Link to the Zurich trip full album on Google Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/sfcheng/ZurichAndLuzern#slideshow

 

I am on the flight back to Austin from Atlanta. Thanks to gogo in-flight wifi service, I can have some time to write something about this trip.

 

It was a business trip to Zurch site of our company. I need do a couple of presentations there and have technical discussions with many of the designers over there. A couple of weeks before the trip, I spent a lot of time reading and writing a lot of technical documents in order to prepare for the meetings.

 

It was a slight shock when I arrived in Zurich on last sunday. I was picked up by a nice Chinese colleague (Zhenhua) in zurich site and he accompanied me all the way from the airport to the hotel by train and tram. We walk through a couple of small alleys like those in China. One of the alleys are full of trash and beer bottles. I guess there must have been large parties and crowds last saturday night. And we arrived so early that the city workers haven't had time to clean all the mess up. A couple of days later I did see some trash cleaning vehicles running on the street early in the morning.

 

Zurich River in old town.

 

Lake of Zurich with Swans

 

I was surprised to see the tiny gate and lobby of the hotel that we lived in when I arrived there. It looks pretty shabby from the outside for a 3-star hotel. When I stepped into the hotel room, it was even smaller, with a twin-size bed! Couldn't believe my eyes at that moment. That's even smaller than the hotel room I lived in japan tokyo. There was no water boiler in the hotel room. The hotel receiptionist told me to drink from the bathroom tap directly. I stared at him with wide open eyes . At the end, they gave me a water boiler. For such hotel rooms, they charged me $150 per night. Thank god that I don't have to pay for it myself.

 

After I put down everything in the room, I took a walk in the famous bahnhof street. However, none of the stores were open on sunday. These european people are really enjoying life! I was so drowsy and hungry taking the walk trying to find an open restaurant. After several attempts, I finally found an open pizza place. I sat down there and the waiter asked me about drinks. He mumbled sth like "water with xxx or without". I quickly repsonded "with ice, please". In a while, he brought me a large bottle of water with gas! It tasted much worse than pure water! I was starving and quickly ordered a small pizza with meat. The menu was in german and I couldn't read it. But I did recognize the word pizza and made sure it had meat. Unfortunately, I had to watch the young man behind the counter make it on the spot, starting from building the crust. I almost passed out due to hunger and sleepiness befor the pizza arrived. The pizza is not too bad. It is a little hard to bite with a lot of cheese. But it is made with real fresh meat. I am not talking bacon, ham or pepperoni. It's real fresh meat that I usually use to make fry dishes. That is delicious. When I was done with the pizza, they took me another shock by charging six swiss francs (close to $6) for the bottle of water with gas! Water is free everywhere in America. By the way, the small pizza cost $24. After several days of dinner later on, I concluded that the food cost in zurich is about three times the cost of food in America.

 

Hotel Adler Gate

 

Tiny Hotel Room

 

Five days of intensive and exhausting technical meetings are omitted here since nobody will be interested. Something interesting about the zurich colleagues are that they are usually older than my american colleagues. It looks like they have an average age of 35 years, at least. Many of them have been with the company many years, starting with the good old Philips. Some of them are very tall. I heard that German guys are usually pretty tall.

 

After all the meetings were over, we finally had some personal time on saturday. We decided to go to Mount Pilatus in the famous city of Luzern. It is one hour away from Zurich by bus. We saw many cows and ranches by the way. Switzerland is very famous for making cheese and chocolate out of cow milk. There are many high mountains in Switzerland and you will often see cows eating grasses leisurely on some dangerous cliffs. I didn't know cows are such good mountain climbers before.

 

We first visited the lion monument and the chapel bridge in the city of Luzern. The bridge is beautiful, made of wood completely and decorated with flowers all over. It reminded me of the rainbow bridge in my hometown wuyuan. After that, we started the trip towards mount pilatus. First, we had to sit in a small 4-man cabin hanging on a steel cable for 20 minutes to get to the middle point of the mountain. After that, we switched to a larger cable car which got us very close to the mountain top. The mountain top is fully covered with mist and fog. It looked very scary looking out of the cable car because nothing is visible all around the car for a while. It's like flying in the cloud and mist.

Lion Monument

 

The chapel Bridge

 

We unboarded the cable car after a while and reached the mountain top. There are two restaurants up there. We had lunch together with the guide. I ordered swiss rostli (a famous local dish, basically potato slices with cheese, egg and ham). It tasted ok but not very impressed. There is no way I could finish all that much cheese. After the lunch, we took a couple of hikes to different mountain peaks. However, due to the heavy mist, not much is visible around the peaks and I definitely missed  a lot of wonderful pictures. It was close to zero degrees on the peaks. I saw some bit of snow remaining here and there.

 

Mount Pilatus

 

After finishing visiting the peaks, we went down the mount by train via the world's steepest railway. The railway is close to 50 degrees. The train went down along the rail pretty slowly. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the train is going very fast since the cluttering noise are the same. :) We got to the bottom of the mountain in about 30 minutes.

 

After that, we went on a boat ride on the lake of Luzern. The lake is very large and circles all around the high amountains. It is the most beautiful lake I've ever seen. The mountain slopes are pretty steep and we could see small houses spreaded across large green grass lands on the mountains. My indian friend kept wondering how the people here managed to mow all the grasses on such steep slopes. We thought it could be mowed by all the cows. :)  The boat ride lasted for about an hour and we got back to hotel on the same bus after that. I boarded the flight back to America the next morning.

 

Lake of Luzern with Cliff

 

Lake of Luzern with green slopes and houses.

 

I've uploaded all the pictures into my google picasa account. Here is the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/sfcheng/ZurichAndLuzern#slideshow