I’m in a lot of travel groups on Facebook and every now and then someone posts in a panic because they accidentally booked the wrong dates for their flights and I was always like, ha, idiot, how the fuck do you even do that? So it turns out one way of doing it is faffing around with dates in the easyJet app to find the cheapest flights at the best times, then just utterly failing to change one of the dates when you go to book. Fortunately I didn’t slice any time off our already short trip to Liechtenstein, but I did add another night on which we decided to spend in Zürich on account of the fact that’s where we flew in and out of. We didn’t mind. Our bank accounts had opinions but whatever. Zürich is not an unpleasant place to be.

We bussed back to Sargans just over the border with Liechtenstein and caught a train back to Zürich where we had time to kill before we could check into our room. We killed aforementioned time by pottering around the Fraumünster and its crypt. You can download an app with an audio guide which was quite interesting. It used to be a Benedictine abbey for noblewomen and the abbess had a shit tonne of power in the city. The king gave her permission to have markets to buy and sell, mint coins, and she even chose the city mayor because I guess fuck democracy. I would imagine it would have had all the usual Catholic paraphernalia that they’re so fond of. Jesus carrying a cross. Jesus on the cross. Some bloke being decapitated or set on fire or tied upside down to a cross then being set on fire. Bits of dead people in fancy cases. That sort of thing.

It’s a Swiss Reformed church now and has been since the Reformation in Zürich in 1524. The audio guide informed us that this space would have been painted in colour with 12 alters as opposed to the zero alters they have now. They give no fucks about iconography. They care about words. The veneration of saints is forbidden so there’s none of that “Saint Dave or whatever his name is gazing wistfully towards the sky while clutching a rosary” shenanigans. It doesn’t look like King Midas spray vomited the walls in gold so there’s a lot less to look at and definitely less blood dripping from sad-looking figures, divine or otherwise.

In fact it all seems rather plain until you turn around and clock the absolutely massive organ taking up a huge portion of the wall. I bet that can belt out some tunes. Apparently the reformers removed the original organ so the words they were so very fond of didn’t have to compete with music. They’ve since changed their tune (pun absolutely intended) and Swiss Reformed churches can have organs again. There’s some brilliant stained glass too. I was particularly enamoured with the Chagall windows, five long, thin windows in striking colours. The crypt houses a small museum and is the oldest place in the church. It does explain what the various bits of ruins were.

We had one of those free-but-not-really walking tours booked for the afternoon so we hopped on that and were led around the city by an Argentinian man for 90 minutes. He was a nice bloke but it wasn’t the best tour we’ve ever been on. He was fixated on the idea that the old town was basically empty, that the shops were all fake and the flats weren’t lived in. It was a stinking hot day and he told us to check the windows. AC isn’t really a thing here, if there were people in inside then the windows would be open. Every twenty metres he was like, “Check the windows! They are closed!” Mate, if you tell me to look at the fucking windows one more time! It’s the middle of the day in the most expensive city in the world, the poor buggers are probably at work! Not everyone gets to lead tourists around the Altstadt and feed them bullshit for a living.

His reasoning was that the wealthy families that owned the buildings wanted to keep them for themselves and they didn’t need the income so they booted out all the shops and the tenants. That doesn’t ring true. Rich families like money. Why would you not want all that extra cash? Plus unused buildings tend to just sort of rot. He told us that there was a shop that only sold CHF3000 plastic chairs, and were only open a few hours a week. The shop we were stood outside was clearly a toy shop and he tried to tell us that was fake too because there were no prices displayed. Yeah, maybe don’t try and convince us a shop is fake when it has a website and a Facebook page clearly printed across the window.

It was all bollocks. Firstly, if I was a tour guide and there was a shop selling nothing but CHF3000 plastic chairs I would march my tourists straight to that shop and be all like, “Guess how much that fucking chair is?!” And I would bet money that if I walked into the shop we were stood at and asked to buy a Rubik’s Cube they wouldn’t stare at me in horror and mutter something about nothing being real whilst having an existential crisis. They’d sell me a fucking Rubik’s Cube. Unfortunately this fuckery overshadowed the rest of the tour. We briefly went into the Grossmünster which is currently being refurbished so the outside is covered in scaffolding. The inside is similar to the Fraumünster for the same reasons. The Reformation got their little mitts on it so it’s relatively plain on the inside and again, the stained glass is great artwork.

We went up to Lindenhof, apparently the oldest part of Zürich, for a nice view over the Altstadt then finished the tour at the end of a street adorned with Swiss flags. So Zürich is really nice but I think an Aussie on the tour put it the best when she said, “I’ve yet to find the beating heart of the city.” It’s a really easy place to just be. Our guide was right about one thing though, the most dangerous part of the city is most definitely the trams. You’ve really got to watch where they’re coming from, we’d already seen one bloke nearly get his internal organs relocated to the rails today.

There’s loads of stuff to do from museums, to swimming in the freakishly clear water. The latter is not something you’d ever do in a British city unless you had a kink for sewage, but we didn’t have our swimwear so we opted for cooling off with beer. Because of course we did. I’d also had my little heart set on scoffing fondue whilst in Zürich even though it’s apparently a winter thing. Shut up and give me the congealed nipple juice! However it’s more of a sharing thing and Tarrant isn’t meant to have dairy. She occasionally does but I feel like a vat of melted cheese would be a touch too much.

I settled for raclette at The Raclette Factory which had exactly zero dairy-free options on the menu, so my wonderful wife took the dairy hit on a pizza type object so I could gorge on two different types of melted cheese slathered over potatoes. I’m currently taking applications from anyone who wants to come to Switzerland with me for the express purpose of consuming inadvisable quantities of cheese though. I do feel like dragging a dairy intolerant person to a country known for cheese and chocolate is tantamount to torture and is probably listed somewhere in the Geneva Conventions.

That evening we caught a train up to Uetliberg (no, I do not know how to pronounce this) for some brilliant views over the city. There are benches and a fire pit to go with your views, and you can take a few cans of motor impairment beverage to enjoy. There’s also a fancy looking restaurant should you be made of money, and a tower you can climb up for CHF2 for even more epic views. It’s an ideal place to watch the fiery skyball fucking off too. All this, so close to the city. Minimum effort sunset viewing. Like I said, Zürich is just a really easy place to be.

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Zürich, Switzerland

Stayed at: SleepandGo, Zürich Altstadt

Useful shit to know…

• We bought the Zürich Card for travel on all public transport.
• It cost CHF29 each for 24 hours.
• As well as free transit on all of the city’s buses, trams, trains and boats, it gives you discounts on many attractions.

• We used GuruWalk to book the walking tour. The one we went on was Zurich in its Entirety: Old Town, Panoramas, and Hidden Secrets.
• We only chose it as it had a time to suit us. They provided headsets so you could hear what they were saying at all times which was a nice touch.
• They contact you beforehand and let you know that if you pay them less than CHF10 per person then it’s not really worth you coming. They word it much more politely of course.

• The Grossmünster was free to visit.
• The Fraumünster cost €5 each to visit.

• You can get to Uetliberg with the S10 train from Selnau. Your Zürich Card is valid on this route.
• Keep an eye on the last train back though, especially if it’s the middle of summer and the sun sets late.
• The tower is CHF2 each. It’s not manned, there’s a machine by a turnstile and you can pay by card if you want.

• The language in Zürich is Swiss German, but I believe standard German is also understood. We found English to be widely spoken.
• The currency is Swiss Francs.