Sunday 8th September - Our tour begins

I've decided to rename our hotel from the Mövenpick  Zurich airport to the Mövenpick Fawlty Towers.  Today we met some of the people  in  our tour group and  none of them had a good word to say about the hotel.   I had complained yesterday that our room hadn't been  serviced. Some of our tour group were left without any toilet roll after their rooms were "serviced" and others had been left with only a single  hand towel in the  bathroom.  It turns out that nobody's AC is working,  but we are glad we didn't complain about it.  Those who did call maintenance had to wait hours  for anyone to  turn up, then  the maintenance  person  would pull the whole unit out of the wall and just disappear.  Given  that it's not working in the  entire  building  I think it's safe to say that the problem  isn't going to  be in the equipment  that's in the room anyway.   We can count ourselves lucky that at least we got a room to ourselves as several  people were given keys to rooms that were already  occupied  when  they opened the  door and walked in, or, alternatively were unpacking when some strangers would walk in on them.  There only seems to  be one power socket  in each room and that's in the bathroom.  Someone was complaining  that they'd had to put their  kettle in the bathroom to make  tea. Well at least they could  reach their kettle.  Our tea and coffee tray with the  kettle and cups on it has been  placed at the very top of our closet - well out of the reach of either me or Becky.  The final straw is that nobody's  card key seems to work for more than an hour and reception is full of a continuous  stream of people  trying to get their  card keys reset.  

Anyway, enough about the hotel as we're  leaving it tomorrow.   This afternoon we all congregated in reception to meet  our tour guide, Ellen.   Then it was onto the coach for a short tour of Zurich on coach and foot.  

The large church with the  2 towers is called the Grosse Munster.   The story goes that Charlemagne was riding  past this spot when his horse tripped over a gravestone and came a cropper. Charlemagne was unhurt and founded the church in thanks for his survival.  

We walked around the cobbled streets in the centre and saw many old buildings. Although few shops were open as it's Sunday. 

Many of the buildings are former Guild buildings  and  several have animal motifs on them representing the Guild that owned the building.  The wine Guild had a camel on it for some reason.  Meanwhile the building below had a red bull, so that must have been  the Guild for energy drinks. 

After our walking tour we were taken to a local restaurant for a very  nice welcome dinner and met some nice people  from Australia and Singapore.  

Tomorrow we have to be up at 6am to put our cases out for the porters and we will be traveling over the Bernina Pass to St Moritz.