Layers of lairs

Such a weekend! Such... a... weekend!!!

This weekend our friends Jon and Michelle, also of the blogosphere, visited us and we had such... a... weekend! Really, it was great. They are living in London and expecting a baby in the spring, and Jon is also turning 40... today! So, in honour of his birthday they went to Paris last weekend and stayed at the Inder-Mar(man)-apartment, and then came to Zurich this weekend.

We picked them up at the Flughafen on Friday night, but not before hell froze over briefly, and there was a 10 minute delay on our train because of an accident at Oerlikon. Unfortunately, we heard later on that it was a depressingly similar accident to the one that befell our train on the way home from Venice in September. All troubles aside, Jon and Michelle were only slightly concerned that we had abandoned them when we got to the airport, and we quickly shepherded them back to our house for dinner. And then drinks. Well, actually the drinks started before the dinner. And Michelle didn't really have drinks, cause of the whole baby thing. But anyways, I digress.

Friday quickly turned into Saturday, and on Saturday we decided to go in search of tall Swiss mountain landscapes for our flat-landed British Islanders. But first, a quick trip to the Grossmunster as the weather was good and the church is, after all, right around the corner. We saw Charlemagne in the crypt... he has a big head.
Afterwards, we hopped in our friend Alesha's car (she is out of town, and lent it to us) and were just pulling away when we heard the wocka-wocka of iphone... it was S! She said "looking forward to the tour. the meeting is too complicated, so I will meet you at your flat at 2pm instead." Huh? Today? We had plans with S for Sunday, but not Saturday... a quick change of plans later, and we had ditched the car for a bratwurst mit goldburli snack instead, sharing the remainder of our bread and mustard with the local swans, and off to meet S at 2pm. We had a special Underbelly of the Zuricher Beast tour to attend to!

S' partner T is a grad student at the university in Zurich, and he recently went on a tour of the medieval tunnels of Zurich with one of his professors. Turns out you can get a key from the local Gemeinde... and it also turns out that there is a tunnel right underneath our back alley! Unfortunately for us, but more unfortunately for the people who used to live at The Unnamed Street #3, our back passage started out as an open sewer. Things have improved dramatically since those first "poop chute" days: take a moment to embiggen the pictures from the lit display cases in the medieval sewer underneath our back alley!

Yes, the Swiss are totally absurd. You get a key from the city (no deposit required, just leave them your name and phone number) and then you open secret doorways in walls, and enter medieval sewers with educational and pictorial descriptions of how we used to go. My favourite is the "Ehgraben im spatmittelalter".... as an aside, Michelle was telling us about a someone she heard in an interview who talked about the intrinsic or intuitive nature of language, that you don't need to know what words or phrases translate as in order to sort out their meaning. I am happy we do not have a spatmittelalter in our house anymore:Yes, it looks like "things" do not require a bucket-and-horse-cart apparatus anymore.

So, poop chute done, we were off to the Lindenhof, where we James Bonded our way into the earth and onto the Roman walls underneath the city:Holy bananas was that ever cool. The pictures don't capture the stares of the petanque-playing opas who didn't know what the f--- was going on. T is on the right, turning a key in an anonymous control panel in the wall of that house, which activates this hydraulic lift! As if this actually exists. Down below were bits of walls up to 2000+ years old, more lit panels, ladders up and down into other rooms, and uber-coolness!

We finished it off with a check of the old Roman bath ruins and the Chagall stained glass windows, and we have now seen more of medieval Zurich than we even knew existed!

We wrapped up Saturday with a fondue at the Fribourger Fonduestubli, a revolting amount of cheese that was thankfully a few curds short of a wholescale kase revolution. Michelle, Swiss Miss, and I then played Settlers of Catan while Jon watched... it was his early birthday present, getting to watch us play. We let him occasionally roll the dice so he could give us more cards.

On Sunday we reconstituted the mountain expedition, and took a chance on the Braunwald. It turned out to be really good, except that the hotel at the top of the Braunwaldtram has seen better days. Only in Switzerland can you pick a mountain valley based on Google Maps Satellite view, drive for an hour to get there, then impulsively follow signs for a funicular and end up here! Thankfully for us and our ill-preparedness, there was no snow. So instead we took the mountain railway up, then walked for 20 minutes till we got to a restaurant that served us homade mushroom ravioli and pumpkin gnocchi. As Swiss Miss says, "when Switzerland is good, it is very good." Oh yeah, and then a bunch of teenagers in a marching band went by, on their way down the mountain to the Braunwaldbahn. I am not shitting you, there is a kid with a drumset right there:


S & T then had us over for dinner with Jon and Michelle, and we left at 8:30 to put them on a train back to the flughafen and off to their windy island home. As the email from Michelle said this morning: "getting onto our flight last night was a dream but, fittingly, as soon as we landed in london we were severely delayed on the tarmac for 40 minutes and then shuttled inexplicably to another terminal farthest away from the trains into London. By the time we got downtown it was midnight and the tube had just closed, so we had to wait on the street to take a late night bus across town, and by 1am were back in our flat." Yes, 20 minutes to get to the airport in Zurich and 40 minutes just to get off the tarmac at Gatwick. This city is definitely not everything we want here in Swiss (Mister and) Miss HQ, but it sure is nice sometimes that we get to share it with such great friends as Jon and Michelle.

Happy birthday Jon. This one goes out to you.