Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-02-28 06:23 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-02-28 06:23 pm
La Suisse
So, Geneva. And Zurich, because I've been here for the past couple of days. I wish I had been able to write about Geneva just after we left, but there was a nightmare of hotel screw-ups and lost sleep and on top of it all I haven't had free internet since Geneva--and, well, I've been busy.
So, Geneva. Beautiful city--very French, but not as uptight as I remember France being. (Or maybe Bordeaux is just a snobby city, who knows.) At any rate my father, who speaks maybe five words of French ("L'addition, s'il vous plaît" and "Merci"), never got glared at for walking up to people and saying "Hello" without even a perfunctory "Parlez-vous anglais?" Our hotel was (I think?) part of a moderately upscale local chain--not too many bells and whistles, but they had free internet and good breakfast and very helpful staff who inundated us with maps and restaurant coupons and free public-transit passes.
The first day I was, as mentioned, horribly jetlagged, so I just wandered around looking at things--the quays, the Jardin Anglais, a brief visit to the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre before it closed for the evening, and then I meandered down the hill ogling the antiquarian bookshops. One of them had set an extensive Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection out front as bait--that being the series whence my annotated LM comes. It was really shiny, but I don't actually care about Dumas enough to blow $40 on an annotated Three Musketeers, so I didn't bite. Had Thai for lunch and Chinese for dinner; traditional local food is right out, since we're in the land of mountain pastures full of picturesque cows and all that shit, which means all the local cuisine either (a) involves some kind of cheese, (b) is cooked in butter, (c) is served in cream-based sauce, or (d) some combination of the above. (Not that I'm bitter about the milk allergy or anything.) And then after dinner I barely managed to check my flist and forums and dash off an LJ entry before I collapsed.
On Day 2, I was rested enough to do tourism in earnest, and I dragged along my father and a camera. We went up the tower of the cathedral--which led me to the conclusion, now proven false, that I never wanted to see another narrow stone spiral staircase as long as I lived. Anyway, the view was fantastic, and we got to the top just as they were ringing the bells. Quite lovely. Afterwards we stumbled upon a really neat shop full of scientific antiques--everything from spyglasses to barometers to theolodites to 19th century medical kits. We also did a boat tour of the lake, which I have about eight billion photos of, on the principle that if I take enough pictures there will be at least a few decent ones. Then we walked around and I took yet more photos--yes, including the Sissi statue. And before I knew it, it was time to retrieve our luggage from the hotel and head off to the train station for Zurich.
We arrived in Zurich at about 9pm. Dad and I are, theoretically, here so he can attend a conference on some issue in immigration law, so we are stuck staying in the hotel where it's being held--a gigantic overpriced corporate monstrosity that doesn't even have the good grace to be beautiful and pretentious for the price. Its only redeeming virtue is that it can be written off as a business expense. Its vices? Multifarious. Nothing but the (shitty) bathroom products and the (mediocre) teabags they leave in the room is free--and I'm not sure about the tea. Internet? Airport shuttle? Toiletry kit from the front desk? Exorbitantly priced. Breakfast or a meal at the trendy in-hotel restaurant? Three times what it would cost even in the middle of the city. It's way out in the middle of nowhere near the airport; right on a tram line, but the tram ride to Central is at least 20 minutes. The front-end staff (waitresses, front desk, etc) are nice, but the actual services rendered are of the suck.
The first thing they did when we got there? Lost our reservation. And they didn't have any rooms free. So they got us a taxi to take us (at our expense) to a Marriott 20 minutes away in the center of town, only for us to discover that they were overbooked too. Much wrangling occurred, the upshot of which was that we wound up in a single room when we'd booked a suite in the other hotel, and managed after much arguing to get two single beds instead of one double. We got into Zurich at 9; when we finally got to our room at 11, we realized we'd had no dinner. The hotel restaurant served trendy variations on Swiss food; again the dairy problem. When we managed to find something I could eat, they took an hour and a half to bring it out. Keep in mind that we walked in at 11:30 and there were exactly two other tables being served. We got our food at fucking one o'clock; the waitress was apologetic but offered no explanation. Afterwards, yet again, I got no sleep--there is a reason we wanted a suite instead of a room, that reason being that my father snores like the dickens. Breakfast was a joke--we discovered after we'd paid for it that literally all I could eat there was... fruit. And bacon. All the cereals had either dairy or nuts in them; all the breads came from a bakery outside the hotel and there were no ingredient lists. The manager was friendly and apologetic and scrounged up some whole-wheat crackers approximately the consistency of cardboard; I asked if the cook, who was up front making pancakes to order, could make me some with soy milk, and he said they didn't have any; at which point I pointed out the pitcher of soy milk on prominent display next to the inedible cereal. I did get the pancakes, but oh my god the headdesking.
With all that frustration, a night of no sleep, and my über-rusty German, I was not looking too kindly on Zurich yesterday morning. But I did perk up a bit after a hot bath and an obscene amount of strongly-brewed tea, so I descended upon the city while my dad was off at the conference. And I discovered that while Geneva is beautiful, Zurich is fun. (Or maybe that's just because I spent most of the day in the environs of Niederdorfstrasse. I don't know if Geneva has anything equivalent, but I suspect it's far too French to let its hair down that much.) I made the requisite visit to the Grossmünster, which is stark and Calvinist and not actually that interesting for anything but sheer size, and paid the handful of francs to climb the tower, figuring that my fear of heights wasn't actually that bad at the cathedral in Geneva so I would be all right here. Ha ha, little did I know. The twisty stone staircase lasted until maybe halfway up; from then on, it was wooden stairs. With gaps between the steps. And a nice view over the side railing of all the steps you'd climbed and how very, very long the drop was. The view from the top was spectacular, but I was so lightheaded by the time I got there that I'm glad the railings were so high or I would've fallen right over the edge. I never thought I'd be so glad to see a spiral stair again.
Right behind the Grossmünster is the Kirchegasse, a street that has a few bookshops and antique stores, but mostly goes straight for the kill with antiquarian booksellers. Oh man. I was still tipsy from adrenaline when I got down from the tower; the lingering effects of acrophobia combined with some bizarre bibliophile variant of Stendhal syndrome nearly produced a panic attack in front of a beautifully-bound collection of the complete works of Goethe. Which, now that I think about it, is probably the best kind of panic attack there is. I walked out with my pocketbook mostly intact--a little dented by a book of Schubert piano sonatas, but it will live to shop another day--got some cheap lunch, and found a quiet spot in the Obendorf to eat and calm down.
After that my wanderings through downtown were mostly uneventful. I went back through Niederdorfstrasse and its side streets--that entire area is made of win--visited the other big churches, took pictures, avoided Bahnhofstrasse and the rest of the luxury-shopping district as best I could, and caught the tram back to the hotel at around 5pm. (Oh yes, the original hotel had room for us then; it was only for the first night, when we were too frazzled to want anything but a bed, that they lost our reservation.) Had some tea, got annoyed when I realized the internet wasn't free, dropped off my stuff, mooched around a bit, and set out for the Cure concert.
The venue was actually only a few tram stops away from the hotel, so I got there early. The doors were open but there weren't too many people there; I got some wine (yay reasonable drinking ages!) and parked myself near the stage with the other early arrivals. Obviously I, at the age of 20, am already old and funless: I got there an hour before the warm-up band started, showed up in jeans and a hoodie to a concert where half the goth population of Switzerland was dressed to the nines, wore earplugs the whole time, and (but I'm getting ahead of myself) left halfway through the encore to catch the tram before it got mobbed. (Speaking of the tram, one of the ads at the hotel stop has a blurry photo that's probably meant to represent any old rock or metal show, which I am 98% sure is from an old Rammstein concert. Haha. What's sad is that I recognized it even though I'd never seen that specific photo and you can't actually make out their features.)
Warm-up band was fairly good--I was just busy snerking to myself because their guitarist was the spitting image of Jeff and he was about ten feet from me the whole time. Oh yes, I was up at the way front. There are benefits to getting there early. The remarkable part of it is that, the whole time, nobody shoved me aside to get their five minutes at the front. Everybody just stayed more-or-less in place and had fun, no pushing or crowdsurfing or people whose dancing required a five-foot radius of empty space around them--in fact, two or three people made space and pulled me forward "because you're too short to see from there!" and I wound up, loosely speaking, in the second row of people from the barrier, without any idea how I got that close.
The Cure, by the way? Amazing. I haven't kept up with what they've been up to lately (or really, anything they've done after the 80s), but it doesn't really matter because they played mostly old stuff--almost all of their best songs. And yes, I was just that close to Robert Smith in all his backcombed, eyeliner'd glory. And there was angst and HoYay and random moments of bonding with other audience members when we realized we were the only ones singing along to a particular song. I don't know what else to say about it, it was just a really good time.
And yes, I finally got a good night's sleep afterward; I was too exhausted not to. Old and funless, remember? Today dad and I went to the Swiss National Museum, mostly the weaponry exhibit, where I tried mostly unsuccessfully to translate the little blurbs out of German. (Okay, I admit it, my German is bad--but I haven't had a class in three or four years, so.) Afterward I wandered alone through the park on the banks of the lake, had a picnic lunch, was menaced by a swan, discovered that the Chinese Garden is closed for the winter, and went to a café where I had a random attack of language confusion and went through three languages just to order a cup of tea. Met back up with dad, we got tickets for Rigoletto tomorrow night, and then we ate in a Turkish restaurant that was very first-gen immigrant--nicely but slightly shabbily decorated, only half a common language with the waiter, Turkish music playing a trifle louder than propriety might dictate--which means that of course it was the best Turkish food I've ever had.
I was planning to stay out after dinner--there's a place on Niederdorfstrasse that serves absinthe and I want to go there--but I went back to the hotel to fetch my coat and just sort of crashed. So just internet tonight (at an exorbitant rate of course). Tomorrow who knows what I'll do; I still have 90 francs cash, and I can theoretically use my debit card if I want to splurge on something. I might get some good wine to bring back home--I swear alcohol and train tickets are the only things that are cheaper in Europe--but I'm not sure what the customs officers have to say on the disparity in drinking ages (it was legal when I bought it!) so maybe I'll get dad to pack it with his stuff. Saturday we have to get up early to catch our flight, so tomorrow is our last functional day here.
...yes, I think that's all so far. Whew.
So, Geneva. Beautiful city--very French, but not as uptight as I remember France being. (Or maybe Bordeaux is just a snobby city, who knows.) At any rate my father, who speaks maybe five words of French ("L'addition, s'il vous plaît" and "Merci"), never got glared at for walking up to people and saying "Hello" without even a perfunctory "Parlez-vous anglais?" Our hotel was (I think?) part of a moderately upscale local chain--not too many bells and whistles, but they had free internet and good breakfast and very helpful staff who inundated us with maps and restaurant coupons and free public-transit passes.
The first day I was, as mentioned, horribly jetlagged, so I just wandered around looking at things--the quays, the Jardin Anglais, a brief visit to the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre before it closed for the evening, and then I meandered down the hill ogling the antiquarian bookshops. One of them had set an extensive Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection out front as bait--that being the series whence my annotated LM comes. It was really shiny, but I don't actually care about Dumas enough to blow $40 on an annotated Three Musketeers, so I didn't bite. Had Thai for lunch and Chinese for dinner; traditional local food is right out, since we're in the land of mountain pastures full of picturesque cows and all that shit, which means all the local cuisine either (a) involves some kind of cheese, (b) is cooked in butter, (c) is served in cream-based sauce, or (d) some combination of the above. (Not that I'm bitter about the milk allergy or anything.) And then after dinner I barely managed to check my flist and forums and dash off an LJ entry before I collapsed.
On Day 2, I was rested enough to do tourism in earnest, and I dragged along my father and a camera. We went up the tower of the cathedral--which led me to the conclusion, now proven false, that I never wanted to see another narrow stone spiral staircase as long as I lived. Anyway, the view was fantastic, and we got to the top just as they were ringing the bells. Quite lovely. Afterwards we stumbled upon a really neat shop full of scientific antiques--everything from spyglasses to barometers to theolodites to 19th century medical kits. We also did a boat tour of the lake, which I have about eight billion photos of, on the principle that if I take enough pictures there will be at least a few decent ones. Then we walked around and I took yet more photos--yes, including the Sissi statue. And before I knew it, it was time to retrieve our luggage from the hotel and head off to the train station for Zurich.
We arrived in Zurich at about 9pm. Dad and I are, theoretically, here so he can attend a conference on some issue in immigration law, so we are stuck staying in the hotel where it's being held--a gigantic overpriced corporate monstrosity that doesn't even have the good grace to be beautiful and pretentious for the price. Its only redeeming virtue is that it can be written off as a business expense. Its vices? Multifarious. Nothing but the (shitty) bathroom products and the (mediocre) teabags they leave in the room is free--and I'm not sure about the tea. Internet? Airport shuttle? Toiletry kit from the front desk? Exorbitantly priced. Breakfast or a meal at the trendy in-hotel restaurant? Three times what it would cost even in the middle of the city. It's way out in the middle of nowhere near the airport; right on a tram line, but the tram ride to Central is at least 20 minutes. The front-end staff (waitresses, front desk, etc) are nice, but the actual services rendered are of the suck.
The first thing they did when we got there? Lost our reservation. And they didn't have any rooms free. So they got us a taxi to take us (at our expense) to a Marriott 20 minutes away in the center of town, only for us to discover that they were overbooked too. Much wrangling occurred, the upshot of which was that we wound up in a single room when we'd booked a suite in the other hotel, and managed after much arguing to get two single beds instead of one double. We got into Zurich at 9; when we finally got to our room at 11, we realized we'd had no dinner. The hotel restaurant served trendy variations on Swiss food; again the dairy problem. When we managed to find something I could eat, they took an hour and a half to bring it out. Keep in mind that we walked in at 11:30 and there were exactly two other tables being served. We got our food at fucking one o'clock; the waitress was apologetic but offered no explanation. Afterwards, yet again, I got no sleep--there is a reason we wanted a suite instead of a room, that reason being that my father snores like the dickens. Breakfast was a joke--we discovered after we'd paid for it that literally all I could eat there was... fruit. And bacon. All the cereals had either dairy or nuts in them; all the breads came from a bakery outside the hotel and there were no ingredient lists. The manager was friendly and apologetic and scrounged up some whole-wheat crackers approximately the consistency of cardboard; I asked if the cook, who was up front making pancakes to order, could make me some with soy milk, and he said they didn't have any; at which point I pointed out the pitcher of soy milk on prominent display next to the inedible cereal. I did get the pancakes, but oh my god the headdesking.
With all that frustration, a night of no sleep, and my über-rusty German, I was not looking too kindly on Zurich yesterday morning. But I did perk up a bit after a hot bath and an obscene amount of strongly-brewed tea, so I descended upon the city while my dad was off at the conference. And I discovered that while Geneva is beautiful, Zurich is fun. (Or maybe that's just because I spent most of the day in the environs of Niederdorfstrasse. I don't know if Geneva has anything equivalent, but I suspect it's far too French to let its hair down that much.) I made the requisite visit to the Grossmünster, which is stark and Calvinist and not actually that interesting for anything but sheer size, and paid the handful of francs to climb the tower, figuring that my fear of heights wasn't actually that bad at the cathedral in Geneva so I would be all right here. Ha ha, little did I know. The twisty stone staircase lasted until maybe halfway up; from then on, it was wooden stairs. With gaps between the steps. And a nice view over the side railing of all the steps you'd climbed and how very, very long the drop was. The view from the top was spectacular, but I was so lightheaded by the time I got there that I'm glad the railings were so high or I would've fallen right over the edge. I never thought I'd be so glad to see a spiral stair again.
Right behind the Grossmünster is the Kirchegasse, a street that has a few bookshops and antique stores, but mostly goes straight for the kill with antiquarian booksellers. Oh man. I was still tipsy from adrenaline when I got down from the tower; the lingering effects of acrophobia combined with some bizarre bibliophile variant of Stendhal syndrome nearly produced a panic attack in front of a beautifully-bound collection of the complete works of Goethe. Which, now that I think about it, is probably the best kind of panic attack there is. I walked out with my pocketbook mostly intact--a little dented by a book of Schubert piano sonatas, but it will live to shop another day--got some cheap lunch, and found a quiet spot in the Obendorf to eat and calm down.
After that my wanderings through downtown were mostly uneventful. I went back through Niederdorfstrasse and its side streets--that entire area is made of win--visited the other big churches, took pictures, avoided Bahnhofstrasse and the rest of the luxury-shopping district as best I could, and caught the tram back to the hotel at around 5pm. (Oh yes, the original hotel had room for us then; it was only for the first night, when we were too frazzled to want anything but a bed, that they lost our reservation.) Had some tea, got annoyed when I realized the internet wasn't free, dropped off my stuff, mooched around a bit, and set out for the Cure concert.
The venue was actually only a few tram stops away from the hotel, so I got there early. The doors were open but there weren't too many people there; I got some wine (yay reasonable drinking ages!) and parked myself near the stage with the other early arrivals. Obviously I, at the age of 20, am already old and funless: I got there an hour before the warm-up band started, showed up in jeans and a hoodie to a concert where half the goth population of Switzerland was dressed to the nines, wore earplugs the whole time, and (but I'm getting ahead of myself) left halfway through the encore to catch the tram before it got mobbed. (Speaking of the tram, one of the ads at the hotel stop has a blurry photo that's probably meant to represent any old rock or metal show, which I am 98% sure is from an old Rammstein concert. Haha. What's sad is that I recognized it even though I'd never seen that specific photo and you can't actually make out their features.)
Warm-up band was fairly good--I was just busy snerking to myself because their guitarist was the spitting image of Jeff and he was about ten feet from me the whole time. Oh yes, I was up at the way front. There are benefits to getting there early. The remarkable part of it is that, the whole time, nobody shoved me aside to get their five minutes at the front. Everybody just stayed more-or-less in place and had fun, no pushing or crowdsurfing or people whose dancing required a five-foot radius of empty space around them--in fact, two or three people made space and pulled me forward "because you're too short to see from there!" and I wound up, loosely speaking, in the second row of people from the barrier, without any idea how I got that close.
The Cure, by the way? Amazing. I haven't kept up with what they've been up to lately (or really, anything they've done after the 80s), but it doesn't really matter because they played mostly old stuff--almost all of their best songs. And yes, I was just that close to Robert Smith in all his backcombed, eyeliner'd glory. And there was angst and HoYay and random moments of bonding with other audience members when we realized we were the only ones singing along to a particular song. I don't know what else to say about it, it was just a really good time.
And yes, I finally got a good night's sleep afterward; I was too exhausted not to. Old and funless, remember? Today dad and I went to the Swiss National Museum, mostly the weaponry exhibit, where I tried mostly unsuccessfully to translate the little blurbs out of German. (Okay, I admit it, my German is bad--but I haven't had a class in three or four years, so.) Afterward I wandered alone through the park on the banks of the lake, had a picnic lunch, was menaced by a swan, discovered that the Chinese Garden is closed for the winter, and went to a café where I had a random attack of language confusion and went through three languages just to order a cup of tea. Met back up with dad, we got tickets for Rigoletto tomorrow night, and then we ate in a Turkish restaurant that was very first-gen immigrant--nicely but slightly shabbily decorated, only half a common language with the waiter, Turkish music playing a trifle louder than propriety might dictate--which means that of course it was the best Turkish food I've ever had.
I was planning to stay out after dinner--there's a place on Niederdorfstrasse that serves absinthe and I want to go there--but I went back to the hotel to fetch my coat and just sort of crashed. So just internet tonight (at an exorbitant rate of course). Tomorrow who knows what I'll do; I still have 90 francs cash, and I can theoretically use my debit card if I want to splurge on something. I might get some good wine to bring back home--I swear alcohol and train tickets are the only things that are cheaper in Europe--but I'm not sure what the customs officers have to say on the disparity in drinking ages (it was legal when I bought it!) so maybe I'll get dad to pack it with his stuff. Saturday we have to get up early to catch our flight, so tomorrow is our last functional day here.
...yes, I think that's all so far. Whew.