September has become our favourite month for visiting Switzerland. This has something to do with the fact that Alessio's birthday is on 3rd September and this year he was five as you can just make out as he tries to blow out all the candles on his yummy cake.
One of our great pleasures when in Switzerland is to just wander around Zürich and other towns looking at some of the wonderful sights. Zürich doesn't have any real skycrapers, but recently they did build Prime Tower, which is by far the biggest and highest building in the city. Below are a couple of views of the place.
On a completely different scale is this rather unusual and somewhat "in your face" family home which I came across in Kilchberg.
Zürich is a pretty bright and lively city and below is my attempt to capture the city at night.
Switzerland is also a great place for window shopping. With the exchange rate so poor, it is just about the only shopping we can afford. However the window displays are so beautifully arranged that it is a pleasure to linger by some of them. Here are a couple.
Everywhere in Switzerland you come across public drinking fountains. Usually they are very simple affairs, and in autumn they begin to fill up with falling leaves. This often makes for some beautiful displays as in the one below, taken in Rüschlikon.
The holiday is of course also a time to relax and luckily we always manage to sneak in some R&R, usually accompanied by a glass of fine wine.
Though we are based in Zürich, we always manage to visit other parts of Switzerland. One of our trips was to Schaffhausen where we visited the Rheinfall, the largest waterfall in Europe. Nothing compared to the giants elsewhere in the world, but still, pretty impressive.
Our main trip this time was to Zermatt, a ski resort in the south of the country near the Italian border. We had glorious sunny weather and had a wonderful time going up the mountain railways and admiring the views. Below is Alessio in reflective mode just below the summit of the Gornergrat at 3,100m and then the Matterhorn itself the iconic mountain of the area.
Back in Scotland things returned to a slightly slower pace. But we still managed to fit in one more outing, this time to an Apple Day at the Botanical Gardens in St Andrews. We went with Elena and her boys and there was plenty for them to do, including crushing apples to make apple juice. They also got to try out a special tool for coring and peeling apples as demonstrated by Jamie below.
I end September with this photo of a rather colourful butterfly which we found attached to a wall on one of the houses in our street.
yes we had a good time in Switzerland this time, next year will also be good!
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