Left home last Monday at 5:00 PM, Eastern time, arrived hotel at 2:00 PM European Time.

– Left sunny and warm, arrived cold and rainy
– Was fed lousy food on the plane
– Knit a lot and met lovely German tatting woman on the plane (see below)
– Worked long days and slept short nights until presentation on Thursday morning and ate pizza, Thai take-away, etc.
– Thursday afternoon, toured old Zurich city for about 2 hours
– Other than the one picture I posted looking out my hotel window, I took no pictures

Left Zurich Friday morning at 8:00 AM, arrived home at 8:30 PM

Travel
Business travel often sounds like a great thing to folks that don’t do a lot of it, but it is usually a long, arduous travel schedule, a lot of work, in an unfamiliar locale, with a different sleeping and eating patterns, and often very little time to enjoy the local flavor.

However, it does expose me to different cultures, for which I am forever grateful. I often pity the American who isn’t able to experience other countries, which usually results in an ethnocentricity that is very unattractive to folks in other countries.

As for my flying companion on the way to Zurich, she was a lovely German woman, who was quite pleased to be sitting next to a knitter. She didn’t knit, but she did some lovely tatting. She pulled out a spectacularly beautiful, fine linen handkerchief that she had tatted a simple, but exquisite lace border onto. Like Buffie, in comments, she also likes the color of the bedspread/coffin cover, and thought it would look quite fine over a nice Italian or Irish linen bed cover. I think I have changed my mind about the color, now that I can visualize it as she describes.

Current Knitting
As expected, long flights and waiting in airports allowed me to get quite a bit of knitting done.

At this point, I’ve completed about 20 inches, and I will need at least another 45 inches before I can consider the main section complete. Suffice it to say, I still have a long way to go.

Readers’ Comments/Questions
Regarding the trip to Zurich, Mel notes, “I’m with Carol on the chocolate thing, but I would also add a recommendation to go have some cheese fondue.”

Our one team dinner where we went out to a restaurant, was to a fondue place, where we had two big vats of cheese fondue for dinner. I’ve decided that, while I like cheese fondue, I would prefer it as an appetizer, rather than a dinner.

Regarding the bedspread, Barb B. asks, “It’s tough to see accurate colours due to monitors etc. Does it have that kind of orangey overtone so much brown alpaca has?”

No, the yarn has no orangey overtone at all. It’s much closer to coffee with just a touch of cream.

Hilde from Germany writes, “If you have some free time, you should try to get to the yarn shop “Hand-art” at Neumarkt 10, and of course to Caf´e Sprüngli!”

Thanks for both recommendations. Our brief tour of old city was with a large group, and surprisingly, not one of them wanted to go to a yarn store. But I did get to hang out in Caf´e Sprüngli and get some of the famous Swiss chocolatier’s wares.