Anyone fancy a drive?

Forced to go into Zurich today as my hotel room wasn't available when I arrived - to be fair to the hotel, I was 4 hours early... And now I'm in I've got a massive bed (which I've already spent a couple of hours 'testing'), a tassimo machine and a flippin' balcony (first one of the trip), where I'm now sitting in the sunshine with a coffee, enjoying my free 60 minutes of WiFi.

Anyway, 5am is really early, so I wasn't in the best of moods when I arrived. The hotel website says you can get tram 2 or 3 to the hotel, but it doesn't tell you that they don't go from the airport - and it doesn't tell you how to get to where they do go from, from the airport. So a taxi driver got to fleece me for 59CHF (I didn't calculated the exchange rate, being close to tears with tiredness and frustration anyway).

So, off I tootled - after a fortifying latte - on tram 3 (who knew?) to book a seat to Paris tomorrow. Turns out all I could book was a journey with 3 changes, which will take 8 hours :-( I'm going to ask in the morning whether that's because everything else is full, or because there are a limited number of seats you can book with an Interrail ticket. If the latter is the case, I might risk an unbooked journey (which would take 5 hours - the risk being that I'd have to stand for all that time!).

In walking up and down Zurich's main shopping street, I passed more jewellers than you could shake a big stick at, posh clothes shops and (obviously of more interest to me) a good number of chocolate shops. It would've been rude not to buy anything of course...

I also went into a housey type shop and could've bought everything there! Had a chat with two of the cashiers and another customer about the language here - it is germanic, but I didn't think German. Apparently it's a local dialect of German, which I'm not even going to try to understand! I said I thought the Swiss spoke French, but apparently I'm not far enough west for that.

No plans for this evening other than relaxing in preparation for tomorrow. And putting my feet up as, for some reason, my ankles are about to need their own postcode!

Tschüß x