Day 2 - Zurich. The Adventure of Sending our Luggage to Budapest

Tony's View

What a day! We were in the rain all day, but had great adventures. Thank goodness for raincoats and an umbrella. It was also good that our bicycling didn't start yet. We start Thursday and no rain is forecasted at this point. We started out on a walk that ended up at three churches that were Catholic until the Reformation in the 1500's. Then the Protestants' took the churches over and removed all the painting and pictures of the Saints, Mary etc. The churches were big with great architecture, but plain on the inside. They have remained Protestant churches. I got a picture by the one St. Peter Church that has the biggest clock in Europe. All three churches were majestic on the outside but very familiar on the inside. Zurich reminds me of Rome with all the side alleys, shops and restaurants. The one alley as you can see had all the Swiss flags down it. In Central Station we took a picture of Joan looking up at the gigantic angel. We did a lot of touring and saw quite a bit even though it was raining. Now for the adventure of shipping our tandem cases. We started out about mid morning here using all my research of the best way to ship these cases. I called UPS before we left home and they said to go to a UPS drop off area where they will be able to ship our luggage, print the labels and just pay there. So we headed to one of the places I researched and they said that we needed to be able to weigh them and print our own labels, and pay UPS direct. Oh Crap! So when I don't know what to do with shipping, what do I do? I get with Brittany at Choice One. I texted her at 5:30am in Ohio, 11:30 our time. She answers and starts asking me questions. Yep, I woke her up 😀. She got to work and started sending me options. We still needed to weigh them. I decided then we should go to the other UPS drop off location I investigated as a wild chance that they would have scales. So, off we went. My research got us lost and we ended up at DIE POST. What is DIE POST? It may be their version of a post office, but probably not government owned since they were very friendly. Friendly, strange for a Post Office, unless it was my Dad, of course. Thought I better put that in there in case Dad is up in Heaven with Mom reading this. Mom just got there with Dad and she died a couple weeks before this trip, so she could go with us. On earth, she struggled with this blog thing. Hopefully, she is better in heaven. I love my Mom and miss her. Good thing she is here with Joan and I. 😥. Anyways, back to the post office. We went back and got our suitcases to send them to our new friend from Budapest. We got there, weighed them and it cost 156 Franks, which was way cheaper than UPS, being $246. Great, but they didn't accept Credit Cards. They were nice enough to hold the bags though while we went out looking for an ATM. First two ATMs were out of order. We plugged it into Around Me App and found a place. When we got there it was a hospital. We went inside and they said the ATM was down the hall 100 meters and downstairs. It was their cafeteria and the first machine we went up to didn't work. It was an employee machine.😂. Then Joan looked around and asked these people if they spoke English. Then she saw the real ATM machine. They asked us what we were doing in a hospital? We laughed and shrugged our shoulders. What an adventure to get these tandem cases out. Let's hope they make it to Budapest now?

We went out to eat and Joan got gluten free pasta. Yea. I said I wanted a beer and they asked me what kind. Not speaking their language I said a large. Hey, it worked. You can see by the picture, I liked it. Now, as you can see, I am learning the language.

Joan's Extras

First of all, for all of you English gurus reading this, i.e. Kaye and Tisha, I only correct most of Tony's run on sentences and typos. This proofreading becomes a whole new challenge, you know, after he drinks a few "large" beers!
Today was really WET. We debated about keeping an unnecessary umbrella, after packing our items that we do not want to pedal in the cases to Budapest, but it was so worth it to hang on to the umbrella today.
We laughed about how walking around Zurich we at least seem to look like the majority of people here, unlike some places like China and Israel. In China, people just walked up to Tony and took a picture with him without asking him. He still thinks they thought he was a star. Carol & Clyde gave us the real story though. 
The other interesting piece for me was getting to see some Marc Chagall artwork in the Fraumunster church. Marla & I toured the Chagall museum in Nice, France after Cara left for Florence. Kind of interesting stuff for this logically trained brain.