Tuesday 13 December 1983 – Zurich
It should
have been Friday 13th today for all that went wrong!! For a start
Rab started her cold in earnest poor thing with a bout of sneezing and coughing
at abou 01.30. she was coughing for most of the rest of the night after that so
none of us slept too well.
There must
have been a low pressure zone over Austria because when I got up I felt as if
the sky was going to fall on my head; Rab wasn’t well and even Matt said he
didn’t feel one hundred percent. “Well,” I said, “after the delicious breakfast
we get here you will all feel a deal better.”
Some hope!
No cutlery on the tables, stale bread and cheese, three or four slices of
suspect cold meat and a shrewish little waitress who sullenly slammed down some
lukewarm coffee with no sugar, no cream and then pushed off. To make matters
worse, I broke the glass sugar pourer (which was almost empty) when tapping it
on the table in an effort to shake loose the last of the caked sugar in it. And
cut my finger too!
Having
vented our feelings on the receptionist – and obtained a discount of 10%, we
moved on. I left Rab at a department store looking at fabrics (what a
surprise!) while Matt and I went to SwissAir to collect our tickets. More bad
news there. Our original booking had included a flight to Munich
and then on to Amsterdam.
In Bern I had
asked if I could change this to a Salzburg/Zurich/Amsterdam route. No problem
the SwissAir man had said, but we didn’t have time to change the ticket there
and then. Now in Innsbruck
I was told the tickets could not be changed. And if they could be changed the
cost would be $110 each.
So now we had
a bit of a dilemma. We could drive on to Salzburg
as originally planned, catch the flight to Munich
and thence to Amsterdam, BUT…one of our
suitcases was in Zurich
waiting for us there. The SwissAir bloke offered to arrange for this case to be
forwarded to Amsterdam to meet us, but I scathingly told him that in the light
of the problems SwissAir had already caused I didn’t think I could rely on
that.
It seemed
better to return to Zurich
today rather than press on. Rab wasn’t feeling at all well and none of us
fancied another seven hour train trip from Salzburg. Having decided on this point we
were making our way up to the station (eating roast chestnuts to comfort
ourselves) when we came across a travel agent. We popped in there and found
that the Zurich Schnellzug was leaving in an hour and a half at 12.30 and that
we could book and buy tickets at the travel agent. Well, provided you had a
fair bit of patience. They took over ten minutes to issue the three tickets.
Having
finally got the tickets we headed back to the hotel via a toy shop which Matt
had spotted while he was lost between SwissAir and the department store – I
forgot to mention that earlier. (None of
us can recall this incident – presumably I sent him on to tell his mother we
were held up at SwissAir?) we also popped into a deli where we stocked up
with padkos.
No problems
back at the hotel or with getting a taxi – another sullen driver he was, as so
many taxi drivers seem to be. Makes you wonder why they bother with the public
at all and indeed if it was a taxi driver who sprayed the graffiti slogan we
saw in Luzern “F*^* The Tourists.”
We were very
early at the station and found our way to Platform 3 on Platform 7, which
changed into Platform 5(b). We waited in the chill for about 30 minutes only to
find, when the train did pull in that the second class carriages were all up
the other end of the platform where Platform 5(b) ended and became Platform 3
again. With all our baggage the air was blue!
Anyway, we
found a nice compartment, threw ourselves into it and were undisturbed until we
arrived back in Zurich
– well, apart from some rude Austrian Immigration officials. Austria may be cheaper than Switzerland,
but we had our fill of the blighters today. Back we came to the du Theatre and
Matt and I nipped off to Frans Carl Weber to look at their toys, returning via
Burgerland with some sustenance for the sick Rab.
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