Carolyn's Various Travels: City Trolley- Zurich

I was so determined to get a bus tour of Zurich for the brief afternoon that we were there, I finally succeeded. I tried to email 3 times before the trip to make group reservations, no reply. I had our host in Geneva call and she said the 12:00 and 2:00 tours were full for that day. No luck. I decided to show up anyway and see what we could do. They decided to schedule an extra tour that day, so we chilled for several hours (many of the students went to Starbucks, some went to the waterfront and rented paddle boats, our family went to the park), then got our tour. It was pretty well done. The audio commentary gave a lot of history of the city (and perhaps oversold it a bit), and we got to stop several times to take pictures.

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland with approx 300,000 people (smaller than Wichita!) Its at the mouth of the Limmat river that runs into a large lake (Lake Zurich??) and the waterfront is beautiful. There are several historic churches, one with the largest clockface in the world. The old city is a pedestrian zone with small curvy streets reminescent of Venice. The main shopping street is full of both high end and more moderate shops and lots of cafes where you can people watch. (In fact I was standing in line to buy airport train tickets and overheard a young man tell some visiting young men who were trying to decide what to do for several hours, that they should just people watch, "there's lots of good looking women" he said with a nod toward one lady in the line ahead of us. Funny!)

I would have loved to have spent another day or two in the city. Maybe in the future.