Day 24 and 25; Welcome to Zurich

Sorry for not posting yesterday, we are finding it hard to keep our phones charged.

The heat finally broke yesterday!! Which made for a much more pleasant biking experience. We biked about 125km from Solothurn to Zurich (with a brief stop in Baden for Doner Kebab). Upon arriving in Zurich, we learned that the campsite which Google Maps told us existed actually did not exist and forced us to call an audible.

We found another campsite and biked through Zurich fully loaded during rush hour, doing our best to avoid other bikers, people, trams, cars, and dogs. Thankfully the next campsite actually existed and so we set up camp in a tiny camping area surrounded by RVs and went to the local Denner to grab some food. Dinner was once again pasta as we continue our quest to save money.

The next morning we awoke and made a quick breakfast. Nate went into town to do some work and Mark and Matt waited for there friend Mike to arrive my train. He wandered in around 10:30 and after a half hour of listening to his tales (he's had some wild experiences) we set out to go to ETH Zurich, one of the most prominent technical universities in all of Europe and somewhere the Schulte's are thinking of going to grad school.

Side note: I don't have any pictures of the actual city but Zurich is really cool and a beautiful city. The older part of the city has some beautiful architecture and everything is really clean. Also, the public transport is phenomenal.

We made it the ETH Zurich and Mark was able to pinpoint the building which housed the embedded systems professor. We walked around looking at posters and even walked by the professor's office whose research we were interested in. We wanted to talk to him but didn't know what to say and so instead grabbed some lunch from a street cart.

Afterwords Mike decided it would be ridiculous if we didn't talk to at least someone and so we talked to the receptionist who directed us to the admissions office and we ended up talking with some student advisor about the Master and PhD program at ETH Zurich. The cost of the program, 520 CHF per semester, though the recommend setting aside 20,000 CHF per year for living expenses (did we mention its expensive here).

The guy was really helpful and answered a lot of our questions about the program, though he was a little to proud of ETH, but we'll let that go.

All the students are currently on break as they prepare for exams. It's a little different then in the states. They get about a month to study for exams. The advisor said the students study during this time but I doubt they spend all that time studying... Just a thought though.

After ETH we went swimming back at campsite and met up with Nate for dinner. Mike introduced us to a website called WikiTravels in which anyone can write about places to visit anywhere. That's how we found our restaurant. We all order what we've been told is a traditional Swiss dish. I wish I remembered the name for it, but it was basically veal in some mushroom soup. It was delicious.

Now we're back at the camp prepping for our train day tomorrow. Mike is heading to Heidelberg where I think we will meet up with him again before he continues his travels to Amsterdam and then Denmark.

We aren't taking the train all the way to Heidelberg but instead will be making it there in a couple of days. Our wallets are excited to make it out of Switzerland though!