Zürich and Schaffhausen*

On Saturday morning, Elias and I walked to the Hauptbahnhof and took a train to Zürich, joining Stefan for the weekend in Switzerland's largest city and one of the wealthiest and most expensive cities in all of Europe. Zürich was used by the Romans as a tax-collection site, and it was probably named by earlier occupants before the Romans ever got there.

On sunny Saturday, we did a self-guided walking tour through the old town, where we encountered charming Gaessli (wee alleys), the largest clock face in Europe, Sprüngli chocolates, decadent bejeweled and gilded antiques costing tens of thousands of CHF, and a Lamborghini. The chickens were nervous about the high price of Mineralwasser, but we humans thought it tasted better than any we've had so far. Perhaps you get what you pay for.

On cold, rainy, grey Sunday, we walked up into the hills to the Zürich zoo; afterward, we caught the Georges Seurat exhibit at the Zürich Kunsthaus. I promised Elias I would mention the pileated gibbons on the blog. The highpoint of our zoo visit was watching a young gibbon relentlessly taunting his papa, the papa gibbon responding by grabbing, chewing on, and kicking said offspring, and the mama gibbon stoically serving as "base."

Saturday evening, we took a train to Schaffhausen, on the Rhine, to meet up with one of Stefan's colleagues and his wife for dinner. Records of the town date to the 11th century. M. and D. showed us the scenic Rheinfall, Europe's largest waterfall, in neighboring Neuhausen, as well as Schaffhausen's 16th-century fortress, Munot. We walked from Munot down the hill into the Innenstadt, where D. explained that one of Schaffhausen's architectural trademarks is Spionfenster (spy windows)--small rectangular holes in the sides of oriel window boxes that allowed modest Medieval women to look out on street activity without themselves being seen.

This quick trip exposed us to the delights of Schwyzerdütsch, an expansively lush, gangly, and angular Alemannisch dialect, all elbows and knees.

*Not in Southern Germany.