Renee and Stefan: Uetliberg

17 November 2005

Uetliberg

This past Sunday, Renee and I took a pleasant, 1-hour hike to the top of a hill near Zurich called Uetliberg. I've posted some pictures at www.stefanpharies.net/uetliberg. As you can see from the photos, the hike started out in the fog, but at the top of the observation tower at the summit, we were just barely able to peek out through the top of the fog and see the Alps! Renee and I had actually been up there in July when we came for my interview, so it was fun to see the same place in a different season.

The hike started at an area called Albisgütli, which is at the end of the number 13 tram line. After a nice hour of climbing up some relatively steep but very well maintained trails, we got to the top. At the top of the hill there are two or three restaurants, a hotel, a lookout tower, and a network of hiking and biking trails leading to other areas. (Oh, and a really cool solar system exhibit, where sizes and distances are all to scale.) Renee made an astute comment that the Swiss really enjoy being in high places - and it's clear that they enjoy hiking and being outside too. After checking out the view from the tower and enjoying some Bratwürste, we took the S10 train back down from the top straight to the Zurich Hauptbahnhof.

Uetliberg is a very popular hike, and we were not alone. In Switzerland, shops are closed (by law) on Sundays, so you are "forced" to do something other than materialistic consumption. This would normally be just fine with me, since I hate shopping anyway, but I have to admit it's been a little inconvenient these last couple weeks because there are so many move-in things we need to buy. The good news is that we've had very pleasant and relaxing Sundays in spite of needing a bedroom closet so badly. =)

The easy accessibility of Uetliberg (or anything else in Switzerland) by train is very interesting, but maybe I'll write a separate blog entry on that.

Oh, and one other relevant comment: Uetliberg is spelled that way rather than Ütliberg because the Swiss have a rule that you don't write capitals with umlauts. I am not certain, but I think this rule arose in order to accommodate typewriter keyboards on which they need to fit German as well as French and Italian diacriticals. They had room for ä, ö, and ü, but they needed to put things like é and è and à on the shift positions of those keys. (I believe on French Swiss keyboards, the characters are in the same places, but shift/unshift is reversed, so the French Swiss have to type shift to get German characters.)

posted by Stefan Pharies at 19:53

RSS Feed