Thursday 2nd October 2008 – Zurich, Switzerland

Today was the day of our visit to Jane's 2nd cousin, Caroline. Caroline, smiling as always, arrived at the campsite with her two year old son Seb strapped in the child seat. We last saw Seb when he was just a few months old so, resisting the temptation to say “hastn't he grown?”, we reintroduced ourselves to him and introduced them both to Henrietta. After a short journey, we arrived at Caroline and Josh's lovely three bedroom apartment with glorious views over Lake Zurich. There is a railway line running on the hillside just below the apartment and Seb is totally fascinated by trains and every other form of transport – a typical boy! He had already pointed out the train tracks at the campsite and now we were introduced to his wooden toy train set with a small battery-operated locomotive. In fact, “train” was a large part of Seb's conversation together with “Oh dear!” whenever the loco crashed or stopped on the slope up to the bridge. “Oh dear!” was heard frequently, often because Seb was convinced that the loco should push the carriages rather than pull them.
The weather was good so we caught the bus into the centre of Zurich and wandered around the old town admiring the architecture but mainly chatting – catching up with all the news since we last met. Seb was a delight, running around at great speed, indicating points of interest such as “car”, “tram” (there were lots of these!), “bus”, “clock” (not a form of transport!) and he also made conversation with us, all of which was a mystery to everyone except Seb. I spotted an ornate drinking fountain and decided to introduce Seb to it. However, Seb knew all about fountains and was impressively adept at holding his finger over the water spout, causing it to spray at high velocity in all directions. Fortunately there weren't any people in the near vicinity, so an international incident was avoided. We travelled back on a “big boat”, as Seb called it, a lake ferry that had a stop very close to the apartment. That was a very pleasant way to travel and was all part of the Zurich integrated transport system – a single ticket provided 24 hour travel on buses, trains and the ferry.
Josh has a very enjoyable, although demanding, job with KPMG and we were very lucky that he was able to get home at a very reasonable time. Seb was impressed too and ran across the room to give his dad a great big hug. Conversation flowed over a gorgeous dinner cooked by Caroline – wonderfully pink lamb, which was greatly appreciated by us as our diet had consisted of 98% pork and certainly no lamb for the last few months. It was a lovely relaxed evening and it was great to see Caroline and Josh so happy together.
Photos: We rather hoped that this shop in the designer area of Zurich belonged to one of my relations but discovered that we couldn't even afford to buy one of their bags; The Zurich ferry.