day-trips from Zurich

Heidi on the Walensee

Yesterday afternoon we took a train to Walenstadt (about an hour from Zurich), in search of some Swiss culture. We walked through the small town to the lake and hopped on a boat for a dinner cruise. The Walensee has some beautiful, dramatic scenery going on – on one side the mountain is so steep … Read more

Spargelfest!

That’s right, boys and girls, it’s that time of year again: Spargelzeit. The celebration of asparagus is in full swing in Switzerland. Thanks to a tip from Jack at Laughing Lemon, some friends and I headed outside the city last Sunday to check out the Flaacher Spargelfest (an asparagus festival held on a family farm … Read more

Skiing in Davos – a post for posterity

Sunday morning we woke up hideously early and hauled our ski gear to the train station for a day in Davos. On the way there my husband joked that someday we would tell our kids about this last day of skiing ever before global warming made it a thing of the past. So I figured … Read more

Colorful Fribourg

This weekend we hopped on a train for a day-trip to Fribourg, a charming town which straddles the Röstigraben. The Swiss city Fribourg (which is primarily francophone today) is known as Freiburg in German, but don’t confuse it with the German city of Freiburg (also a fun place to hang out) or the two other … Read more

Carnival, Italo-Swiss style

After last year’s lackluster parade in Zurich, I was beginning to think the Swiss just didn’t know how to do carnival. I mean, a correct carnival celebration does involve a certain amount of coming out of oneself, public silliness, and, (gasp!) messiness. Oh yes, I’ve heard about how in Basel there is ‘craziness’ in the … Read more

Liechtensteiny blues

After not leaving the country in over a month, our wanderlust brought us to Liechtenstein on Saturday afternoon. It took about an hour and a half to get there from Zurich by train and then bus. We decided to head for the capital, Vaduz (who knew Liechtenstein was big enough for more than one town?), since it contained a few interesting-sounding museums and such.

We arrived around 1 pm and headed straight to a restaurant that promised Liechtensteinese (is there a real adjective form of this word? Anyone? Anyone?) specialties, which turned out to be strikingly similar to Swiss food: meat, potatoes, sausage, cheese, spatzle, beer. Actually a lot of things about Liechtenstein are strikingly similar to Switzerland: the Swiss Franc is the official currency, High German is the official written language, and an incomprehensible dialect is what they actually speak. Plus it’s generally clean, safe, and orderly, at least from what we saw.

Read moreLiechtensteiny blues

Crap skiing at Flims Laax

[For those of you who haven’t been following along, we are in the midsts of the warmest and unsnowiest winter in the history of Switzerland (please note that this is just my own estimate, and that I am not a weatherman).] Not being able to hold out any longer, we finally went skiing today for … Read more

St. Gallen and Switzerland appreciation

This weekend we decided to get out and appreciate some Switzerland. On Saturday we hopped on a train to St. Gallen, a city in the eastern part of the country. We chose St. Gallen because 1) we had never been there, 2) we had heard it was cute, and 3) it was only an hour … Read more