So this will be pretty fast (I usually say that and then ramble on but hopefully not this time as I'm very tired).
Had a work trip to Bern for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday last week and went to Zurich with one of the guys on my team for the Friday/Saturday to party it up. Who am I kidding. We both live in Luxembourg and wanted to stay out of the city for another night. It's just a really laid back atmosphere in Lux, which I actually missed while in Zurich.
Transportation
- Train ride there and back. Took about 6 hours to get to Bern from Luxembourg with 4 train switches. We (4 of us were travelling together) got on the wrong train that was 2 minutes before the one we were supposed to be on. Ended up in a tiny town called Remilly and had to go back to Metz from there to go to Saarbrucken. That added about an hour onto the trip.
- Train to Zurich - 1 hour with a few stops.
- Train back to Luxembourg - about 6 hours again but no wrong train this time. Just a bunch of drunk french kids going to Luxembourg.
Bern
-Beautiful city
-Nice office
-Great team. Met up with my counterparts from the US, Germany, Luxembourg, Bern and Dublin. All in all, close to 30 of us.
-Good team meetings
-Had Starbucks for the first time in 2.5 months. A Venti Mocha costs 8.6 Swiss Francs... so about 8.6 US dollars.
-Had a meal at a Mexican place, 2 margaritas and a shot of tequila. Came to close to 45 dollars US.
-Hotel was nice. THe Best Western Bristol I think it was called. Smallest room I've ever been in but oddly I'm getting used to them. 430USD for 2 nights. Did I mention Switzerland is even more expensive than Luxembourg?
-Had a nice walk over the river to the office each day..not sure what the river was called.
-Seems that if a place has the name 'Casino' here, it's more likely to be an Art gallery.
Zurich
-Nice city
-Extremely expensive
-Train station very cool.
-City and clock towers amazing.
-Went in and through the Grossmunster Church. No pictures of the inside as they aren't allowed but alot of great stain glass. No crosses anywhere or any of the disciples (I think it's a Protestant church).
-Alot of drunk people here.
-Lots of what I would say are 'crazy' people that scream/yell at air.
-Panhandlers
-Police handing out letters/brochures about pickpockets
-Went to a pub and a guy did a line of blow off his hand at the table next to us...
-The hotel we stayed at was really nice. About 70 Euro's per room. I apparently got the better one. Biggest shower I've seen in a long time. Single bed but still adequate. The room I would say was maybe 100 square feet.
Will post pictures probably next week when I'm home. I don't think I'll get time to do it this week.
BONUS - If you made it this far, I went to the luxembourg Christmas parade today. Most impressive christmas parade I've seen outside of the Disney ones. Great live marching bands, coca cola handing out free cans of coke, free champagne from France!, lots of candy, luxlait handing out hot chocolate, big Coke christmas truck.
It was freezing cold and snowing! Then, because the main road was blocked off for the parade, no buses were running so I had to walk back to my place.
That's it. Video of the parade coming at some point as well. Probably next week or sometime in January.