An Adventure to Zurich

On Monday 22nd October I got up extremely early to start my journey to Zurich for the night. It has been below 0 degrees in Laengenfeld all week, so I knew it would be very cold and I really wasn't looking forward to the 3km bike ride at 7am to get to the bus stop. Especially not when I stepped outside into this:

But I was all rugged up and survived the ride. It really is very pretty, but also very very cold!

I arrived in Zurich around lunch time and immediately booked myself into a bus tour around the city. Zurich is a surprisingly small city, so a 2 hour bus tour covered most of the sights including the lake and a trip up the nearby hill to see some good views of the city.

Like all European cities, it has some quite remarkable churches. My favourite was the Fraumunster which has stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall.

The other significant churches are Grossmunster where Zwingli headed up his part of the Reformation (I need to find out exactly what that was though... he doesn't get as much press as Martin Luther) and St Peters which has the biggest clock on a church tower in Europe!

The rest of the afternoon I spent wandering through the streets of the old city and looking at the shops. Bahnhofstrasse is apparently some of the most expensive real estate in Europe and boasts a lot of designer stores. The whole city is meant to be great for shopping, but to be honest, I found it has most of the same stores as the other European cities and is hideously expensive. Food and drink is especially expensive - a Big Mac meal cost more than 10 Swiss Francs (and a Swiss Franc is about equivalent to an Australian Dollar!). The other thing Zurich is famous for is its banks - but would you believe I found it really difficult to find an ATM!

For me, the main reason to go to Zurich that day was because Cecilia Bartoli (a very famous Italian opera singer) was giving a concert that night. It had been sold out for weeks and my original plan was to stand in the foyer in the hope that someone would be selling a spare ticket. The day before I left, though, I checked the internet one last time to find that they had added a small number of seats that day and so I was able to buy a ticket and was very very excited.

Outside the concert hall, there was even a mobile museum that the Cecilia Bartoli foundation sets up outside all of her concerts. Her latest CD and the concert tour is a tribute to the singer Maria Malibran, who was apparently the first international opera superstar.

I collected my tickets and headed towards my seat to find it was actually on the stage. I was sitting in the orchestra, basically, directly behind the 1st bassoon player and 1st clarinet player, right in the middle of the music. It was so amazing. Of course, it meant I was only able to watch Ms Bartoli from behind, but it was still an incredible concert. She even turned and sang to us during the encores which I thought was incredibly gracious. I am sure this night will be one of my favourite concerts for a very long time. I did notice that they were videoing it, though I kinda hope that is not the concert they will use as a DVD - I'm not sure I want to be that visible during it! Interestingly, being right in the middle of the orchestra really heightened my enjoyment of the orchestral pieces in the concert. It was really great feeling the music move around the orchestra! As far as her singing, I really can not say enough. Her voice is so rich and flexible and I am so lucky to have heard her live! And coincidentally, I was sitting next to a couple from Melbourne and when the 1st trumpeter heard our accents he turned to introduce himself - Simon Lilly, who was at the WA Conservatorium a few years ahead of me!

The only thing that tainted my trip was the hotel I stayed in. It was directly over a nightclub which I could hear all night and then the breakfast delivery knocked on my door before 7am - mistaking my room for the one across the corridor. Then they forgot my breakfast altogether. Not very impressive.

The next morning I did a little more sightseeing and then got back on the train back to Laengenfeld. It was 4 and a half hours of travel altogether, but the concert alone made it worth it. On the way home I had a very brief stop in Liechtenstein and got to ride on this very cute train back to Austria.