Geography Lessons

August 25-27

We went back to Zurich on Saturday, the 25th. The train takes about an hour from Bern. I had expected it to take longer. 

When we got to the station, traffic outside was really snarled. We had to walk around the station to find where the cabs were lined up.

There were barriers in the street, cops directing traffic. One driver got so confused that the car wound up in the trolley lane. There was so much confusion and anxiety on the street that, even with the help of two traffic officers, the poor woman couldn’t simply back up to get where she needed to go.

Our cabbie told us there had been a large fire during the night, and the roads in front of the station were blocked off.

After some small traffic delay, though, we were on our way to the hotel, the H+ on Badenerstrasse, the same place we had stayed before.

When we gave the driver the name and address, he said, “the Ramada.” 

No, the H Plus, we said. 

He explained that until recently it had been a Ramada hotel. All the cab drivers knew it. 

Wow, what a difference a continent can make. We had stayed at a Ramada in Geneva, but it was nothing remotely like any Ramada where I have stayed before. 

I’ve stayed at a few in the States. They usually charge the same as La Quinta, but the wi-fi, the maintenance, and the comfort are usually a full step down.

So, we got to the ex-Ramada just fine. 

We dropped off the bags and headed for the old town.

We got off the tram at Paradeplatz, where we have started before in Zurich. Right from the square, about a block away, we saw the front of an old church that we hadn’t explored. 

I wanted to see what it was. Turns out, it’s the Fraumunster, the church on the Limmat River directly across from the Grossmunster. 

We had been in this neighborhood several times, but hadn’t come to the church from this particular street before

When we had stopped at the Fraumunsterplatz before, we didn’t go inside the church and had followed a different route away from it.

So we found that our favorite trolley stop, the Paradeplatz, is only a couple of blocks away from the bridge that crosses the Limmat to the main cathedral.

I wanted to go back to the Grossmunster in hopes of getting a better view of the back wall of the chancel.

When I was first in the church years ago, we were able to enter the chancel, which is now roped off and reserved as a place for prayer only, where no one from the public apparently is permitted to go. 

The Reformers destroyed frescoes on the wall, but there are some intriguing traces remaining. I saw two or three kneeling figures holding their heads, severed but smiling, in their laps.

A day later, on a walking tour, the guide told us the story. A group of early Christians who refused to renounce the faith were beheaded on the river bank. They picked up their heads and climbed the hill to the site of the present cathedral.

It’s strange, too, what was lost and what was spared. A medieval and very un-Protestant painting of the Virgin and Christ child fills a niche in a column in the nave of the Grossmunster. 

Most of the image remains. Her hand is holding a white rose. The faces, though, have been erased.

It had been spitting rain on and off during the afternoon, then it started dripping a little more. But these narrow lanes and medieval buildings are so beautiful that we didn’t want to quit walking. 

Eventually the damp and the falling temperature got to us.

We went back to the hotel and had dinner at Da Cono, the Italian restaurant across the street. I had pizza Margherita and Joanna had lasagne. 

We shared a half liter of one of Joanna’s favorite wines, and also of mine, a Sicilian red called Nero d’Avola. It’s a smooth-drinking wine, but when it is good, as this was, it has a lot of flavor.

Sunday dawned bright, and it was one of the rare days this summer when the weather was seasonable, in the mid-70s.

Joanna had read about the Chagall windows created 40 or so years ago for the Fraumunster. So this time, we paid 5 francs to go inside.

Like the rest of the post-Reformation churches, it was gutted of most of its artwork.

The windows were commissioned by a former church rector who had seen windows that Marc Chagall had created for a synagogue. Or maybe he had seen pictures of the windows. 

Chagall, who was 80 at the time, took the job. There are five windows in what used to be the choir, the church within a church where the cloistered religious used to worship. 

“Munster,” I gather, is a church to which a monastery is attached. The monastery for the Fraumunster was torn down in the 1890s to make way for a city administration building.

It was a convent of nuns. Two Frankish princesses, Hildegarde and Bertha, followed a deer (or maybe an elk) with flaming antlers to the spot where the church stands. They became the first abbesses.

A painting about their adventure is on a wall over where they are buried.

The king their father (Ludwig, grandson of Charlemagne)  wasn’t so sure about building in a flood plain. But a rope fell from heaven and marked the outline of the church. That convinced him.

The current church dates to the 12th century, but it stands on much older predecessors. Some of the early foundations have been excavated and you can go into the crypt to see them. Sort of a miniature Geneva cathedral.

But back to the windows. Three are on the back wall of the choir.

The central, and largest, is devoted to Jesus. He is shown crucified at the top and at the bottom as a baby being suckled by the Virgin. There is a tree that grows from beneath her feet and fills the frame.

To the right of that is a window about David, shown at the top as a shepherd boy and at bottom as the king strumming a harp. A woman behind the king may be Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon. In the middle is a New Jerusalem spilling out of heaven.

To the left of Jesus is Jacob, wrestling with an angel and dreaming of the ladder.

On the left wall are prophets. Elisha watches Elijah’s flaming chariot climb to heaven. Jeremiah at the top holds his head in lamentation.

On the right wall is Moses bringing the law on the tablets. There is a charging army below him, maybe representing the lawless, or maybe pharaoh’s army chasing the Israelites.

The room also has patches on the walls revealing portions of original frescoes that had been painted or plastered over.  

Chagall did a rose window for the church later. It is over one end of the transept. A description says it depicts events from Genesis, but the execution is so abstract that I couldn’t make sense of any images. 

A window by Giacometti, who was Swiss, is on the opposite side of the transept, but that is very dark and hard to make out. 

We crossed the river on the bridge between the munsters. Looking south toward the lake, the horizon consists of rows of increasingly high mountains. 

The air was so clear that the Alps stood out in sharp relief.

We strolled along the Limmat to admire the swans and the clock towers.

We had talked about trying to find the bierhalle where we had bratwurst on our first visit to Zurich. I had even written myself a note of the name of the place and the street.

I was just about to reach for it after Joanna said she was getting hungry. What timing. 

There was the Rheinfelder Bierhalle right then, only four or five bars away. 

We wanted to go inside because that would take us away from the smokers. But indoors had its own difficulties.

There was a duo having a great time performing, but the music was so loud that conversation was a challenge. Besides, this was apparently a very popular way to spend Sunday afternoon, so most of the seats were taken.

Sitting outside was just right. We could hear everything going on inside, some familiar covers and as many that we didn’t recognize. 

When we ducked in later to use the rest rooms, there was a couple dancing between tables.

We had the bratwurst again and a Feldschlosschen amber.

It is always great fun to sit outside and watch people go by in Europe. Across the street, among the smokers outside another bar was a woman whose hair matched a man’s green shirt.

Monday we were up before 7 and out before 10. 

We found a cab right outside the door and there was no traffic to speak of, so we reached the airport early.

We waited around for a gate to be posted. Then we trekked across the terminal and rode on a subway to get there. We sat at the gate until they started boarding a Russian plane due to leave after ours.

They had changed the gate assignments but wanted it to be a surprise, so there was no announcement. 

Lucky for us it was the next gate down.

We were among the last to board because people kept shoving their way into the front of the line. Most people who travel seem to be self-involved rubes who should stay home. 

We were in the last row of a flight packed so tight that it felt more like Virgin Atlantic than British Airways.

It was actually tricky trying to get bags under seats. It was the most uncomfortable flight I can remember. It lasted less than two hours, though, and there was the promise of beer at the end of it.

When we changed planes in London we stopped at Huxley’s, my go-to bar at Heathrow. 

I was hungry and there was all manner of pub food. I finally ordered the English breakfast with a pint of Fuller’s London Pride. Joanna had fish and chips with sips of my beer.

You get English breakfast all over England—also at Archer’s in Chiang Mai. I have to guess that in the U.K. they call it English breakfast because it is intended for tourists. 

But I don’t care. It’s fun to be the foreigner and the food is damned good: grilled tomatoes, sausage, bacon, baked beans, lots of other things.

We had more rubes in front of us for a little over 7 hours in the air. Who else reclines all the way back in coach? 

That breakfast stayed with me, so I skipped dinner and snacks on the plane. The beer choices were fairly weak for a Trans-Atlantic BA flight. In the past they have usually included at least some kind of British or American ale.

I settled for a Heineken, and the lady gave me two. Maybe as compensation for sitting behind rubes.

I watched movies for most of the flight, including “The Wild One.” The imagery is familiar to everybody, even me, what with Marlon Brando in his captain’s cap and his black leather jacket. But I had never gotten around to watching the movie before.

It had thought it was the film that made Brando, but “The Wild One” is from 1953. Stanley Kowalksi and “A Streetcar Named Desire” came two years earlier, in 1951. 

“The Wild One” is a lot sillier than Tennessee Williams and more than a little naive. 

There was also a British thriller whose title I’ve forgotten, and a violent downer of a Western called “Hostiles,” which had Christian Bale and Wes Studi in the cast.

The western wasn’t bad, but as entertainment goes, it’s pretty grim, right up there with Leonardo DiCaprio getting beaten up by a bear.

We were back in Montclair a little after nine local time, and a few minutes past three a.m. Zurich time.

It was a long day and no rubes were harmed, at least by us.

Be well, all. 

Harry