Switzerland 1: German and Italian

Christina and I finally made it to Switzerland after a day's drive from Belgium, and we haven't stopped driving since! Today we spent the day in the Swiss Alps and Italian Switzerland, and tomorrow we'll be headed off to French Switzerland. Switzerland is a small but diverse country with distinct regions and geography. After the long day's drive, we rested up at Christina's awesome apartment. She lives outside Zurich in a small village called Aadorf, which Christina says has two As at the front so it's first in the dictionary. 

Since I've already been to Zurich, we were not planning on spending too much time in the city, which is Switzerland's largest. We'll mostly be using it as a base for travel. Trains are amazingly efficient but expensive in Europe's most comprehensive network in Switzerland. Last night, we went out to a Swiss club in Zurich from Aadorf by taking the train into the city. Everything is super expensive here, as I experienced the last time I was here in 2010. It costs 40 CHF (about $42) to take a round trip train just 25 miles into the city, and you must pay an extra 5 CHF at night to pay for train security. As such as wealthy country, everything is well organized and regulated. Roads are clear and monitored, and there are even taxes/fees on placing a trash bag out for disposal to cut back on waste here.

Back to Zurich, we decided to go out on the Niederdorfstrasse, the main walking and drinking street at night. Drinks are expensive of course, although to be honest I don't even remember the price after handing a confusing and large 200 CHF bill to the bartender. Swiss ATMs hand out only big bills. After a few hours of dancing, we headed home on trains (which run all night on weekends) back to Aadorf for our first travel day. 

Today, we drove down to the Italian section of Switzerland near the Italian border. As I stated earlier, Switzerland is divided into four main cultural and linguistic areas. The vast majority (65%) of the country is German and in the north, including Zurich, Lucerne, Basil, and Bern. My friend Christina is German from Germany, and she often runs into "trouble" with her German German accent instead of Swiss German accent in this part of the country. Today, we drove to the far south to the Italian part (10%) near the Italy border at Milan. Tomorrow, we'll be doing to the west near France via train to Geneva, the main city of the French section (25%). There's also a tiny population (less than 1%) in the east near Austria which speaks Romansch, an old language derived from Latin.

To get to Lugano, the largest city in Italian Switzerland, we had to cross straight through the Swiss alps. We drove up and down massive mountains in Christina's little Volkswagen, but we made it just fine. The are tons of picturesque Swiss towns like you would imagine in the Alps, complete with cows on the side of the road with bells around their necks! The Alps even had snow still on many of the mountains, and of course we stopped so I could touch a bit of snow in July. After many ups and downs (literally), we finally made it to Lugano.

Lugano is situated on a lake in the middle of the mountains, and it looks much like what you would imagine Lake Como in Italy to be like. There are Italian signs and buildings, and it's amazing that you're in the same country as uber German Zurich just 3 hours away. Lugano is all about sailing and sitting down to eat Italian style food. After walking the city promenade around the lake, we sat down for a long pizza dinner and of course got amazing gelato for dessert nearby. There was also a Harley Davidson festival going on, which was odd seeing Swiss Germans in biker garb.

After relaxing in Lugano, we headed home to Zurich via highway instead of Alps, which cut the trip down by an hour and several thousand feet of altitude. We also passed through the St. Gotthard tunnel, which goes under the Swiss Alps and is the third longest tunnel in the world (16 km).  Soon, Switzerland will open the world's longest tunnel in 2016 at 57 km, longer than the Chunnel between France and England. We must have gone through a hundred tunnels today on our way down, as everything is super mountainous.

That's all on Switzerland for now. Looking forward to seeing French Switzerland tomorrow on my last full day before heading down to Florence, Italy, to visit my cousin Joe and his family. Ciao!