Zurich

Posted by Anura Samara, 2 March 2015

Once again, we decide to explore a bit closer to home. Both of us have been to Zurich before, but only on day trips. My last visit there was in miserable, foggy weather in winter. Guess what? Zurich managed to make it miserable, although the fog was replaced by rain.

Walking tour

We started our weekend with a free walking tour of the Zurich downtown area.

The tour started at Paradeplatz, then took us inside Fraumunster and up to Lindenhof. This is supposedly where the original city was but sadly there are no ancient ruins or anything else up there. However, it’s a nice spot to look down on to the river and across to the other side of the river. From Lindenof, we then crossed to the other side of the river and walked along the narrow old streets before ending up at Grossmunster.

This was a larger group than the (paid) walking tours we normally take but the guide was informative and friendly and it’s hard to believe that such a great service is provided for free.

Grossmunster

As our tour ended at Grossmunster, we figured we might as well go in for a look. Of course, my only intention was to climb the tower – the last time I did that, the views of the city were obscured by fog.

Although it was overcast, we did get a good view of the city. The pick of the views is from the north to south-west, taking in the city, the river and the lake beyond. When you look to the east the view is more of offices and suburbs – although the hills rise in that direction, it’s not a spectacular view.

Swiss National Museum

We woke on Sunday to steady rain.

As I’d mistakenly booked the eco-tuktuk tour for Saturday, we were at a loose end. Zurich does that typically Swiss thing – it was impossible to find anywhere for breakfast on a Sunday morning, even the supposedly fantastic shopping strip of Bahnhofstrasse. The only places open were in the station itself, so that’s where we had breakfast and waited for the Swiss National Museum to open.

Once we’d figured out that there were audio guides – as the signs are all in French and German – we found that the main exhibition does a good job of explaining the development of the Swiss Confederation from early days of separate kingdoms, through to the separate cantons forming and joining together. It’s not all been smooth sailing, and along the way with a few civil wars, mainly over religion. Throughout all of this, it was interesting to see the strong independence felt by each canton, which they would occasionally fight for. However, this independence combined with the system of popular referendums to change laws results in a deeply conservative society – the museum points out that one of the reasons that women only achieved the right to vote in 1971 was that all of the people who had to vote on the proposal to extend voting rights to women were all men!

There are a couple of other interesting exhibitions in the museum:

• a series of rooms create to reproduce various rooms from old houses, complete with wall panelling, windows and furniture, and
• an exhibition on the art of paper-cutting. These ranged from traditional silhouettes to the most amazing works of 3d art.

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