Easter meant a lot to us this year than ever before, not that I was a planning for any celebrations or expecting a guest home, it was perhaps because we were heading towards Switzerland during the vacations. The country of chocolate, cheese, watches, skiing slopes , and the breath taking alps.
Ranga had booked the flight and the accommodation in December itself. So I had to just look at the other side of my travel. There were far more interesting places to visit than the days in our hand. Had to first shortlist the places, look at the weather, pack the essentials, find some eat outs, local transportation..........and so much more since we were going on our own as against the conducted tours.The first thing I did was to call the consulate of Swiss in Barcelona a week before to enquire if we needed a visa in order to enter Swiss thru Spain. Well there came a pleasant reply that a valid Indian passport along with Spain’s residential card would do the trick and we could stay there for a period of 3 months without a visa he didn’t forget to add that we were not entitled to work.Nevertheless we had crossed the biggest hurdle of getting permission to enter Swiss.The next biggest challenge was to counter the weather. I browsed couple of websites which forecast the weather for a week in Swiss; none was different from the other, all claiming that the weather would be between -2 to +4. So the best of my cloths were unpacked and sweaters, jersey, jackets, socks, gloves, and mufflers anything and everything which could keep us warm took their seats.Initially we had booked only for handbags which was now to be altered since the luggage was too much to fit into only handbagsHad exchanged some Euros for CHF (Swiss franc) as precaution money.
Our flight was from El Prat de Llobregat barcelona at 6:45 am to Flughafen airport zurich. We reached there around 8:15. After leaving the plane we headed directly to the arrival hall and went through the passport control. This didn’t take more than a moment or two. The Swiss immigration officials were really quite efficient and well groomed.
Flughafen Zürich is located 12 kilometres from downtown Zurich in the suburb of Kloten
Zurich airport railway station (Zurich Flughafen) is located underneath the terminal. The Zurich S-Bahn was quite punctual and luxurious too.
Our stay was in Swissotel Zurich which was a deluxe hotel conveniently located between Zürich Airport and the centre of Zürich in the newest business district of the city called Oerlikon. It would take around 10 minutes to reach the centre thru trains or around 25minitues by tram
We were now in Zurich the largest city in switzerland with the population of 376,815 at the end of 2007; population of urban area is 1,007,972 and capital of the canton of zurich. The city is Switzerland's main commercial and cultural centre, the political capital of Switzerland being Bern and is widely considered to be one of the world's global cities. According to several surveys in 2006 and 2007, Zurich was named the city with the "best quality of life" in the world.
