May 12

No trip to Zurich is complete without a tour of Nate's amazing Google office. And of course, we arrived early to enjoy the free breakfast offered to employees... and family. Well, not family members every day, but Nate assured us that guests once and a while would be fine. Google may rethink that policy after witnessing our consumption. Just kidding! We were entirely reasonable. I promise. My parents were thoroughly impressed with the coolness factor of the office and Nate was even able to cajole each of us into riding the fireman's pole - not that Mom took much convincing! We definitely got the full google experience.

Next on our list was a trip to the Rietberg Museum. Now, we are cultured folks ... kinda, but we do not usually frequent art museums while on vacation. We made an exception because our ZurichCards (that we purchased only for today) provided free entrance to all museums. It would have been a waste of money not to go! The museum was primarily non-European art and pretty fascinating ... at first. We stayed for about an hour and half and then sped through the rest. The grounds were amazing and lush, but I think we got our fill of museums. We went back to the apartment for lunch (not without stopping for a pre-lunch of bratwurst for the parents with my vegetarian stomach rumbling), rested for an hour, and then got back on our feet to attend our 2 hour walking tour of Zurich (half price with the ZurichCard!)

We loved the tour! Out guide was fabulous. She had to be, she was the tour guide featured on the front of our tourist booklet. She conducted it in both German and English (although all but one participant spoke English). We learned so much about the city and saw parts of it that I did not yet know about. I tried to memorize everything to be on my game when giving mini-tours to future guests. Zurich is a beautiful little city and we saw an interesting side to it. The most shocking thing we learned was that women were not allowed to vote in country elections until 1971. 1971!!! Wow! I was amazed. Probably not the tourist take away point the guide was hoping for us, but it was so outrageous. At first, she said 1871 and mentioned how the Swiss were embarrassed about their slow move towards equal rights. The Americans in the group all seemed to hem and haw thinking of our less than stellar date of 1920 for women's suffrage. When she corrected herself and said 19 instead of 18, their was actually a gasp of surprise (mingled, I'm guessing, with relief that we were at least "ahead" of the Swiss) from the Americans in the group.

(Mom and Dad worked hard to coordinate with the blue & white Zurich flag and the red & white Swiss flag)

The tour ended just as it started to sprinkle. We made it home a little wet, but happy with our full day. It didn't stop there- after supper Dad noticed the sky looked clear so we went to the lake to witness a rainbow and beautiful sunset.