{"id":699,"date":"2009-06-13T15:41:52","date_gmt":"2009-06-13T19:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=699"},"modified":"2011-10-18T20:54:37","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T01:54:37","slug":"zurich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=699","title":{"rendered":"Zurich"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve arrived in Zurich, and aside from the people beside us harrassing the flight attendants and knocking us over with the &#8220;snuggle train&#8221; it wasn&#8217;t too bad &#8212; even though we didn&#8217;t get our pre-picked seats in the 2-seat part of the 2-4-2 plane setup.<\/p>\n<p>Wayfare&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/themoneygardener.com\/2008\/11\/potato-wedges-luggage.html\">brand-new Air Canada branded suitcase<\/a> fell apart. Hopefully it&#8217;ll hold together long enough to get it home, where hopefully the Bay will take it back.<\/p>\n<p>Our hotel room is great &#8212; probably bad to start with the biggest, nicest room, because it&#8217;ll spoil us for Davos and France, where the rooms will undoubtedly be smaller and less luxurious. But for now it&#8217;s fantastic, quiet, with our choice of 5 different types of pillows (goose down, duck feather, new wool, spelt chaff, ortho latex, or memory foam). The internet is free, but strangely enough the ice costs $5\/tray.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re pretty beat from the flight, so we didn&#8217;t spend too much time exploring the city, but so far it&#8217;s been really good. I&#8217;m surprised at how many people speak English &#8212; I thought my broken French would have to serve as a lingua franca, but so far it&#8217;s been no problem. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s the pale skin or what, but most people even greet me in English from the get-go. The main shopping strip is really cute with pedestrian and trolley\/tram access only &#8212; many of the cars seem to have to navigate around.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that&#8217;s really struck us about Zurich is that it has a really intricate trolley\/bus\/regional train system, which is amazing since the city is pretty much the same size as London, Ontario, which has pretty terrible transit (ok, I like the LTC and it&#8217;s not bad along Richmond or Oxford, which is surprisingly good for small-town Canada, but this is just a whole other league). Even on Saturdays the trams have been coming every 5 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>The streetlights are suspended from cables strung between the buildings, which looks especially strange in the daylight when the lights are off and you can&#8217;t figure out why all the cables are strung all over the place.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and the river was a fair bit larger than I was expecting &#8212; I figured the (Ontario) Thames was a decent-sized river, but this one is a good 10-15&#8242; deep, with fish snapping at bugs in the early morning!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve arrived in Zurich, and aside from the people beside us harrassing the flight attendants and knocking us over with the &#8220;snuggle train&#8221; it wasn&#8217;t too bad &#8212; even though we didn&#8217;t get our pre-picked seats in the 2-seat part of the 2-4-2 plane setup. Wayfare&#8217;s brand-new Air Canada branded suitcase fell apart. Hopefully it&#8217;ll [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}