Swissotel Zurich

After spending time in Italy, we took a train to Zurich Saturday night and stayed in the Swissotel Zurich. We arrived late in the evening, and we were pleasantly surprised at how nice the hotel was. (It was voted the best hotel of the year - or something along those lines; I don't remember exactly). But it was definitely nice!

But when we got there, Laura heard from a friend who was in Switzerland at the time that a simple meal there (for lunch!) cost the equivalent of $25-30. We realized that we were a bit tired, and we were at the end of our trip and the end of our money, so we pooled our resources to get this:

We joked that we could eat only what you see in this picture for all of our time in Zurich, and we would be okay!

We did find a Burger King, (where combo meals were $12-13), and we were able to eat there for under $10 by ordering the "junior burger," which was plenty of food for me! I do have a funny story, though. I ordered "country potatoes," which were potato-wedge fries, and I learned that I had to buy ketchup. That was okay. But then they gave me sour cream for free. I guess I was supposed to dip my potato fries in that! I think I ate at the Burger King three times! (I stayed there three nights).

We decided to take a vacation in our hotel. I guess that would be a hotelcation??! We downloaded a few movies and watched them, and we took advantage of what our hotel offered!

We slept in Sunday morning, but we ventured out in the afternoon. Here are a few of the things we saw. A nice building with some window boxes of flowers


Another cool building

This grocery store, (with a great name!) was right across the street from our hotel. One day we bought some bread, tiny mozzarella cheese balls that you might put on a salad, yogurt, water, and chocolate for lunch. That was fun!

We ate here once, too. The guy who worked here was really nice to us, especially because he could tell it was our first time in this restaurant. (I'm sure we looked ridiculous as we tried to understand the sandwich menu, the pizza menu, and whatever else they had, too!) He even let Laura try a sauce to see if she would like it on some chicken.

By far, the best thing we saw near our hotel were these chess games in action! Remember, it was a Sunday afternoon. All these old people were watching two of these guys play chess! It was awesome!

But it wasn't only the old people; there were kids playing, too! We figured out that the chess pieces were kept in the benches next to the boards. There were more boards, too. It was simply fantastic!

We enjoyed our Sunday afternoon walk, and then we went back to the hotel and enjoyed more of our hotelcation! There was a "Complimentary Pillow Menu," so I called and ordered a few. The only problem was that, out of the three pillows I ordered, we only got one. - And it wasn't very good. It was called a "work pillow" or something like that. It claimed to be a good pillow for working in bed. Well, I guess that's the nice, showy way to put it; it felt more like a bean-bag chair. Oh well! We still enjoyed our movies!


We also went to the top floor of the hotel and went swimming! It was actually really cool. The entire pool area was enclosed with windows. Here is the view of Zurich from the pool.

At the pool, we met some flight attendants from the States. One was from Texas, and the other was from New York. The guy from New York gave us suggestions of how to see Zurich while staying "on a budget." We took his advice and had a great time!