Hi all,

I'm staying in Zurich (a couple blocks from the lake) until the end of September. I've been enjoying going to the lake and doing some things outdoors but still don't know much about the city and other trips I could be making during my stay here.

If anyone has any suggestions on things to do concerning dining, entertainment, sport, sightseeing, day trips, poker games, etc please post here and I'll write up a trip report after I get around to trying it.



Also, if you have any questions about Zurich I can do my best to research (in an effort to learn myself) it and get back to you with a good answer.

Thanks!

Hope you enjoyed the StreetParade last Saturday despite the weather if you are into that kind of parties and you were already in the city.

If you are into relaxement, spa, massage stuff you can go try out the new http://www.thedoldergrand.com/en/spa/day-spa/#c420 Spa that was just opened in one of the 5 hotel stars hotel.

If you are more into cultural stuff there are some museums. A classical one for a tourist interested to know about the country where they are lodging is the Swiss National Museum: http://www.musee-suisse.com/e/zuerich/index.php

There is also a Chinese Garden inside the city if you are into oriental stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Garden_Z%C3%BCrich

As for the nightlife here is a shortlist of a couple of clubs: http://www.roughguides.com/website/t...560539016_0438, There is a pretty wide choice, depends a bit on what type of music you are into.

http://www.ticketcorner.com Use this website to look for all type events in Zürich and outside. Through it you can book tickets for them. Also sports events.

If you let me know more about you I can try to make you also some suggestion about where to go and what to do outside Zürich. Hope this can be at least half way helpful.

Yeah I was already here. We had a good time partying around the corner from the Starbucks at Bellevue. We headed out after the rain had stopped and didn't run into any rain all night. It was a bit of a bummer that everything stopped so early but I can understand why. People were already pretty crazy early on in the afternoon.

Amazing how the city was clean again the next day as well. Bravo Zurich street sweepers!

I'm definitely into such things but I may have been spoiled by Thai prices. I quite often get sticker shock (price tag shock) when I see prices for things here in Zurich. It's just so much more than I'm used to, even from Bologna which is where I lived last.

That being said, there are a lot of benefits that come with the city prices as well like all of the amazing nice and clean parks and running water everywhere, etc.


Yeah, I've been through the courtyard here when I took a trip up to swim in the river here. Haven't been inside yet but I plan on going sometime soon.


Good idea! Also on my list as it's just a two blocks from my apartment. I jog by there nearly every day.

I didn't bother looking for a gym. I just work out in the park there in front of the Chinese Garden. If you ever see a guy doing pull-ups or other strange fitness stuff in the tree and surrounding grass feel free to say hi. That would be me.



I'll dig through here for a few good places. I'm usually fond of the more down to earth type places where people aren't there to put on a show or wait in line outside. Just folks having a good time.

This will be useful. Thanks!

Yeah, now that you mention it I've been meaning to check into some things for myself as well. I'd really like to be able to get out on the water a bit during the nice weather here. I don't have a boat so I was thinking of looking for some wake-boarding (or even wake-surfing) classes.

I generally like to stay pretty active so all outdoors stuff is awesome for me. I've already done a day trip mountain biking near Zermat and the Matterhorn. The full story of that will have to wait as it involved getting very very lost and being on a super expert level trail for my first mountain biking experience.

I've also already done the hike up to the lookout tower on the west side of the city. That was actually a lot of fun.

As far as nightlife is concerned I generally stay away from posh or trendy type places and prefer the hole-in-the-wall type bars with cheaper drinks and a slightly rougher and more genuine clientele.

Thanks dj_mercury!

oh, and by the way, are you a dj around town? Should I be on the lookout for you doing a set at a club some time?

right now there is the biggest Poker Event so far in Switzerland. 1 Week of Tournament Poker sponsored by Pokerstars. The Swiss Poker Masters in Oerlikon. 2 Stations away with the Train from the Mainstation. afaik there are Event till Sunday. Maybe you like to play in one. http://www.swisspokermasters.ch/

there is also the POker Palace (also in Oerlikon) but afaik they have closed now because they rebuild it or something

greets

Neat! I'll check it out. I had no idea this was going on.

If you're involved in the poker community here perhaps you know www.pokeracademy.ch ?

They have an office just below my apartment but I haven't been able to read their website since it's in German/Swiss-German.

Cheers!

Y, the party in the streets end at 24 hour, however you should have looked for the parties organized from the discos and events like the Energy, that would have kept you entertained till the morning

In that case I don't think the SPA I suggested you is really something that may interest you since it will be really expensive. Btw you will keep having those shocks for the whole period you are there. Zürich is pretty expensive.

No, I am just a bedroom amateur dj and I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. However since I have parents near Zürich and the best parties are usually located in that zone, I move there often so I have decent knowledge of the city.

I forgot to address the poker question. Tournaments are organized by Casino or by private people/organizations in many places, you can inform yourself through this website. Cash games are instead of exclusive control of Casinos, problem is that the lower stakes you can play I think is something like 5/10 so far from affordable, although I would expect the games to be really soft.

Btw enjoy the nice weather of this period, because in September it can get cold pretty fast in that region when there is no sun.

As for day trip you could go visit Luzern, probably the most touristic Swiss city, from there you can go make a tour around the 4 Cantons lake where there is a really nice scenery. It takes 1 hour of train to go from Zürich to Luzern. Same thing for the capital Bern, where you can go look at the Federal square and the well known city bears http://www.berninfo.com/en/page.cfm/...htseeing/13505. To the north on the other side you can go to Schaffhausen and enjoy the waterfalls of the Rhein.

For longer excursion the classical breathtaking scenery suggestion is http://www.mylauterbrunnen.com/de/welcome.cfm. But in Valais and in Graubünden Cantons you can find other places that fit for outdoor excursions and relaxation. The classical touristic destinations in these regions are Davos or St. Moritz and Crans Montana, but you can stop in smaller less touristic places to enjoy the experience more. If you love a bit the risk and love adrenaline, a lot of foreigners are into rafting in the Swiss rivers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54evweF6eiI
Even more risky is Canyoning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enKtqv1Ywss, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxysjI0t8Mk. Then if you don't have enough and want to emulate James Bond in Goldeneye you can come in Ticino (the region where I live) and jump from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziAokXVWdI8 If you prefer something different not far from there you can jump from this unusual bridge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ZbU...eature=related.

Long shot but if anyone is in Zurich or the rest of Switzerland and wants to meet up, shoot me a PM and drop a line in this thread.

Tell us about your impressions of the city, country, food, people

Great tips. Long wanted to visit.

I've been here for a little over 2 months. But it's during lockdown so my views are extremely meaningless. I could revisit this thread in 6-12 months to give a better review later hopefully.

My personal goal was simply to move to the best country and city in the world. Through lots of research and exploration over the years, my verdict is Zurich. It's where I plan to spend a lot of time to set up my new home base, hopefully eventually buy property, start a family, everything.

The most striking thing that pretty much anyone could tell you is how expensive everything is. It's truly shocking. While it's fairly affordable to me (ty Bitcoin), I still just get sticker shock all over the place. Human resources in particular are even more.

But with the high prices come top tier everything. The quality of the city, people, infrastructure, food, culture, customs, it's all really top notch. I actually didn't know that cities could be quite as nice as Zurich. I thought there was always some kind of upper limit as to how nice cities could get because of tragedy of the commons types of issues. Zurich raised the bar. On that note, I visited Geneva for a while to compare the two (I do speak French nearly fluently, so I was looking forward to being able to communicate more effectively here) but quite frankly, Zurich outdoes Geneva by quite a bit when it comes to long term living imo. So learning a fourth language, Swiss German, it is. But I am still curious to look into Lausanne and maybe a few other cities, I could potentially talk about them later when I can get around to visiting them.

Food: I religiously eat out at many restaurants anywhere I travel but again, we're dealing with lockdown, so I'm rather muted on knowledge here. I have to say that I'm probably going to be somewhat disappointed though. The good news is that all of the ingredients and processes are going to source everything from tip top starting materials since they care so much about things here. It's also just such a healthy country too, and it shows. The bad news is there's quite a lot of tastier countries and restaurant prices are fairly exorbitant. Pure Swiss food also, while fine, is a bit heavy and definitely not something I'd ever be eating extremely regularly I don't think but I could enjoy it a few times a month.

People: They are so nice, intelligent, good opinions, fun to talk to. That is kind of a surface layer thing, I think becoming good friends with Swiss is difficult, which is kind of a true stereotype. On discussions, I feel like I have fairly balanced and nuanced points of view but I'm even more careful when I engage with Swiss people because if I step too far out of bounds by being too certain on things I seem to get called out more often than not lol. I do get mistaken for being a Swiss all the time so people just love to come up to me for some odd reason and speak Swiss German to me. I only know a few hundred words at most right now so I always have to let them know pretty quickly that I'm just some dumb tourist.

I could also kind of talk about dating in Switzerland but to be brief, I'll boil it down to a couple things: It's extremely tough, worse than I could have imagined. You need a lot going for you and to be quite serious or you won't stand much of a chance imo. It would have to be one of the worst PUA cities of all time (which isn't my personal goal but just saying in general). Girls are unbelievably intelligent and fun to talk to though if you land dates, I've never seen anything quite like this. Strangely, they are kind of similar in points of view as I've seen less variation between girls than I'd normally expect but since it's something I view as "good", it's okay that it doesn't vary too much from good.

Side notes: There's a lot of cool benefits to Switzerland in general, I could talk about them for quite some time. But some of my favorites are:
Central location - get to all the hot spots in Europe so easily from Switzerland.
Infrastructure - Switzerland cares deeply about it's construction in so many capacities from how it develops its land to it's individual buildings.
Things to do - They really just have limitless high quality things to do which given it's size is just so impressive to me. A welcome change from Vegas for me as I mature out of that semi gimmicky segment.
Currency - The Swiss Franc, imo, is the strongest fiat currency in the world. And they also issue 1000 CHF notes which is just insanely cool.

An interesting story came out. Thank you