Botanical Gardens, a Hike Near the AirBnB, a Laundry Fiasco

Statue Near Escherhöhe

After breakfast this morning, we took a tram down to the botanical gardens and spent a couple of hours wandering through them (the QR codes that were supposed to provide English translations did not work, so we were slowed by the need to use Google Translate). This included three greenhouse domes that we could walk through, which was pretty interesting.

We then headed back towards the apartment to an area Benton had seen that had a lot of restaurants and had a pretty delicious meal at a Thai restaurant. We were there late enough that we were the only patrons from when we arrived until when we left.

We got back to the apartment in time to relax for ~45 minutes before Lukas Oldenburg arrived. He’s a locally based analytics guy who Tim had only met in person once before, but with whom Tim has “known”—via Twitter, Slack, and mutually consumed blogs and podcasts—for a number of years. He had provided a number of suggested activities, including a couple that we could do as a group, and we’d settled on a hike through the woods right behind our AirBnB. It turns out, “all” we had to do was walk on a moderate uphill series of well-groomed paths for an hour, and we reached the highest point in the hills around Zurich. There was no view or anything from there, but we then continued the walk and wound up with… a great view near a hotel!

Then, it was a 15-minute walk to a nice restaurant for drinks and dinner, and then another 20-minute walk back to the apartment.

It would have been great to call it an evening at that point, but it was only 8:30, so we decided to throw a couple of loads of laundry on. Since all we had to go on from our AirBnB host was that there were “washers in the basement,” and we’d confirmed their location earlier in the day, we thought this would be an easy task. It was not. And, as I write this, we have two loads of dirty laundry locked in washing machines and inaccessible, and a host that has not responded to a request for help in the 2.5 hours since she was contacted.

An interesting/memorable experience of the day:

  • Benton: This was a day with a lot of things: everything was apparently poisonous at the botanical gardens; the apple drink at dinner; my natural Swiss-ness in how I water down every drink; the steel can for my soda at lunch; the “long walk uphill…continuously uphill!”

  • Tim: Lukas turning out to be as delightful and charming as I’d sorta’ expected he would be. And trapping a bee in Lucy’s sparkling apple juice water glass (empty) with my beer glass (and the waitress realizing that it was there as she cleared the table and just tossing the bee into the bushes)


A bit of hard data from the day:
  • According to Benton's Apple Watch, he took 18,129 steps over the course of the day, covering 8.3 miles and burning 1,073 active calories.
  • According to Tim's Fitbit, he started the day having slept for 6.0 hours, and he walked 17,951 steps over the course of the day.

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  1. Botanischer Garten Universität Zürich
  2. Jao Praya
  3. Escherhöhe
  4. Ziegelhütte