Exploring Zurich with Kira

Kira (a wonderful friend of mine from Cal) is visiting right now and we have had the best time exploring Zurich together! On Wednesday we explored the city on foot and hung out by the lake with a bunch of very hungry swans

We wandered into an apple store downtown and ended up Skyping with my parents, but we didn't have sound so there was really creative sign language and sign-making until we figured out that Skype has a chatting feature (brilliant!) and had an actual conversation until we were informed that the computer we were using was reserved for lessons. So we sort of got kicked out of the apple store. Oops!

That evening there was a BB King concert at the outdoor arena at the top of the mountain we live on, so Martin and I climbed up with a bunch of our housemates to listen to the show. It was really fun, and they even let us in for the last ten minutes! Pretty good considering that tickets were about 200 Swiss francs.

On Thursday, Martin told us about the free bike rentals at the main train station, so Kira and I collected supplies and headed down in the morning to go on a bike adventure! After a little bit of searching, we found the place and got our excellent 8-speed cruisers (mine was bright green) and we were off!

Our first stop was the Lindt factory on the shores of Lake Zürich. It took us less than an hour to ride there even with pedestrian-dodging while we were still downtown. We got a few truffles, tried all the free samples, and Kira took advantage of the much-reduced factory defects, although we couldn't see anything wrong with the bar she bought.

We stopped by the lake to have some real food for lunch, then decided to ride back to the bottom of the lake then up the other side for a while. In actuality we ended up riding a really long way along the Seestrasse (literally lake road) while we enjoyed the fabulous bike lanes and beautiful scenery.

We eventually stopped in Rapperswill, which is waaaay up at the other end of the lake from Zürich. We had a snack and sat by the lake for a very quick hour, then rode all the way back to the train station so we could meet Martin by 5 to watch a beach volleyball tournament in the train station (inside!). In all, we rode more than 50 miles! We were very happy to watch some beach volleyball before heading up the hill to our house. Thankfully, the concert that night wasn't anyone we had heard of, because I'm not sure I would have made it up the hill.

There's an Ironman race (3ish mile swim, 110 mile bike ride, full 26.2 marathon) in Zürich Sunday (today), and we spent most of our ride on the official course. I have great respect for those racers even more now!