Chiara and I encountered at Zurich Airport an exceptionally long and slow line at customs.  When we finally got to the front, the guy inexplicably asked us no questions, stamped our passports, and sent us through. 

 

We found the train station easily enough, but gave up after a few attempts at buying tickets through the automated machine. We wanted to go to Interlaken, and it wasn’t clear how to do it.

 

We stood in a long line for manual assistance, but the line did not move, so we tried again with the ticket machine, this time locating a friendly a customer service agent who explained how to navigate the various menus.  Tickets in hand, we headed for the platform, but the tickets don’t say which platform, so we went to the wrong one.

 

Eventually we found the correct platform, and boarded the correct train.  The ticket to Interlaken via Bern was outrageously expensive – something like $80 per ticket for a two-hour trip?  We would learn that everything in Switzerland is outrageously expensive, including McDonalds.  There may be something terribly wrong with the exchange rate for Swiss francs, which were actually worth more than dollars at this time.

 

The other very bad thing about Swiss trains is that they assign you a connection that typically requires getting to a sometimes distant platform in 6-9 minutes.  The customer service agent assured us that the connections were usually just across the same platform, so it would require no time. This was true of our very first transfer, in Bern, but never again on the trip.

 

The fact that the transfer was across the same platform in Bern was small consolation because Swiss trains are always on time EXCEPT for ours, which was six minutes late, leaving only two minutes to cross the platform.  Two minutes would seem like enough, but the second-class cars were at the back of the train, and a conductor was blowing an urgent last-whistle when we got to the door. The train pulled away before we could set down our luggage.

 

However, once inside the Swiss trains, we found them to be sleek, smooth, fast, comfortable, delightful – and, for an American – enviable.  Americans would kill to have a train system like this if they only knew it existed and could try it.  Chiara and I always sat in the upper deck when an upper deck was available, with a little table between us, and a great view of the countryside silently whizzing by.

 

The other problem with the way the Swiss handle the trains is that they not only give you exactly one connection, without enough time or information to make that connection, but they ALSO fail to tell you that the ticket they sold you is something different from that.  The ticket allows you to get from your origin to your destination any time you want on whatever trains you want, connecting however you want.  But the Swiss assumption that you want the fast, tightest, most direct route is so overwhelming that they not only show you no other options, but they do not even acknowledge the possibility of other options.

 

However, once you are familiar with the system, it is really a delight.

 

Interlaken

Interlaken has two train stations: East and West.  We exited at the West station, and our hotel, which appeared to be just a few blocks from the station was in fact just a few blocks from the station.

 

We arrived at the Hotel Bellevue on the Arre River at about 2pm.  We had two objectives: (1) Stay awake at least until 8pm to try to adjust to our new time zone nine hours ahead of where we started; and (2) Locate the pickup point for our scheduled Viator the following day, which would take us to JungFrauJoch, the “Top of Europe,” also known as “Europe’s Highest Railroad Station.”

 

We quickly settled into room 312, which seemed both quiet and comfortable, but was in fact neither. 

 

Next we walked to the headquarters of Swiss Outdoor Tours, but we made a wrong turn early and ended up somewhere else, and it took a while to get back.

 

But we finally found it, just a few doors down from Hooters of Interlaken, to our dismay.  Hooters of Interlaken was so centrally located that we would have to walk back and forth past it to get to all of our sightseeing activities.

 

Note that although Hooters is obviously an international commercial business colonizing Interlaken, there are literally no other comparable examples in Interlaken.  There is no Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, or Hard Rock Café, for example, or any other American restaurant chain (other than Hooters).  No Hilton or Marriott or Westin.  Just Hooters.

 

Interlaken made a bad first impression.  Not only was there a Hooters, but it was right next to a casino, and the casino was right next to a luxury jewelry flagship store. In short, it felt a lot like Las Vegas.

 

Or some Swiss version of Las Vegas, because nearly every souvenir ship sold swiss army knives, swiss watches, and/or cow bells.

 

The city was touristy in other ways, too. For example, one of the prominent stores was called “Heidi’s Photo Chalet,” which is named after the book “Heidi.”  The opportunity is to stand next to a costumed person purporting to be Heidi from the book, and have your photo taken in front of a green-screen, and then purchase the photo of you with Heidi apparently in the Alps, but actually just in the photo studio.

 

Paragliding Interlaken

But despite the area’s strong efforts to turn Interlaken into a retail tourist disaster, the city’s real attraction is not for shoppers, but for outdoor types, and the most prominent business of all is paragliding.  The skies of Interlaken were at all times filled with paragliders – typically a dozen at a time.

 

Several stores sold paragliding experiences, and presumably each one transported the paragliders to the top of a nearby mountain, where the paragliders jumped off and spent maybe a half-hour slowing circling the valley until finally gliding to the ground in the very large grassy park in the center of Interlaken.

 

Paragliding must be very easy and foolproof, given the sheer number of participants, and their extraordinary success in navigating back to the ground at the correct location – never crashing into mountains, getting snagged in trees or on wires, or landing in the streets surrounding, but instead always circling down to Interlaken’s big central park.

 

After finding our way to the tour store, Chiara and I stopped for dinner at an Indian restaurant called “Taj Mahal” -- ghastly, to be named for a mausoleum.

 

It was at the Taj Majal restaurant that we first noticed a surprising number of women in burkas on the street. We first guessed that we had somehow navigated to the part of Interlaken that caters especially to Middle Easterners, but later realized that all of Interlaken, and perhaps all of Switzerland, caters to Middle Easterners.  We didn’t see many Americans. Middle Easterners probably outnumbered Germans.

 

The food at the Taj Mahal was fine, but the WiFi did not work, even though a purported Wifi network and password were prominently posted on the wall. The problem of purported Wifi would recur.

 

Next Chiara and I got to our hotel and promptly fell asleep at 7:30pm, which was earlier than we had hoped, but close enough for the first day of jet lag.

 

We awoke many times, due to late night revelers on their balconies, noisy trains rushing by on the train tracks, and squeaky floors.

 

The first time I woke up was at 9:40pm, but my watch doesn’t say am/pm, and I was sure I had slept 14 hours and it was 9:40am and we were going to miss our tour. Chiara had difficulty convincing me that I was off by 12 hours.