Hello Schweiz!

Appenzell is a quaint and beautiful town nestled amidst the Alps with a population of about 7,000. Its colourful traditional buildings are picture perfect against the breathtaking snow capped mountains in the background. To get there, take the narrow-gauge train from St Gallen AB (to the front and right of St Gallen HB). The 45 minutes trip will take you through beautiful landscapes...

Read More...

Abbey precinct Stiftsbibliothek. (Picture taken of a postcard I bought for CHF 1.80) St Gallen is located in the north eastern part of Switzerland, about an hour away from Zurich by train. St Gallen is home to the Abbey library or Stiftsbibliothek, which houses over 170,000 documents, mostly handwritten from a thousand years ago. The Abbey precinct (located 10 minutes on foot from...

Read More...

Yes, you heard me. We found halal meat! Actually we didn't go to Zurich with the intention of buying groceries. We were merely looking for a place to perform our prayers and found the Islamic Center on Ausstellungsstrasse 21. The Islamic Center is located on the 4th storey of an unsuspecting apartment on Ausstellungsstrasse. After our prayers, we thought, hey usually halal food...

Read More...

Since Winterthur (the place we're staying at) is 20 minutes away by train from Zurich, it is only natural that we explore Zurich first. The train ticket costed me CHF 12.60 with my Half-fare card. Hence a normal trip from Winterthur to Zurich Hauptbahnhof (often abbreviated as HB which means Central train station in English) would otherwise cost CHF 25.20 without the half-fare card....

Read More...

Grüezi (pronounced as gry-et-si) means hello in Swiss-German. Do you know that 74% of Switzerland speak German? Or Swiss German rather as they have their own set of words, pronunciation and grammar which differ from the standard German. I don't know why, but I always had the impression that they speak English. The rest of the population speak French (20%), Italian (4%), Romansch (1%) and...

Read More...