A long day on the road

by Diane

Well, not a whole day.

P. and I went into Dublin yesterday evening to see Return of the King, then afterwards ran into an old fannish acquaintance and had a late dinner with him: then went back to the hotel and Fell Over Big Time. It’s astonishing the effect seeing such a long and (to the two of us, anyway) emotionally loaded movie can have on your energy levels. It’s going to take days to internalize this one, if not weeks.

Anyway, around noontime we went up to the airport, had lunch, and then parted company, I heading for LX 401 to Zürich, Peter heading home to feed the cats and get on with his own work. Two hours later I was in Züri: I did the sane thing and sent my luggage ahead of me to Basel (Swiss Railways makes this easy: and they’re probably the only rail system on the planet I would really trust with my luggage…) and then paused for some dinner.

This is one of the few places in the world where you can genuinely imagine yourself saying to a friend, “I’m dying for a good meal…let’s go to the train station.” Zürich Hauptbahnhof (or “main station”) has eleven restaurants of various kinds, ranging from “Au Premier” upstairs (Michelin-rosetted, I think, though I could be confusing it with the former station buffet at Eaux-Vives in Geneva) to various cafes scattered about the lower levels (there’s a terrific shopping center under the station, not to mention the gym and tanning center and the two supermarkets…).

My favorite of the main-level restaurants is Brasserie Federal. Once upon a time, a shade more than a hundred fifty years ago, when the Hauptbahnhof first opened, it was the first-class waiting room — and hence has noble classical proportions, beautiful sculpted plasterwork, and a spectacular stained-glass skylight. Nowadays it also features a hundred Swiss beers (twenty or so on draft, the rest bottled) and a great deal of what the Swiss would consider “comfort food”: a lot of rösti, the local version of meat loaf, sausages naturally (the veal and pork bratwurst are terrific), and much other stuff which can be generally classified as “stick-to-your-ribs”. Ryoh-Ohki and 2 dezi of rose'. Don't think you're getting to see the liver and onions. They lasted about 30 seconds.So I had some calves’ liver (which I love) with onions, and rösti, and a few dezi of rosé, and then got the heck out of Dodge and headed for Basel.

The early-ish meal was a good idea, since by the time I hit the hotel (11ish) everything restaurant-like in the neighborhood had closed down. So nothing to do but go upstairs to my room, go wireless (the hotel is a Swisscom hotspot), and take care of business before falling over. There’s a morning appointment in town, and then I can head north to Köln. The final destination…

More about that later. I’ll paste a picture or two of Brasserie Federal in here in the morning…or you might look at this page, as this gent’s pictures are probably far better than mine are going to be. (These will be from a marvelous device which I’m still attempting to get to terms with — Peter’s Christmas gift to me, a Nokia 6600. I’m trying to do with it what the kids in E. Nesbit’s “Psammead” series would describe as “taming it by kindness”, but this may be impossible at the moment. More of this later as well.)

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