Zürich

In Zürich I stayed with friends of friends, H and T, who lived in Binz. a settlement to the west of Zürich, on the shore of the Greifensee, not Zürichzee. It didn't augur well on the bus because I wasn't sure where to get off, and when I finally reached the stop I had to squeeze past dismayed passengers with my backpack. But H and T soon put me at ease.

H showed me around the area, including a meadow with wild though small strawberries.

He also took me on a couple of excursions on the weekend, one was to the Rhine Falls, near Schaffhausen, through which poured an impressive volume of water.

I remembered that Sherlock Holmes had a confrontation with his nemesis Moriaty in The Final Problem, and wondered if these were the falls. Seemed too low to me. But those were a different set of falls, the Reichenbach Falls, which do exist, but are closer to Bern.

On another excursion he showed me Habsburg Castle, which is where the House of Habsburg began in the 11th century. Later the Habsburgs went to rule large swathes of Europe.

One topic of conversation I had in common with my Swiss hosts was the comedy film The Swissmakers, which had been screened in Sydney a couple of years before. Despite or perhaps because of its satirical nature, it was one of the highest grossing films in Switzerland.

I cooked an Asian dinner for my hosts and friends of theirs on my last or pentultimate night with them. While collecting ingredients in the Globus department store in the city, I took the chance to buy a Swiss Army Knife, a Victorinox, and have my name engraved on it. That knife has served me faithfully all the years since, although these days I have to be careful not to pack it in hand luggage on planes.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of Zürich city in this collection, although I took many during other visits in years to come.

It was also in Zürich that I received a poste restante aerogramme from my friend in Singapore saying that he could not join me on the second half of my travels as I had suggested. So all that rush through France was unnecessary.