Exploring Zurich

Today was our last day in Switzerland and ultimately our only day to explore Zurich. We were out late last night for the soccer match, so slept in a little this morning and enjoyed breakfast at the hotel before heading over to the National Museum. This museum had several floors of exhibits and was pretty interesting. We ended up spending much more time here than we intended, which will be a recurring theme for the day. We planned to do a walking tour of the city next and it was already lunch time by the time we finished at the museum, so we eyed lunch spots as we strolled around Zurich.

We didn’t make it far before we decided to try one of the cafeterias in the department stores. We definitely got overly excited by all the choices and had regrets by the time we made it to the cashier with all of our goodies. Nevertheless, it was a great spot for lunch and would have been pretty affordable if we had made a loop to strategize before loading our trays.

After lunch we headed back to the hotel to drop off a few items we had accumulated in the morning and do a little sink laundry before heading back out to finish our walking tour. It was a warm, sunny day today in Zurich and there were lots of stairs and hills to climb, so we were pretty strategic about finding shady places to stand and read about the various points of interest.

We moved through the various outdoor stops pretty quickly, but the churches slowed us down – especially the Fraumünster, as it had an audio guide to describe the stained glass windows by Marc Chagall. We can’t pass up stained glass by Marc Chagall.

We finished our walking tour at Lake Zurich and hopped on an hour-long lake cruise around the lake. We had planned to take the river cruise back to the neighborhood where our hotel is situated, but the timing wasn’t great and our previous adventures had taken longer than we had planned, so we caught a tram instead and aimed for a casual bierhaus for our last dinner in Switzerland. It was nothing special, but it was tasty and relatively quick, letting us get back to the hotel for a fairly early night so we can get ready to head to the airport tomorrow (with a couple of brief stops to get gelato and listen to some live music in one of the many platz’s).