7th September - The Adventures of Becky and Ruth in Zurich

Last night we'd taken a short walk from the hotel to find the Tram station, with the intent of taking the tram into the centre of Zurich today.   So it was a bit of a shock when we walked over to the tram station this morning only to find they were doing maintenance on the line over the weekend and the tram station was out of service.  

Not to be put off, we took the hotel shuttle to the airport and bought a 24 hour "Zurich card".   This allows travel on ALL forms of public transport in Zurich (which includes boats across Lake Zurich and even the cable cars!).   We then took the train to the main station and walked from there down to the lakefront doing a bit of souvenir shopping along the way.  

We then used our travel cards to take a short cruise on Lake Zurich.

We were able to conveniently disembark the cruise ship at a stop near the Lindt Home of Chocolate museum.   We had to wait for our tour, so in the meantime we decided to go in the cafe and have hot chocolates and slices of white chocolate cheesecake.

And yes, this is a real chocolate fountain in the foyer......

I don't know about this really being a museum so much as a tour of the chocolate factory with a bit of background about the history of chocolate thrown in.   At every stage there seemed to be opportunities to sample, liquid chocolate, squares of chocolate of different flavours, etc.  Between all the samples and the hot chocolate and white chocolate cheesecake I'd eaten in the cafe beforehand, by the time I got to the end of the tour I was chocolated out.   The final room gave us the opportunity to sample all the different flavours of lindor and I could only manage one flavour.   Becky pocketed a few for snacking on later though. 

After this we took the train out to a suburb where we did some more souvenir shopping and then managed to catch a train all the way back to the airport - so our Zurich Cards have been very useful.  They even got us a discount of 10% at the Chocolate museum tour.  

Tomorrow afternoon our guide should meet us in the hotel foyer and take us for a welcome meal in the evening.