’re in a band, you’re going on tour. Sure. Well, turns out they’re pretty much the most famous band in Switzerland and one of their songs was used to introduce the Swiss team in the recent London Olympics. We of course found this out the next day over breakfast and couldn’t stop laughing. They even invited us to dinner and to go out again Saturday night.
Saturday morning my roommate and I decided to explore the city of Zurich. We even stumbled upon someone passing out free samples of Swiss chocolate so our first taste of this heaven was free! We spent our afternoon walking around the lake, looking at the swans, going inside the churches and buying chocolate! We even got a free sailing lesson. Someone needed some extra deck hands and offered us a free boat ride on Lake Zürich and we jumped at the chance! I think we were all happy with our decisions until he figured out we weren’t lying when we said we couldn’t sail and we figured out how hard sailing was. The sailor came to this realization when we crashed the boat less then ten minutes in. But I came to this realization when I got hit in the head with the boom because I didn’t know I had to duck. It was an adventure to say the least. But we made it back to shore alive, got a free boat ride, and learned how to sail! We then finished our day in the city with some Swiss cheese fondue
and a hot chocolate from the famous Sprüngli chocolate store.
Saturday night, we decided to go to the same club we had gone to the night before to meet our friends. At the door we were given the option to either pay ten Francs or submit ourselves to be made over for the Halloween theme. Well, to a college kid, there isn’t really any choice. I ended up as a ghoul and my roommate a vampire. We then finally made it upstairs to meet our friends in the band. They had paid the 10 Francs. They also didn’t want to stay. So we ended up leaving and going to this random Spanish bar where we met a lot of new people. Mostly because a lot of people felt the need to tell us it wasn’t Halloween and were wondering why we had stuff on our faces.
The next day was rainy so my roommate and I decided to check out another part of Switzerland, Luzern (mostly because we had to buy more chocolate and all the stores in Zurich were closed). Once again we were running late to catch our train so we decided to just buy our tickets on the train itself. Well, turns out you can’t do that in Switzerland so we got a lovely little fine to go with our last minute decision to go to Luzern. Luckily the ticket man felt pity, compassion, or he just wanted us to shut up so he lowered the fee from 90 Francs to just 10.
My roommate and I even felt like we had accomplished everything so we hopped on an early train home which would get us back an hour before the public transportation stopped working. Well, fate was against us because Germany’s borders were closed, so the train had to create a new route back to Vienna. This caused a two hour delay, so we didn’t get back until 1:00 in the morning. Just enough time for me to catch six hours of sleep before I had to wake up and teach English to my little Austrian students. All in all the weekend was a win. But then again anything involving chocolate for me equals winning.