Matt and Kat Brown

We finally had time to sit down and sort through the 600 or so photos we generated over the past week. For your viewing pleasure we’ve cut them down to the following highlights:

• Zurich and surrounds (Winterthur, Rapperswil) – ignore the first 10 winter photos, they’re from an earlier Zurich trip!
• The Rhine Falls – one of our day trips out of Zurich, it deserved a gallery all of its own.
• U2 360degree tour in Dublin – We saw U2 in Croke Park, Dublin on Monday night, Awesome concert.
• Car on Fire – A Mercedes parked behind our house "burst" into flames at 4:30am on Wed morning, providing some uneeded excitement!

We’re off to the UK this (long) weekend, so expect to see some photos of Stonehenge and the Banksy exhibit from Bristol Museum next week.

Last week in Zurich was nice and relaxing. I enjoyed sleeping in and spending afternoons visiting different places in the city. I visited a Museum of Design one day and the Zurich zoo on another. I wandered around the old city and browsed the shops a lot.

Zurich seemed very orderly and very expensive. The people there were generally quite reserved. Nobody smiled on the tram and most people are quite unwilling to speak English. Despite this the city is nice to explore because everything is so clean and organised with great tram, train and boat services. The city really runs like clockwork.

I was able to meet Matt at the Google offices for dinner a couple of nights and I enjoyed getting the grand tour. Pictures of the Zurich offices have been much discussed and puzzled over online ever since the makeover last year. It was cool to see each of the zany ideas in reality. My favorite part was lying in a bathtub filled with foam and watching the fishes in the fish tank. A bit surreal really.

I wasn’t allowed to take any photos Mum, but I can tell you I did try out the twisty metal slide that goes down to the cafeteria and it was somewhat embarrassing

On the Saturday before we left we took a boat down the lake to a town called Rapperswil. The slow cruise gave us good views of the houses and vine yards along the lakeside, very pretty. We walked around Rapperswil a bit and then met some of Matt’s colleagues in the afternoon for a UK beer and cheese tasting event! It was a little ironic to be ordering a stout and a wedge of wensleydale while in Switzerland but it was an enjoyable afternoon and evening with good company and tasty food.

Early on Sunday we headed off to the airport. We shed all our remaining swiss francs at the airport plus a wee bit more when we stocked up on toblerone, lindt and some luxemburgerli yum yum!!!

The only thing I didn’t do while in Switzerland which I still want to try is a  fondue dinner. Warm summer evenings are not well suited to meals of melted cheese so I think we’ll have to plan a return visit to Zurich in winter when the city is cold and snowy.

We’re in Zurich this week, I’m here for work and Kat managed to get a week off work to relax and join me which certainly makes my traveling for work much more enjoyable.

We arrived yesterday (Saturday) in the late afternoon and found our hotel/apartment with no problems. After settling in I took Kat on a quick tour of the central city / lake area which I’d sort of explored on a previous visit last year. Our first impression, at around 6pm on a Saturday was how quiet and sparsely populated many of the streets in the center of town were, all the shops were closed and there weren’t really that many people around even at the lake front. We had dinner at a nice “Gratin” restaurant near the central train station, delicious food.

Today (Sunday) we took the train northwest out of Zurich to the town of Winterthur, Switzerland’s 6th largest city apparently. The town itself was absolutely deserted and quiet by normal standards, Sunday in Switzerland is definitely not a day for shopping or anything that requires interaction with a store of any kind. Luckily for us, the object of our visit was the Swiss Photomuseum which is open on a Sunday and we spent an enjoyable hour or two browsing an exhibition of Walker Evans’ work along with a couple of other exhibitions.

After a quick lunch at an Italian restaurant (delicious pizza baked in front of us) we hopped on another train, (Switzerland’s public transport is awesome, if a little pricey), and journeyed a bit further north to the Rhine Falls which are apparently the largest in Europe. They were impressive, but if that’s the best Europe has to offer it’s doing pretty badly. Huka Falls are at least competitive with the Rhine Falls in my opinion. We took a bunch of photos, and a boat ride to a rock right in the middle of the falls where we could see the water cascading down on either side and feel the spray making us and my camera somewhat wet…

We eventually headed back to the train via a nice riverside walk and returned to Zurich via a round-about route via some small rural train stations that a friendly ticket seller in Winterthur had arranged for us to minimise the cost of our overall trip!

I’m off to work tomorrow and Kat has a week of shopping (window only I hope) and relaxing planned for herself.