Pictures from this day can be found here.
Monday morning our only plan was to get to St. Moritz in southeastern Switzerland, so we took our time in Zurich before we left. We were still full from last night’s dinner so we did a little shopping in town from the stores that were closed the day before. Sunday in Zurich means a holiday, and pretty much everything was closed the day before, so we hit a couple of stores and then went off to the station. At the station we looked for a couple of sandwiches to take with us for lunch, but unfortunately we couldn’t find anything that looked appetizing. In the end we walked into the “American Bakery” that ended up having some pretty delicious bagel sandwiches. We were pleasantly surprised that the cheesiest store had the best food.
Once on the train it was a long trip up the mountains to St. Moritz. Despite the rain the scenery was gorgeous – huge mountains with waterfalls cascading down the side, cloud-topped rock faces and tiny towns nestled around a church in the middle of nowhere. Kuniko slept through most of it – there is something about riding trains and my wife – it is pretty tough for her to stay awake.
We arrived in the ritzy moutain resort town of St. Moritz around 3 p.m. The weather was still crappy, and quite a bit colder due to the elevation of 1800 meters. We walked around the lake that dominated the town until we reached to low-rent area where our hotel was. On the hill above the station was the upscale stuff, and it was very upscale. A little snobby for me, but Kuniko liked the town well enough. Once we found the cheaper area of town we kind of accidentally stumbled on our hotel (Hotel Sonne). We checked in and promptly couldn’t figure out the door to our room. I think the lock was stuck because of disuse, but once we got the hotel clerk up there she opened it right away. The building was a little old, the hallway smelled vaguely of cat litter, but once inside our room it was clean and smelled fine. I was relieved that the room was OK, because our options for affordable accomodation were pretty limited in that town.
After dropping off our bags the weather turned quite nice and the sun came out, so we walked around the high-rent part of town taking in the sights, snapping pics of the surrounding snow-capped mountains and doing some shopping. Since we didn’t really feel like eating out that night we bought some goodies at the local Coop store (our new favorite grocery store in Switzerland) and brought them back to our room just as the temperature really started dropping. We had a small party in our room, and opened a couple of bottles of wine, ate lots of Swiss cheese, along with some peppered salami and had a good time. We conked out a little early in anticipation of our trip on the Glacier Express the next day.
