What does anyone who lives in
Switzerland do during the winter here?
They go skiing. At least that’s
what it feels like. Almost everyone on
my team loves to ski or snowboard so the question around our office come Thursday or Friday is “Where are you going skiing this weekend?”, “How does the
weather/snow look for this weekend?” and so on.
I suppose that all makes sense being that we are an hour by train from
the closest ski resort.
For us, last weekend we were off
to Zermatt! It’s a little over a 3 hour
train ride from Zurich with the last hour being quite scenic. We took off early from work on Friday (again,
totally accepted when you are heading skiing for the weekend) and met up with
Stacey and Alex in Zermatt a little after 8pm.
First impression for me was that it reminded me quite a bit of
Whistler. It’s a cute village and no
cars are allowed except for the shuttle buses and taxis that are all
electric. We headed out for dinner that
night and a drink and got to experience a bit of the village night life. If you wanted, you could be dancing until the
early hours of the morning. There are definitely
plenty of options.
In any case, we got up early the
next morning ready to explore the mountain.
The one unfortunate part is that the weather was less than ideal. It was snowing and cloudy which kind of put a
damper on my excitement for getting views of the Matterhorn. The skiing was ok in the morning but
definitely by early afternoon it was tough conditions. Kind of icy and flat light (which to me
basically feels like I’m skiing blind).
But we still enjoyed ourselves, had lunch in a mountain restaurant and
finished up our day around 2 or 3….ready for après ski. We headed back into the village, found a
great little bar and enjoyed a few beers after our day of skiing.
 |
| The best view of the Matterhorn we could get |
That night we headed out to
Grampi’s for dinner which featured a one man band type of guy playing and
singing to entertain the crowd. I have
to admit, he was an odd little man. But
we enjoyed that while we ate dinner and then were off to a country bar we had
seen as we were walking to dinner. Now
I’m not quite sure what made them decide to call this a country bar as there
was no country music playing inside (much to my disappointment). But it had a pool table and dart board so was
perfect enough to get a few more drinks before calling it a night.
Sunday we were up again early
with the goal of going to the Italian side of the mountain to explore over
there. That’s right, Zermatt has both a
Swiss side and an Italian side….it’s quite big.
It took a while to trek over to that side and by the time we did, Nate
and I had a chance to do one “Italian” run.
Now we can technically say we’ve skied in Italy. We said goodbye to Stacey and Alex and
started making our way back to the Swiss side so we could catch our train
back. Sunday was definitely better
weather-wise. We got to ski on powder,
the light was slightly better and we got to get a glimpse of the Matterhorn! All in all a good day. I definitely feel like I need to go back
though to get better views. Perhaps
we’ll make our way back in summer time, which I’m sure would be fun as well,
where we’ll be guaranteed a view of the Matterhorn.
