I just had a totally wonderful weekend — many thanks to Yohan, Cas & Yen-Ha and Sasa for that! I finally went on a long overdue visit to Zürich to visit Yohan and Cas & Yen-Ha. What I did not know in advance: Zürich is cool! The city feels alive, especially around the lake area and in the old center. Friday evening I had the personal tour of Zürich by Yohan, which cemented my impression (and convinced me to return here once). After a short sleep, Yohan departed and I walked around for myself a bit to find the recommended chocolate store Teuscher.
Now, you may now Lindt, you may have heard of Sprüngli, but if you’ve seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the one with Gene Wilder in the role of Willy Wonka), you already know the feeling you’ll get upon entering the Teuscher Konditorei. “Who can take a rainbow” indeed!This store is cool! I seriously recommend it to you :) It’s tiny, and they do not have the widest selection in the world, but you do really feel like you would in the candy store in Willy Wonka.
After taking way too long and managing to curb my inital enthusiasm (i.e. I did not buy the whole store, and I did manage to walk out with less than a kilo of chocolate) it was time to visit Cas and a very pregnant Yen-Ha. They are doing wonderful, and it was very, very nice to see the two of them and catch up again. In the evening we explored Zürich-by-night and inevitably this led to some foosball. Cas’ skills haven’t diminished in the slightest, while I learned some new stuff there. We were good enough to provoke a local team into playing us in their real setup (instead of reversing their traditional roles of keeper and forward player). And then we got our asses handed to us, giftwrapped and all.
Well, again a short night later, I met Sasa’s dad downstairs to receive Sasa’s new bike. A decent mountainbike, and I sort of expect that now that the majority of the SaToSS group is bike-mobile, we will inevitably go on some bike tour. (It helps that taking your bike in the train is free in the Luxembourgian trains (CFL) — but remember, there are plenty of trains in Luxembourg by other companies.) I returned to my bed (humongous bed btw) for a bit more sleep, and then Cas & me went out for Zürich in broad daylight, and spending of final Swiss francs. We walked by the lake, saw the Alpes in the distance (cool view!) and walked back to the station. Luckily (considering my surplus of Swiss francs) the Sprüngli Konditorei at the station was open. Nowhere near as nice a store as the Teuscher (I doubt they have truffles that will be categorised by some as “life-altering experiences”, for instance ;-). Bought a magazine to have a bit to read in the train, stressed with getting on the train (they decoupled the first third of the train, where the obvious bike carriage was…). In the end, it all worked out, and then I had a nice, short (5hrs) train ride back home and happened to see the Ardennes on the way.
(yes, I enjoyed the view of the Alpes and the Ardennes on one and the same day. Sometimes I envy my life ;-)
Biking out of the station, towards home, I hit a Portuguese festival at Place Guillaume. Looked like fun, but I wanted to get the bike to Sasa and grab a bit to eat and then catch up on sleep. Getting the bike to Sasa was easy. Turned out he hadn’t eaten as well, so we took our bikes and went into town to find a nice place to eat. First we looked close to the station (did about 45 km/hr getting there :), but just about all places were closed. So we then looked in the center, again many places closed. In the end we ended up at a place called L’entracte. It looked a bit stylish on the outside, and turned out to be even more so on the inside. The food tasted wonderful, and the desserts were a treat to behold (and taste too). This place is going on my ‘OK’-list of restaurants (on the top position in fact). The perfect conclusion to a very, very enjoyable weekend.
Recently played: Mario Kart DS. Recently listened to “From Paris To Berlin” (of course)