A day in Zürich

Yeah, I know, a pretty long time has passed since my last post. I have various good and not so good reasons :D I have been super lazy with my camera and I managed to break one of the objects...well, it still works but only manually. And the straw that broke the camels back, our laptop broke down and the little pictures I had taken are now lost to us. Well actually hubby said that they are not lost but we need to do some recovery thingy to be able to use them again. We will see about that later.

I have also been very busy at work, as always. In addition to that I am doing a french language course which has been taking some of my time. Couple of weeks ago we booked flights to South Africa for October so I have also been using a good amount of my time for surfing the net to find us some nice places to stay down there. Sometimes I can't help but just wonder where does the time run to every evening.

Well, now I finally do have something to write about. Already for six years we have had the tradition of doing something nice for our wedding anniversary. So we did not want to pass the seventh without some fun. I had made some great plans to go to Paris or maybe Berlin but as it turned out we went to Zürich. We ended up to Zürich because, sadly, my hubby could not have a long weekend off as we had first planned. Well, it doesn't matter because we had great time nevertheless

Sheraton Zurich Hotel in Zürich Hardbrücke

I booked us a night at the Sheraton Zurich Hotel in Hardbrücke which is the new hip area in Zürich. The hotel itself is also quite new. I think it opened last year in January. The building is high and I wanted to be up so I booked a room with a guarantee of an upper floor. The room with a breakfast in the club floor, with an entrance to the club lounge, late check out (4pm) and high floor was about 250 CHF. The entrance to the club room wasn't a muss for us but it was very nice to have breakfast there in the morning: no travel groups. I have seen enough of those in my previous working place to want to avoid them ;D By the way the parking lot was easily accessible and cost 25 CHF per day.

Our room at the Sheraton

The bathroom

The room was very nice, by the way. Nothing to yammer there. The location was also perfect for us because we had booked a table for dinner in restaurant only two tram stops away. The tram stop is right in front of the hotel and the tram drives like every seven minutes. The 24 hour ticket for the Zürich city centre costs 8,60 CHF.

I could even have done some ironing...

...while drinking my coffee.

The weather was lovely so we only dropped our bags at the hotel and headed to the centre. First we did a cruise on a Lake Zürich. There are three different lenght cruises available: short, medium and long. Because it was already afternoon, we did the short one. We could use the day ticket we had bought for the tram plus we needed to buy a connection ticket for 4,60 CHF (I think..). The short cruise only goes for 1,5 hours.

Our ship is leaving

Zürich seen from the ship

Funny cups for coffee

The Alps

A house at the lake...I would not mind :D

The Restaurant Quai 61

After the cruise we were thirsty and hungry so we walked to the Restaurant Quai 61. I know I already wrote about them before in this blog but we just love them and it is a habit for us to visit them once in a while. This time though the service was not on it's best...they seemed to be irritated and a bit angry about something, but it did get better towards the end. Usually the service there has been great. Food was, as always, very good. We had "Heisser Wiediker Hund"(a hot dog) and Vitello tonnato. It would have been nice to try some other things as well but we had a dinner wating for us in a couple of hours time.

The garden terrace of the restaurant Quai 61

On the terrace

People chilling on the lake

The lake Zürich

Heisser Wiediker Hund

The harbour Enge

Business and leisure

The view from our hotel room

We had dinner in a new restaurant called Brisket. It's a great place for a meat lover but not for someone who hates hipster stuff ;D The meat was fantastic and we loved the beans. Extra points go to the great, smiley and friendly service. We had reserved a table for two and because it was such a warm sunny evening they asked if would like to sit outside. We had to wait only a couple of minutes to have a table cleared for us. If you ever find yourselves in The Brisket, please try their cocktails. Cellery sour, that is a muss!! For four cocktails, lone star platter, chips and beans we paid something like 135 CHF which we found to be a really good price.

Pretty hip(ster), don't you think? I am having watermelon gin tonic and hubby has got a gingerita.

The starter: beans n'brisket

The lone star platter: pulled pork, brisket, pork belly. As sides potato salad and bbq beans

Having breakfast and admiring the view

The next morning we enjoyed breakfast in the sheraton club lounge on the 10th floor. Super! 

Because we are food people, after breakfast we headed to the centre to do some food shopping. Our must visit destinations in Zürich have always been the Globus delicatesssa (Photos) on the Bahnhofstrasse and Jelmoli food-market on the Bahnhofstrasse. Now we also have new must visit destination: Im Viadukt Markthalle. If you like food you should not pass this place. Not to miss are the different savory pies of the Pie Shop. By the way, one of the many things we are eagerly looking forward to eat in South Africa are all those fantastic pies.

The Lake Zurich and the Alps