Zurich, Part 2

We couldn’t continue our itinerary and travel on to Munich today, so we had to make a new plan. I didn’t want to stay in Lucerne because it was the most expensive hotel we had for the entire trip, so we decided to go back to Zurich and stay at the same hotel we were at before, which was 100 sf per night instead of 350 sf per night. We then booked our train for the next day to go to Munich, so instead of a day and a half in Munich we will only have half a day. We will just need to pick and choose what we will do for that half day. Anyway, we took the train to Zurich and dropped off our bags at the hotel, then went straight to the Lindt Chocolate Factory. This was a huge surprise for the kids, and you should have seen their eyes when they saw where we were going!

There were quite a few exhibits explaining how chocolate is produced and the everyone got an audioguide that gave you information when you pointed it at an exhibit. Everyone liked using the audioguides, even though I am not sure how much the kids actually heard what what being said.

There were several tasting stations along the way. The first was three chocolate fountains—dark, milk, and white. You could get as much as you wanted, you just needed a new spoon for each taste. We had a lot of liquid chocolate! The next tasting station was a bunch of different bars of chocolate that had a motion sensor so they would cut you off a piece when you put your hand under the sensor spot. Half of these weren’t working, and none had labels so you didn’t really know what you were eating. The kids didn’t really like this station, but there were some touch screen games where you do some quality control where you have to get rid of the bad chocolate or put almonds on the nougat pieces. The next tasting station was our favorite—a bunch of Lindt chocolate balls of different flavors! We even snuck a few to save for later. The last tasting station was a Rube Goldberg-type thing that had a ball go through a maze and then spit you out a square of chocolate at the end. This was fun and we did it several times. By the end, we had so much chocolate that all our bellies were a little queasy and the kids were bouncing off the walls with a sugar high!

After so much chocolate, we had to do some exercise. So we went back to the FIFA World Football Museum to finish some of the games we didn’t get to play last time. We had three hours before the museum closed which should be plenty of time, right? Well, once again we closed the place down. We first did the soccer games, even though I had to leave halfway through to go back to the hotel for a meeting.

There were then some handheld soccer games that the kids played. A few were like air hockey, and of course there was foosball!

There were little chairs where you could watch soccer chants and anthems and then take a quiz, and the kids took quite a while to do this.

Finally, there was a video game hall of fame of soccer video games and even a pinball machine!

Although it was an unexpected day it was still pretty fun. We bought some noodles and sauce at the grocery and made dinner in the hotel community kitchen. Tomorrow we will hopefully make it to Munich, but we will see if the strike is over then.