Boston to Copenhagen : Life in Denmark: Day 125 -- Zurich, Switzerland

First of all, a disclaimer: I apologize in advance because I am not going to figure out where a german keyboard can be found on my computer, so I will write all Swiss German words without any "fancy" letters.

For the past two days I have been in Zurich, Switzerland for a haemophilia conference (look how European I now am, I write "haemophilia" instead of "hemophilia"). I arrived Sunday evening and took a 4 min train ride from the airport to my hotel -- Swissotel -- in Oerlikon which is just north of the city center of Zurich.

After checking into my room I walked around the area looking for dinner but most things were closed with it being Sunday night. I did come across some men playing on giant chess boards. The picture is not very good because I didn't want to get too close!

I ended up having dinner at a Mexican sports bar called Cheyenne, where I had a Swiss beer and chicken quesadillas. After an exciting meal alone I headed back to my hotel room, spent the evening talking to Collin and went to sleep.

Yesterday, the conference started early and went until 5:30. It was a long but interesting day. At 6 we all met in the lobby where a bus took us to the city center of Zurich. There we were greeted by our walking guide (who happens to be the husband of one of the organizers, also pictured below). He is dressed in "guild" clothes and told us a little bit about the guilds in Zurich in the 11th-14th centuries as we walked to our restaurant.

I will try to recall some of what he said, but you are better off checking out the wiki pages! The guilds, or "Zunfte" were established in 1336 as a means to give some voting powers to the tradesmen. There were 14 original guilds. Here is a picture of some guild houses. The red dog represents the Gessellschaft zur Constaffel which was a nobility guild. I realize the picture is hard to see.

He told us about the Grossmunster church and how the statue sitting on the outside of it would throw bread down at 6:00 to the citizens below...I believe he said this is a tradition that is still carried out at some point

looking up the tower at the statue

Grossmunster from across the river

Some other sites we saw along our walk were the Fraumunster Church and St. Peter Church.

Fruamunster church tower

St. Peter church tower

He also told us about a big spring festival that we just missed (it was last weekend) called Sechselauten. It has something to do with that idea that in the winter workers would stop when the sun went down, but in the summer they decided to stop at 6 pm since the sun was up for so long. Now, the big draw is a meterological event similar to our groundhog day. They build a huge snowman called a Boogg and burn it in a pyre by the lake. The head is filled with fireworks. The speed at which the head explodes indicates how nice of a summer they will have. I believe our guide said it was only accurate twice. A few times the head fell off and had to be thrown back onto the fire.

We concluded our tour at our restaurant, another guild house called Zunfthaus zur Waag.

Dinner was a white asparagus salad, veal with mushrooms and crispy potatoes and sorbets for dessert.

After dinner we were taken on a ghost tour of Zurich with Dan Dent. I don't remember all the details of his stories, plus most of the fun is in his storytelling techniques, but I highly recommend this if you are in the area. Here are some pictures of the same sites I already showed you but at night.