On our March Break trip, if we did not visit the Alps or Germany, the trip would have been quite disappointing. Doing research prior to the visit, it didn’t seem like there was much to do in Geneva, Zurich etc and now that we’ve been there, I can say that there isn’t much to do there!
We actually went to four different Swiss cities: Geneva, Zurich, Luzern and Basel. In all of them, we hardly spent any time (a few hours in a day) which was by plan. Even with that little time, we could not keep ourselves busy! Perhaps it’s because we’ve been to Europe sufficient times that the environment and culture are not interesting anymore; and we’re not big museum fans right now either. That means walking around the city is boring, so what better things are there to do? Well we can people watch in a café or do some shopping – neither of which is feasible because things are outrageously expensive. The Swiss Franc (CHF) to Canadian dollar exchange rate is almost 1:1, but the purchasing power isn’t! A small espresso at Starbucks is 5CHF, a Whopper meal at BK is 15CHF, a $7 mid-day sushi box is 30CHF (ok, so Switzerland is not near any fresh water), and we even saw a Korean restaurant selling bulgogi for 35CHF! Basically if you were to go into any restaurant, an entrée would run 30-40CHF.
Berlin was much better. The food was a reasonable cost and there were more things to do. Although it wasn’t super interesting, again because we’ve been to London, Paris etc. They say that the city of Berlin is 90% fake because the majority of it was bombed out during the second World War. There are lots of old-looking buildings around, but most were rebuilt. Learning about the German Democratic Republic and seeing the Berlin wall was interesting, and we did run out of time to visit a couple of things (i.e., visiting a concentration camp).
Prior to visiting Switzerland & Germany, I had heard that things were very punctual there (especially trains). I didn’t really notice that the trains were more punctual than other places (I guess mainly Japan). I guess it might be because the Swiss trains announce their destination a few minutes prior to leaving and then seemingly just go without any other warning? Or we did have one instance where the conductor went on the PA and apologized for being 5 minutes late because another train was in front of our train.
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