Day 3: Zurich

It's a bright, sunny Easter Monday. We'd expected Zurich to be quite cold, so we packed accordingly. After all, it was snowing during this same time last year. But here we are, with warmer weather than when we left Cali.

We decided to do our nice little RS Zurich walk today and then K would work late into the night.

For a city, Zurich is quite clean. I'm not sure I would equate it to my memory of Singapore, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the cleanest European city. We even saw seemingly professionally-done graffiti during our train from the airport yesterday, which K surmises was commissioned to cover up the bad graffiti.

A few random observations...

• the adjacent faces of joined buildings are painted different colors. So you can always tell where one building starts and another ends (they're the same height).


• cars stop for pedestrians crossing the street! This caught us quite pleasantly surprised for a while. We'd wait for the cars to pass, the car would [unexpectedly] stop, and we'd cross. Eventually we got out of our extra careful mentality from every other place we've been/visited -- we started remembering to just immediately cross without waiting.


• signs and labels on food are frequently in three languages: German, French, and Italian.

The COOP supermarkets (one near our apartment) are closed, as well as all the other shops, just like Brian said. But we're quite happy to find that the Migros supermarket (the other big chain here) in the city center is open. It's very busy though, probably because none of the competition is open. We buy some food for lunch there.

We'd been delighted with various yogurt flavors during our previous trip to Europe in '07... pineapple, coconut, etc. It was very hard to find such flavors on our return to the States. S found some coconut at a place near his house, but aside from that, the closest I've come is Yoplait's pina colada... hopefully not to be retired anytime soon like their guava flavor!



So, quite the happy surprise to see both plain coconut yogurt AND chocolate coconut! Of course, I have to go for the choco coco, which turns out to be pieces of flaked choco in coco yogurt... yummy!


Outside the supermarket, there's sort of a food-court-type area. I know the Big Mac is a measure that many use as a relative comparison of how much a place costs to eat/live... but Chinese in the food court was enough of a comparison for us... 15 CHF (~$13) per dish, for example, Kung Pao Chicken. That's at least a third more than how much one would pay in the U.S. A single spring roll? 5 CHF.

We ate our sandwichy lunch at some standing tables near the area.

Our RS walk took 3x's longer than RS probably estimated, but we (I) like to linger.

A picture for D (not just one, but three games going at once!)...


Afterwards, we picked up dinner at Migros, too. Since we have a kitchen, I figured some healthier but simple-and-quick-to-make food was probably good.