Our week in Europe (part I: Switzerland)

Hello all! Now that we've been back in Canada a few days, I'm starting the process of posting some pictures from our recent trip to Germany and Switzerland. It was a really busy trip, visiting three cities in a week, spending lots of time on trains, and all with 9 hours of jetlag. This is a really long post, but I'm trying to explain what our trip was like in some detail.

We arrived in Frankfurt around 17:00 on Sunday, September 10th. We flew Air Transat from Vancouver as it was much cheaper, but this meant that our journey started with a few hours on a bus and an hour and a half on the ferry, arriving at the airport 3 hours early due to the ferry schedule. Sometimes living on an island is a bit irritating. The flight was fine, with only one stop in Calgary, and the food was even pretty good. However the seats were incredibly tiny, even for me, and Jeremi suffered a bit for this. I actually managed to sleep for a bit over 6 hours, completely missing all three movies, but Jeremi was not so fortunate.

The first stop in our journey was actually Zurich though, and I had to be in Zurich for a meeting with my former supervisor Ulrike at 9:00 Monday morning, and ready to give a talk at 10:00. This had to be done so early on Monday as Ulrike was leaving for a conference at noon. As such, the first thing we had to do was get on the train to Zurich.

I'd planned much of the trip beforehand, and bought all our train tickets ahead of time on line to save some money. For the tickets from Frankfurt to Jena they just sent me an e-ticket that I could print out. But for the tickets to Zurich, because it was leaving Germany and thus was using two different railroads, they had to send me an old-fashioned paper ticket. I was concerned that it wasn't going to make it through the mail on time, but we got it in less than a week. (This is faster than mail across Canada most of the time.) Unfortunately, we then neglected to bring it with us. We realized once we were at the airport in Vancouver, but there was no getting it then.

So the first step was to go to the Deutsche Bahn office to plead our case. All they were able to do was sell us new tickets at full price, which was a whopping 324 Euros (~$475) for the two tickets, almost twice what I 'd already payed. Apparantly we can now mail in the unused ticket and try to get a partial refund, but there are no guarantees. In any case, Ulrike reimbursed me for the more expensive ticket, though not for Jeremi's portion of course.

In addition to the difference in price, he also sold us tickets on a different routing. You can depart toward Zurich from either the Frankfurt airport station or the downtown station. I'd initially booked our tickets from the downtown station since I didn't realize this, but now that we were at the airport the Deutsche Bahn employee sold us tickets leaving from the airport, which was more convenient as we didn't have to take the subway downtown first. I explained that on the way back we wanted the same reservations because (a) the seats were already reserved for us, and (b) we had a connection to make for the train to Jena. (I booked two return tickets, Frankfurt-Zurich-Frankfurt and Frankfurt-Jena-Frankfurt, partly because it made it easier to claim the costs from the two separate sources.) So he booked the tickets for us, indicating that we had the same reservations on the way back as on our previous tickets.

One of the stereotypes we had heard about Germans is that they're very punctual, and that everything is on time. This proved to be untrue when it came to the trains, at least on the first leg of our journey. The train from Frankfurt to Mannheim was late, but then so was the train from Mannheim to Basel, so it sort of worked out. From Basel to Zurich we had to catch a later train, so we didn't get in until around midnight. With the initial ticket that we'd left at home we had seats reserved throughout the journey, which would have been nice. The first two trains (which took over three hours) were completely packed, and we and dozens of others were left sitting or standing in the aisles and in the space between the cars. It was really terrible, especially after such a long flight. We were really very happy when we got off in Zurich.

We were staying there at "Hotel Splendid", which didn't entirely live up to its name. We've stayed in nicer hostels, but it had a good central location and was only 100 Swiss Francs (~$90) a night, which is a bargain in Zurich. It was just funny to travel for 26 hours to arrive at such a shoddy-looking room. While I reviewed my talk and added in a couple of slides Jeremi went out and found us some food, a falafel pita for me and an incredibly delicious donair for him. I have to say, the donairs we had there were way better than those in Halifax. I finally made it to sleep around 3:00, which gave about 4 hours sleep before the church bells and the jackhammers outside the window started. Still, better than nothing.

While I went to ETH to visit with Ulrike, Jeremi went to the train station to meet our friend Gerd. Gerd left Victoria in July and started working in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the beginning of August. He took the train in for the day to see us, as it's only about 2 hours away despite being near the other end of the country. Europe is surprisingly small to our Canadian sensibilities, but Switzerland is downright tiny. Then Gerd and Jeremi came to ETH to hear my talk at 10:00. The talk went well, and afterwards we went for an early lunch with some of Ulrike's students, one of whom I knew from Dalhousie. Afterward Gerd and Jeremi set out to explore, while I toured some of the labs, talked to people about their research, and then had a 2 hour job interview with another researcher working at ETH. I was finished around 15:30, after battling through the worst of the jetlag with far too much caffeine. (The job interview started at 13:30, which my body thought was 4:30 in the morning. Not a good time to come across as intelligent and engaging after only 3 hours of sleep.)

In order to counteract the caffeine we thought it would be appropriate to start drinking, so we sampled some of the beers around town. We headed over to Zurich-West for some supper and some more drinks, and then back towards to centre of town to a beer garden on the banks of the river. By then it was around 21:30, and we headed toward the train station so that Gerd could get back home by midnight or so.

While waiting with him at the train station we realized that we hadn't actually brought our camera with us, so we had no photographic evidence that we were actually with Gerd in Zurich. But of course he had a fancy cell phone with a camera in it, so he was nice enough to take this picture at the train station, and send it to us. (Finally, a picture, for those of you good enough to actually read this far.)


The next picture is from the next morning over breakfast as we were leisurely making our way back to the train station to leave for Jena. I was miserably hungry and sleepy, so Jeremi thought it would be funny to record this for posterity. In my defence, we were only about 10 m from crews working on the cobblestones with jackhammers, to the point that conversation was near impossible. It seemed like all of downtown Zurich was under construction while we were there. And while all the cobblestone streets are very lovely, it seems to be quite difficult to get them up to do any work below. On the upside, my breakfast of Bircher muesli with fresh fruit was delicious!And here is a picture that Jeremi insisted should be here - a Coop in Zurich. While not directly related to Coop in Canada, both "Coop" and "Migros", the two main grocery chains we saw there, are co-operatives of some sort or other. But Coop doesn't stop with groceries - they also have banking and what seemed to be a department store as well. We went in as well, to pick up some food for lunch on the train, and to check out the general price of groceries. While going out for food there was very expensive compared to here, the groceries weren't so bad. What was a bit more discouraging was the lack of non-European groceries. They had one half-aisle that had some overpriced items, but it would take some looking in specialty shops I think.

And here is Jeremi sitting by the side of the river while we waited for our train. There aren't really very many benches anywhere, particularly in the train station, really encouraging you to loiter elsewhere. The river really is as turquoise as it looks here, Gerd claims due to the limestone, but the Moira in Belleville never looked this colour in its all-limestone bed. An oceanographer once told me the colour has something to do with silicates, but I don't remember the details. Jeremi also took many pictures of the swans and ducks along the river, but they didn't come out so well.

And so we've reached the end of possibly the longest post ever. Congratulations if you made it this far. The next post will deal with our time in Jena.