St. Moritz, Switzerland
What follows is the story of my 14 hour journey from London to St. Moritz: 2 Buses, 1 Plane, 2 Trains, 1 Taxi, and 5mi Walking...
I woke up this morning at 7:30am in Kingston, London. I made sure my bags were packed and walked out the door. After a long and wonderful journey around Europe, I was at last on my way to Switzerland, although the vacation was not over yet.
I walked 20 minutes to the bus, which took me to London Heathrow Airport (approx. 1 hour), although I was flying from London Luton Airport, so I had to catch another bus to Luton (1 hour). I arrived with time to check my bags and catch my flight to Zurich.
The flight to Zurich was an easy 2 hours. After disembarking from the plane and customs (“How long will you be staying in Switzerland?” “Oh, a year!”), I collected my bags, navigated to the train station and purchased my train ticket to St. Moritz.
As the train pulled out of the station, it hit me, I am in Switzerland! As the relatively urban landscape of Zurich fell behind, beautiful mountains began to unfold, a gorgeous lake spilling in the distance, green everywhere, and villages dotting the hillsides. Switzerland is beautiful and I haven’t seen anything yet.
Grr German Menu!
I had to change trains in Chur (2 hours from Zurich). As you may have heard, the Swiss train system runs like clockwork (pun intended). In fact, the timetable is actually printed on the station wall, because each train arrives on time to the minute and exactly the right platform, it’s amazing. Although that didn’t do me any good because I couldn’t read German and was looking at the bus timetable instead of the train schedule and I missed my connecting train. Oh well, I decided to get something to eat with the hour I had.
I found a little cafe with outdoor seating and asked for a menu. It as all in German and inevitably the waitress didn’t speak English. So I ordered a beer, perusing the menu, and ordered something with the words “Brot, Fritz, i Chur” for 20CHF (approximately $1=1CHF, Switzerland is ridiculously expensive, to be discussed in future posts) thinking that I would probably get a sausage and some fries from the local area of Chur. Oh how wrong I was. The waitress delivered a plate with 8 slices of cheese on it! For $20! Ugh, I had no time to order anything else, so I ate my cheese (which was good, but hardly filling) and caught the train to St. Moritz (1 hour).
A wonderful welcome to Switzerland
I arrived in St. Moritz at around 9:30pm. I had the foresight to call ahead and let them know I would be arriving late, good thing because the hotel closed at 8pm. They gave me a code to enter the hotel and then my key was waiting for me with a post-it note at reception (cute). It was a very long day, but I decided to walk around a little and see if I could find something to eat (having survived solely on $20 cheese, I was starving). I happened to find a little pub with a couple of people in it. It was warm and most importantly they were still serving food. Since I was a strange site in this city at this time, conversation started to flow ("I'm from Los Angeles. It's my first time to Switzerland. I'm about to start school in Lausanne...") and within a few minutes we were laughing together and having shots of Amaro to welcome me to Switzerland! A wonderful way to end the day and start my Swiss adventure!