Day 9: Vaduz to Brugg

We got up at 7.30 this morning, and woke to this outside our window. Beautiful, minus the crane.

Today we traveled from the small town of Schaan to the (probably) equally small town of Brugg. The trip was very pleasant. We left our hostel at around 9.15, after having a similar breakfast to yesterday and packing up our room. We caught the 9.42 bus out of Schaan to Buchs, and from there took the 10.12 train into Zurich (we’re getting to know that particular Bahnhof pretty well!). Then we caught the 11.36 train to Brugg, and arrived at noon.  

During our bus trip, we met a man who runs some sort of tourism business in the mountains (we think perhaps a ski resort?). He caught us speaking English and asked us immediately where we were from, and what we were up to in Switzerland. It was pretty clear he was trying to convince us to visit his place in the mountains, and even gave us his card. When it was pretty clear that we already had plans, he told us to send him an email next time we wanted to come to Switzerland, and he’d arrange everything (mhm, I’m sure… for a fee). Despite his clear intentions, he was a pretty nice man, and began giving us tidbits of information, for example, what “Bahnhof” meant, and the fact that as soon as you cross the Rhine from where we were, you are immediately in Switzerland. I’m not entirely sure how he could think that we didn’t know that already (we told him that we’d been in Switzerland for a week so far), but I’m sure he thought he was helping.

Our first train trip was on what they call a “RailJet”. I’m not sure whether it’s called a “jet” because it actually moves faster than other trains, or if it just seems that way since the RailJet trains make very few stops. Regardless, we made it to Zurich faster than we would have if we took a different train. The interior of the train was pretty fancy, and even had screens displaying information about the train, including how fast it was going. It seemed to top out at around 130 km/h, which is slow compared to the high speed train I took when we visited Italy. Jeff took these photos from the train:

The second train trip was pretty short, and lasted no more than 20 minutes. On it, we met someone from Sudbury that moved to Switzerland a year and a half ago. We briefly discussed the recent election in Canada before hopping off the train.  

When we arrived in Brugg, our first order of business was to find our hostel. It was a pretty hot day (high of 27 Celsius), and we wanted to get rid of our bags before walking around town. However, we didn’t realize that the walk to the hostel was going to take so long. It took us approximately half an hour to complete the walk; ten minutes longer than we were expecting. Walking with big heavy bags can really slow you down…

When we arrived at the hostel, everything was deserted. There didn’t appear to be anyone around (guests or staff), and we didn’t want to be stuck with our bags all day. So we used our handy-dandy PacSafe’s (metal mesh that goes around our packs and locks to prevent people from getting into our bag), and locked them to a metal banister next to reception. We expected that they would be safe, since the place was deserted and on the outskirts of town. Here's a picture of the hostel from the outside:

After locking up our bags, we went in search of lunch. We ended up walking all the way back to the train station to find a grocery store, and purchased a baguette, 4 carrots, 2 apples, a chunk of Swiss brie (tastes an awful lot like Canadian brie…), some crackers, a package of 3 hazelnut strudel things, a bagged salad, and a package of balsamic salad dressing. We ate the apples and crackers and cheese for lunch. For dinner, we ate the salad, part of the baguette (with cheese), and a few carrots, with the strudels for dessert. But more on that later.

Once food had been arranged, we spent some time strolling through the small old town in Brugg. The buildings were clearly old, and many featured small drawings on the exterior, or signs indicating who had lived in the building long ago (usually during the 1700’s). As in Zurich, we see fountains everywhere, and the water is all supposed to be safe to drink. Supposedly the only fountains you can’t drink from are those that are labelled “No drinking!”. Our walk was lovely, but we discovered that in Brugg, everything is closed on Mondays. No shops were open, and we couldn’t even go into the museum we wanted to visit. We may or may not be able to visit the museum tomorrow, depending on whether we have time before we need to catch a train. (Update: Didn't feel like sticking around Brugg until it opened at 10, so we didn't visit it). The museum:

From the old town centre, we walked along a busy road, and then a pathway, that ran next to the river (River Aare). We came across an old building with two water wheels.

A view from a bridge down the river:

We arrived back at the hostel at around 3o’clock, and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the lawn reading (and in Mary’s case, catching a quick nap).

At 5 o’clock, we could finally check in to our room. Our room has a bunk bed, two lockers (which you cannot remove the key from, as far as we can tell…. Try to figure that one out…), a chair and table, and a sink. We have a lovely little balcony (as far as I can tell, this is the only balcony in the hostel) with 2 chairs, and this is where I am sitting writing this from, as it is still perfectly warm outside.

The only strange thing about our room is that you must go through a bathroom and shower area to get to it. All of the doors are left open, so I suppose the strange thing is more that the bathroom is just kinda in the middle of the hallway. The toilet and shower stalls have doors, of course, but the sinks are in the main area. A view from our bunks out onto the balcony (with all our junk, of course):

There hasn’t been a whole lot to do here (Jeff thought that this meant a short blog post. Hahaha, when can I write only a short blog post? :p), and the main reason we’re here is because Jeff wanted to stay in a castle. I’m not sure I would call this place a castle, but it’s clearly a historical building. It is apparently known as the “Schlosschen”, meaning “Little castle”, because it has a dwelling-tower-like shape and two crow-step gables (whatever that meants…). The first two floors are made up of Roman wall on the western side. The building dates from the 16^th century. We’re mostly here for the hostel location rather than the city, so we don’t mind having a day to relax.

For dinner, we ate the baguette with some cheese, 2 of the carrots, and the bagged salad. We’re getting pretty good at eating without any dishes. We’re very glad that we brought sporks with us from Canada. We opened the bag of salad only slightly, poured in the salad dressing, held it closed and shook it up, then ripped it open and ate the salad from the bag with our sporks. This is the second time we’ve done this (though yesterday we poured it partially out onto the pizza box), and seems to do the job :).

Our next line of business was to get our laundry done. The hostel advertised 8fr to use a washing machine, so we went to reception and asked about it. She handed us a laundry basket and told us to bring it to her and she would do it. We thought this was very strange, but she was very insistent. Supposedly, we’ll go down to reception in the morning, and she’ll have it done for us. Both Jeff and I feel a little weird about having someone else do our laundry, but she didn’t seem to want us to go down into the basement where the machines were located (and it sounded like she was going to hang our clothes to dry??). Anyway, I guess we’ll find out in the morning whether things worked out or not…

Since then, we’ve been taking it easy and not doing much. We plan on calling it an early night and heading to Basel in the morning, with a possible stopover in another town.

The weather here makes us keep thinking it’s June. We were admiring the vegetable garden here at the hostel, and were surprised to find that the rhubarb was a foot tall already, the asparagus already looking past (going to seed), and the lupins in full bloom.

As you have probably guessed, we did not have internet access at the hostel. Hopefully we will have internet in Basel, so we will be able to post this blog entry then.

(Note: Yup, got internet in Basel, so this is posted one day late.)

(Note2: Jeff has been finding it really hard to post from his account, since it doesn't give him admin privileges for some reason, so he'll probably just post from mine from now on. I'm going to ask him to sign them when he writes them though!)