Beautiful Zurich at Christmastime
To be honest, I don’t know why Zurich wasn’t high on my list of places to visit. I guess I imagined lots of banks and commerce and without much character and considered it just a stepping stone to the hills and mountains. Or part of a scene in a James Bond or Jason Bourne movie. WOW did I get this one wrong. From start to finish, our experience in Zurich was as opposite of that as you can get.
From the moment we stepped off of the plane, we were immersed in Christmas magic. Zurich was by far the city with the most Christmas spirit with lights and decorations across every store front and apartment, in every direction. They even transform the farmers market in their central railway station into a large Christmas market around a gigantic lit tree shimmering expensively with over 10,000 Swarovski crystal ornaments! This was one of the first things we saw and that set the stage for our two days there.
It helped that we got lucky with a fantastic corner suite room in the Marriott hotel, just a quick, scenic, river adjacent walk from old town.
After some Christmas market window shopping, we opted to dig into our time in Zurich with a self-paced walking tour found by Juliette that would take us through the best parts of the city. Starting in the train station (where over 2,000 trains connect daily), we walked along Bahnofstrasse, the main pedestrian and tram-only boulevard that took us through Christmas markets and some of the most exclusive shopping we’ve ever seen… $74K Swiss watch anyone??
This took us to Lindenhof Park which overlooks the river for the iconic Zurich photo below. Then it was on to lake Zurich, several churches including St. Peter’s church and Fraumunster church, and then back across the pedestrian bridges.
We had a fun German lunch in an old converted armory-turned restaurant named Zeughauskeller. It was pretty much a feast with great house beer, sausages and potato salad, and beef in a curry gravy with rosti, a typical Swiss hash brown.
Another tower for our collection was claimed that afternoon at Grossmunster Church where we got some great views of the city and the river. But all that food took a toll and we took a break for a mid-day nap after stopping for coffee at Bovelli.
It was tough to wake up again but we had to make it to the famous singing Christmas tree at 18:30! Retracing some of our steps from the morning’s adventure, we turned the corner into the Werdmühleplatz Market just in time to see this:
That, my friends, is 52 children singing Chrismas carols in a tree! This happens to be a huge social event each day as well; consider it a happy hour of sorts. Here we could see friends and family meeting after work just to celebrate the sounds and sights of the season with plenty of hot gluwein and raclette. I think we really appreciated the innocence of it all – this was simply a celebration of the season meant to be cherished and with very little commercial angle. We just stood here and enjoyed for the entirety of the concert, pinching ourselves to see if this was really real. It was, and we have our 2017 gluwein mugs to prove it!
For such a short stop, Zurich really helped us get into the Christmas spirit even more after Scandinavia. It was a great introduction to Switzerland and miles from what we were expecting. Switzerland is clean, unique in its culture (with German, Italian, and French influences), and not as expensive as we feared! We were off the next day, full from a lunch of fresh pretzels and fondue-filled baguette. In a short time we would see a continuation of the beautiful country with our time in Lucerne. Stay tuned!
-GP