Nai-Nai's walk in the woods

Day 2 of Nai-Nai's visit and we woke to partially cloudy skies.  We knew this was probably the best day of week locally and were trying to decide where to go on a day trip.  Basel for the zoo?  Luzern and the Swiss Transport Museum?  But when the bits of blue sky kept appearing, I decided to call Zürich Daddy Geek to see if the top of the Uetliberg was visible.  It was and when I mentioned that option to Little Geek Girl, she was insistent that we go up there.

After the trolley and tram ride to the Zürich Hauptbahnhof we went downstairs to look for the ZVV office on the lower level.  However, they're doing construction and the office had moved.  Even though there was a map, we couldn't find it (turns out it was on the intermediate level).  No worries, we wanted to pick up Nai-Nai's Half Fare Card, but that could wait until after our adventure in the woods.

We took the S10 up to the Uetliberg stop.  LGG wanted to show Nai-Nai the playground.  She also managed to fly off the slide and land on her rear, but fortunately we had put some rain pants on her to protect her clothes from the snow.  We then walked up to the top to show Nai-Nai the view.  It wasn't completely clear, but clear enough that we could see the Alps.  We decided to climb the observation tower.  When we started up the tower, we had noticed that they had started to cordon off the area, but no one stopped us from going up.  It was windy at the top and LGG had a little too much fun cleaning the snow off the bars of the guard rail.  On our way down we passed two policeman and a guy carrying a tool chest.  After we came down from the tower they closed access.  There were more policeman standing around looking up, and when we turned around, we saw the guy climbing up the tower.  Perhaps doing maintenance work?

We went back down the hill to the turn off to continue the Planet Walk.  (You pass the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and the Earth and then you have to decide whether to go up the hill to see the view or turn down to continue the planet walk.  From the hill there are a set of stairs that you can take down, but then you miss Mars and Ceres and those stairs are also steep and no fun covered in snow).  We continued on to Saturn, about a mile away.  We would have like to continue on all the way to Pluto, but LGG was moving slowly and complaining about her pants not staying up, so we decided it was wise to turn around.  

We took the train back down to the Hauptbahnhof and stopped at the Marche restaurant for lunch.  We went to the main ticket office to buy Nai-Nai's half fare card and then we walked along Bahnhofstrasse to the "fancy toy store" (Franz Carl Weber).  LGG took the dragon slide down to the lower level and met us there.  We explored two out of the four floors and then we stopped off next door at Confiserie Honold to pick up some treats for after dinner.  We took the tram/trolley back to our neighborhood, showed Nai-Nai the local grocery store, and then went home to rest and cook dinner.

Nai-Nai's observations on our adventure in the woods:  She thought it was beautiful, serene, and she really liked the whistle of the S10.  The whistle made her realize that she really was in Switzerland.

Back on the home front, ZDG called a couple cleaning companies to make appointments for getting quotes.  Cleaning an apartment for move-out to exacting Swiss standards is more than I want to deal with right now, so this is definitely something we plan to outsource.  Yesterday I received a call from England requesting an appointment for a viewing next week.  That suggests that the advert was still on the internet yesterday (the agency is in charge of the internet advert - which is nice because we don't have to pay for it).  However, the advert is not longer posted today, so that gives us hope.