Month: September 2017

Love letter to Zurich…

Zurich. Photo: Claire Doble

I had an opinion piece published in The Local today: 12 things that surprised me about moving to Zurich.

Enjoy!

#26Cantons52Weeks: Schaffhausen

Canton: Schaffhausen

Destination: Rheinfall

Interesting thing: The Rhine Falls are the largest waterfall in Europe by volume: 487,690 litres per second at the time of writing. It’s the Niagra Falls of Europe!

Special guests: my parents

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I’ve been to the Rheinfall once before, with my in-laws almost exactly two years ago. I had hoped not to double-down on stuff but the year is marching on and there’s still many cantons to visit!

Last time we approached the Rheinfall with a long walk down down the river (nice) past a sewerage works (not so nice). This time we thought we’d go more direct and maybe check out the castle that overlooks the falls – Schloss Laufen.

Unfortunately things were not so simple. We were stymied by the fact there’s too many options for how to get to the Rheinefall! I guess because it’s quite a big, impressive attraction, there’s many ‘entry points’ and viewing stations. So we ended up catching a train to Schaffhausen station, then a bus to Neuhausen am Rheinfall and not bothering with the Schloss… Now that I look at it, the river marks the border between canton Zurich and canton Schaffhausen and the Schloss is on the Zuri side so this works out well for my writing project anyway!

We took a boat tour out to the falls, which I hadn’t done before. There’s various options, we took the shortest/easiest – the Klein Rundfart 15-minute trip – and that was really worthwhile. The flat tourist boats go quite close up to the thousands of cubic tonnes of water crashing and boiling down the falls. It seems thrillingly quite dangerous but probably isn’t. We didn’t opt to climb the rock in the middle of the flow as it seemed rather risky with a 2.5 year old.

Next time I’m gonna nail the transport and hopefully make it to the castle as well but for a first-outing with my slightly jet-lagged parents on this trip, it was a good one.

Disobedient

Sid Vicious “I did it My Way” RIP Sid & Nancy Spungen, you disobedient delinquents. Photo: https://sonicmoremusic.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/swindle.jpg

I wrote every day

every day

then started to disobey

my plans and programmes

I guess

life

got in the way

distracted in the fray

of various this and thats until

well…

sometimes you need to rebel

I make the rules, I break the rules, no one tells me what to do

I always say

and no one fucking publishes rhyming poems either

I may

have discovered too late

but here we are today

you like it, hey?

keep on

disobeying

Written obediently in response to the WordPress daily prompt: Disobey

#26Cantons52Weeks: Fribourg / Freiburg

Fribourg

Canton: Fribourg /Freiburg

Destination: The canton’s capital city, also called Fribourg (Fr) / Freiburg (De)

Interesting thing: The “röstigraben” – the divide between French and German speaking parts of Switzerland – runs right through the city of Fribourg, literally, in the form of the river Saane / Sarine.

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Our visit to Fribourg was another slightly last-minute affair. I had actually planned to use my trip to this western Switzerland canton to check out the city of Gruyères, where the cheese is produced and also the location for the goth-horror designer H.R. Giger’s museum and bar (it’s the largest collection of his work, and the bar looks wicked!) But I sort of forgot that and also not sure the kids are quite ready/old enough for the Giger onslaught. Anyway.

One thing I love about Switzerland is pretty much every canton, area and large or noteworthy town has its own tourism website with a wealth of info and suggestions. There’s usually a “family” section too, which is where I found this downloadable map for a Discovery tour of Fribourg for Kids. We were set.

It is about 1.45 drive from Zurich so we arrived just in time for lunch. Another thing I love about Switzerland is, while almost all the shops are closed on Sundays, you get a really nice atmosphere at the restaurants, with groups of friends and families coming together for brunch, lunch and beyond. On this particular Sunday in Fribourg, we hit a restaurant that was catering to a twins convention, so it was twice as nice!

As well as Giger, the canton also hosts a museum for two more famous local sculptors: Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, which we also forgot to check out (oops!) although I would have liked to. We did see the Tinguely fountain in the Grand-Places park though! Tinguely, who is famous for his kinetic, surrealist sculptures, was born in Fribourg and Saint Phalle (his wife) was French. If you know Zurich, you should be familiar with Saint Phalle’s colourful “Nana” angel sculpture which hangs in the main hall of the Hauptbahnhof. And you may have seen Tinguely’s stuff down the lake and/or in Basel.

Tinguely fountain, Fribourg

Anyway, we had a very pleasant wander around Fribourg following the discovery trail (and won the prize of locally-made chocolate from the tourism office!).

The town is set quite dramatically in a gorge between three rivers and the old bit contains some beautiful medieval buildings and frontages. The stained glass windows in the cathedral were particularly stunning – art deco style, my fave! It’s a university town and it seems the mix of French/German and students adds a real zing of liveliness. I must confess I was sorry not to be able to spend a few hours also checking out the many charming pubs and beer bars we kept passing.

Our final stop on the kids tour was possibly Switzerland’s stinkiest funicular. The Fribourg funicular is powered by wastewater – unique in Europe. Although no doubt it’s a triumph of recycling and sustainability, you could really smell the sewerage: Pooh! Glad the trip was only a few minutes’ long.