Zurich - Day 1

I'm actually going to start with the night before as our flight out of Brussels was in the early evening. We didn't arrive in the Zurich airport until about 8pm, and it actually took us awhile to figure out the transportation from the airport to our hotel. But we always seemed to get lucky in that area. A very nice man helped us at the train ticket kiosk, and eventually we were on our way.

We arrived at The Hotel Opera by 9:30 and then left to find some kind of dinner after getting settled. It took a while but we finally found a place open called Santa Lucia with once again unusual service but pretty good pizza.

The area in this photo, also called Altstadt or Old Town, is where we walked the most our first night. The three churches you see are Fraumunster, St. Peter's and Grossmunster.

I like this shot Mike got of Grossmunster church while we were walking around looking for dinner.

When we got back to the hotel it was pretty late, but because of the seven hour time difference we were able to FaceTime with the kids.

Just a little more information about our hotel. This was the view from our room which we saw the next morning when we woke around 10am.

 (photo from internet)

And this photo is similar to the room we stayed in. It was a good size and the bathroom was a decent size as well. I will say it was a smaller hotel than we realized with only four rooms on a floor. And the elevator was tiny! When we brought our luggage in the night before, Mike took the stairs because the elevator only fit one person with a big suitcase.

Anyway, after we woke up we had a breakfast snack of Fruit Juice smoothies from Joe and the Juice, and then we decided to just walk and explore.

Once again I had turned to the internet and researched things to do in Zurich. Here are a few of the sites I pinned that we actually used.
Zurich Bucket List: 15 Things to do in Zurich, Switzerland
We only really did four things on this list. Explore Altstadt - Old Town (mainly because our hotel was located in Old Town), Eat at Zueghauskeller (which was good but didn't work out too well for me. More to come on that later), See the Chagall Windows at Fraumunster church (loved!), and while we didn't take a boat ride on the river, we did take one out on Lake Zurich

Walking in the Rain - A Zurich Walking Tour
Because of this post, we went to see Lindenhof Hill and Rennweg Street. We kind of naturally ran into Bahnhofstrasse and the churches while walking on our own.

10 Awesome Things to do in Zurich Switzerland
After awhile these types of posts basically mention all the same places because honestly in my opinion, I don't think there is a whole lot to do in Zurich itself. 

5 Best Views in Zurich
The only one we made it to together was Lindenhof Hill. I would have liked to check out the Cloud Bar and Grossmunster Tower, but it just didn't happen. Maybe if we had a little more time.

Anyway, we started off our first full day by going on our own little walking tour like we did in Brussels.

The water in the Limmat river which flows into Lake Zurich is such a pretty color!

 I think the name Altstadt (Old town) is fitting.

 Just the two of us - Zurich, Switzerland August 4, 2017

We walked down to a bridge on the other side of the churches and made our way back down.

I didn't even know Mike took this picture, but I thought it was pretty cool with all the pots on windowsills.

Then we found a little quiet area right next to Fraumunster Church before heading out through some narrow streets to Bahnnofstrasse.

It reminded me of a little fairy tale village back there with the cobblestone streets and buildings. I expected Beauty to pop out any minute singing about wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere!

So Bahnhofstrasse, the main street of Zurich is for trams and walkers only. It is a pretty well known shopping district with stores for every major designer you can think of. It was kind of fun to look and take it in, but in all honesty we just weren't interested in hanging there long.

We decided to head towards Lindenhof Hill to see the view.

Our views from the park at the top!

Just the two of us - Lindenhof Hill August 4, 2017
After that we continued walking heading towards Rennweg street.

 Making our way there on some pretty cool little side streets.

Renwegg Street is supposedly where they take "the iconic photo of Zurich you see in all the guide books." So of course I wanted to check it out!

I had come across the information about Rennweg street on the "Walking in the Rain - a Zurich Walking Tour" blog post. And as we followed the directions to get to Rennweg street we felt lost even though we knew we were right there. Finally I realized since we had been following her tour backwards and we were facing the wrong way. So we turned around and saw this...

Lol, not quite so picturesque as we had thought it would be. Kind of fits right in with the scaffolding on Big Ben in London and the construction machines and materials from the iconic building shot in Amsterdam.

Yep, quite a difference. What are you going to do though? And actually Mike was kind of impressed with how they had the tower crane rigged up there on the street.

After that we headed back towards Fraumunster church to see the Chagall windows.

Fraumunster Church was founded in 853 AD! And of course there were no pictures allowed inside which was a little disappointing.

So you will have to settle for both of these photos off the internet. These are the five windows, but they don't appear together that way.

When you enter the church as you can kind of see, three of them are straight ahead and then there is one on a wall on each side facing in. They were so, so pretty in person!

After visiting the church we had a late lunch at another Santa Lucia restaurant in a different location. We are thinking it is a chain over there because we saw more than one with similar menus but different looks.
We ate out on the patio and the food was really good. I had the Ravioli with buffalo cheese ricotta and it was yummy!

We headed back to the hotel after that to rest and decide what we wanted to do that night.

We finally decided to take a one and a half hour boat ride out on Lake Zurich.

It was pretty cool and relaxing to just sit there on the boat watching the scenery and just talk. It's hard to get a lot of time for just the two of us back home. So I really enjoyed having uninterrupted time just for us.

Then we headed to Zeughauskeller for dinner. All of the "what not to miss" in Zurich lists said to make sure you had sausages at Zeughauskeller.

We managed to get a table and the food did live up to the hype. It was very good. Or so I thought, but more on that next blog post.

After dinner, we walked around for a bit more.

We bought some dessert at a place called Cake Friends and sat by the river to eat it. But we were surprised to find it super crowded all along the river with a teen and college aged crowd. I guess it's the place to hang out on a Friday night.
So we decided to head back to the hotel to FaceTime with the kids and we wanted to get to bed earlier since we had a big day planned for Saturday - a trip to Rigi Mountain.

And surprisingly for all the walking we did, I only had 15,981 steps and 6.87 miles on my Fitbit.