10. Breakfasting in History; Walking Hip Zurich; Drinking from On High. 9/6/22

Hope you are all doing well.

We began our day today with breakfast at Odeon—a café down the street from our little hotel. But Odeon is more than a typical café.. First it’s truly beautiful and in operation since 1911, with many art nouveau features. Second it’s been a gathering place for intellectuals, artists, musicians, and political folk (of every ilk, it seems) for more than a century. The bar was a hangout for everyone from Mussolini to Lenin to James Joyce (who spent 5 years in Zurich) and Einstein (obviously not at the same time). In the early years it was also a hangout for artists like Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber and some say it was the birthplace of Dadaism. During Hitler’s era, Odeon became a sort of ‘center for emigrants.’ One supposedly true story about a regular at the café is that there was a rather well-known Swiss surgeon who was there nightly and consumed huge amounts of champagne. Public pressure made him stop drinking whole bottles of champagne… supposedly… but in reality his regular waiter merely brought him a large coffee pot each night.. but there wasn’t any coffee in the pot; it was filled with champagne. I’m sure there are lots more stories within the walls of Odeon.. 

From there we began our trek to the west side of the river (we are staying on the east side) – and headed to an area called the Viadukt… an early 20^th Century three-story-tall arcade of stone buttresses, supporting steel train trestles, still actively in use. The ground floor level is now filled with one story shops that are glazed on both sides so you can see through from one side to the other— really nice shops that were quite tempting, but I was well behaved..

Scattered throughout –- where the trestles spanned larger distances, there were no shops but rather little parklets that supported various activities from outdoor cafes to ping pong and play areas. There’s also a large market in the arcade at the site. We stopped for a simple lunch of mussels and fries in that market… and then suddenly the rains came so we wound up lingering in the market for a while, until the rain stopped and then we headed to the Freitag Tower—a stack of shipping containers about five containers tall, which housed little shops including a large one with Freitag bags. This was all adjacent to an outdoor court with a funky set of cafes and outdoor spaces (Frau Geroldsgarten) filled with all sorts of found object sculptures and a great red Citroen reformed as a giant planter.

Then we strolled to the 40-stoy Prime Tower (an office building) which had a restaurant/bar at the top called Clouds, where we had a drink and took in the view. Continuing on our walk, we strolled through several other neighborhoods and then went through the Zurich train station which is quite impressive… and eventually made it back to the hotel – 18,150 steps later!!

As we got close to the hotel, we were drawn to symphony quality Mozart wafting through the air…. Two young female musicians—one violinist and one flautist—playing along with a recording of a symphony orchestra coming out of a Bose speaker. The acoustics coming from the tall stone arcaded porch underneath a 19^th Century building, magnified the sound which was incredible… a lovely way to end the walk.

We quickly changed and headed to dinner at La Bottega di Mario, which was good, but not great (although highly recommended in several guidebooks). But the ambience was quite good and very reelaxing.. Then walked back to the hotel… 

Tomorrow is our last day here.. we head home on Thursday.

All the best 

Fern