Trains, Castles, and Soccer

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

We left our hotel in Zurich this morning at about half past eight and caught the 9:00 train to Lausanne. We arrived in Lausanne around quarter past 11:00. It's amazing how you get on the train in Zurich where everyone speaks German and off the train in Lausanne and suddenly everything is in French. We had a bit of trouble discerning how to get to our hotel, luckily I had written down walking directions as well as directions for metro/bus that I found somewhere on the internet. We couldn't really figure out the metro, so we started to walk, but Lausanne is actually quite hilly, so we quickly gave up and began looking for a taxi. But then luckily we came across a bus stop that happened to be for the bus that my directions said you could take after taking the metro a couple of stops, so we waited a few minutes for the bus, bought a day pass (which we would later regret because as it turned out our hotel gave us a free travel card), and hopped on. The bus took us probably about 100 meters or so from our hotel. Luckily our room was ready when we arrived a bit after noon and we were able to drop our bags and head back to the train station, to make our excursion down to Montreaux to see the Chateau de Chillon.

We took the 12:45 train to Montreaux which took a mere 25 minutes or so. When we arrived we grabbed a quick lunch and made our way to the bus stop to catch a bus out to the castle. The small rocky island on which the castle is built acted both as natural protection and a strategic location to control movement between the north and south of Europe. The castle's history was marked by three different important periods: The Savoy era (12th century to 1536), The Bernese era (1536-1798), and the Vaudois era (1798 until today). Excavations carried out in the 19th century indicate that the site of Chillon has been occupied since the Bronze Age. The oldest written mention of the castle dates from 1150 and establishes that the Savoy family already controlled the fortress at that time. The Swiss, or the Bernese, conquered the region and occupied Chillon in 1536. The castle was used as a fortress for more than 260 years. It took us a couple of hours to tour the large castle, we made our way back to the train station and caught the 2:30 train back to Lausanne.

Upon our return to Lausanne we headed back to the hotel to watch the afternoon soccer game and take a break before heading out to explore Lausanne. We headed out of the hotel again around six o'clock in the evening and went to see the Gothic Cathedrale de Notre Dame. We then made our way back down into town. Back in town we found the city to be dead. I will try not to judge the city by our one experience, but the only way I can describe it is that it looked and felt as if there had been some massive party the night before (which we saw evidence of up by the cathedral in the form of broken down festival tents/stages and beer cups strewn all over) and that everyone was hungover taking the day off. All the shops were closed, we couldn't even find a restaurant all the way up until we returned to the hotel around 8 o'clock that was open or if it was there wasn't a sole sitting down or eating. We finally just grabbed a quick dinner at a kebab stand and headed back to the hotel to watch the second soccer game. I have heard good things about Lausanne, but we didn't experience that sadly. The stopover in Lausanne however was still worthwhile if for nothing else for the excursion down to Montreaux.