|
|
|
woo-woo buffet with fondue
Monday, November 3 2025
location: somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
When I next awoke, the plane was either nearing Europe or was already over it, so there was only an hour or two of discomfort left. But I was feeling uncomfortable and had difficulty finding a posture to make an aching in my left lower rib cage go away. I think the enconomy seats on Swiss Air flights are particularly small, which isn't a problem when you're zonked out on ambien. But once you awaken and have to account for the unhealthy posture you'd been stuck in for hours, there's a price to be paid.
As usual when landing in Europe, the immigration process was quick and painless, and before long we'd caught a local tram from the airport to our hotel. (Unlike in the United States and in less-developed countries, airports in Europe are supplied with great ground transportation options, many of which can be used for free even if one is expected to pay. When we got to our hotel, the Hotel Adler, the nice woman at the desk told us our room had been upgraded. Maybe all guests get told this, but our room really was very nice and even had a bathtub (which hotel rooms rarely have) which I was sure to use later.
Gretchen had high hopes of immediately striding into Zürich so as to maximize the one full day we'd be spending there. But the moment we got into our room, we stretched out on the bed and both fell into a deep sleep, one that lasted at least a couple hours. When you've been in a tiny airplane seat for over six hours, nothing is as delicious as a proper bed.
When we next awoke, Gretchen announced that she was off to explore the city. I always opt out of such initial sorties, which is probably for the best, because I'm not a fun companion when I'm sleepy and cranky. But I didn't go back to sleep; instead I took a nice hot bath that lasted for most of the time Gretchen was out.
When Gretchen returned, I was ready to go our with her. So off we went, down the orderly streets of Zürich. At some point I joked, "Bad things have probably happened here, but I don't know what they are."
Gretchen had done her research and had two options for dinner. One was a vegan doner place (that is, Turkish kabob) and, on the way there, a woo-woo vegan buffet place called Vegelateria. Neither of us are fans of woo-woo in our dining experiences, but it being the closer option gave it an advantage in our jet-lagged state. We walked in and looked around, and immediately the older gentleman running the place started luring us in by giving us samples of various things like vegan cheeses, bread, and kombucha, some of which had been made at the restaurant's off-site production facilities. Gretchen was also interested in the fact that Vegelateria can do vegan fondue. (I'm not that into fondue, but Gretchen is always excited by dishes her vegan diet normally forbids that suddenly are available in vegan form.) As we were sampling his food, the gentleman kept saying crazier (or, perhaps, woo-ier) things. As a way of driving home the point about how healthy the food (particularly the sauerkraut) is, he casually mentioned that it was good to counteract the negative effects of vaccines, a bit of salesmanship that must've worked with eat-pray-love types in the past. Of course, we don't care much about the healthiness of the food we eat, particularly at restaurants, and we sure as shit don't believe any of the woo-woo nonsense about vaccines that somehow got an appreciable fraction of the left to vote for Donald Trump. Another goofy thing the gentleman said was that he expects to live 200 years in this particular body before transitioning to another one. That's not the kind of crazy most people will reveal within the first twenty minutes of meeting someone, and it really said something about the kind of customer that Vegelateria attracts.
Despite all that, we decided to stay to do the buffet and have a small order of fondue. Normally when there is a buffet, it's possible to select a set of foods that closely matches one's preferences, and that would've been the case at Vegelateria were it not for the fact that we had to choose all our food up front and then weigh it so as to know what to pay. It was possible to taste little samples as we were loading our plates, but that was a little awkward. When Gretchen weighed her plate, her food came to about a pound. Mine came to about a kilogram, or twice as much.
The food was okay, though not great, and some of it needed salt. As for the fondue, I found myself liking it more than expected, and we managed to eat nearly all of it in addtion to the buffet food. As we ate, we looked around at the other customers, most of whom had come there to eat there by themselves (which seemed weird). The restaurant had been decorated with a statue of some Indian guru named Sri Chinmoy smiling with a creepy beatific expression. The restaurant also featured several of Chinmoy's paintings, which were all abstract, featured bright clasing colors, and looked to have been painted with body parts. They were all labeled at the bottom with cloyingly unoriginal slogans such as "Love the children" and "Imagine and dream the world peace dream." As Gretchen observed when I drew her attention to these paintings, "That's the kind of thing someone makes when nobody ever gives them helpful feedback."
When we settled up before leaving, the bill for our food came to about $150, which is pretty normal for a meal in Switzerland at the current exchange rate (which makes the Swiss franc worth about the same as a British pound). The weird gentleman agreed that things are expensive in Switzerland, but noted that not too long ago, the Swiss franc was worth only about a quarter of an American dollar. This had me wondering if perhaps the sanctions imposed on Russia and the ongoing kleptocratic excesses in America were forcing a lot of money into the Swiss economy, inflating its currency.
On the walk back to the hotel, we stopped for a drink at a cute little bar Gretchen had found called Bar Le Philosphe. We sat at a little table near the end of the bar and each of us had something boozy. In my case it was absinthe, since that was definitely the vibe of the place. The bartender said he couldn't give me the full absinthe experience, but he gave me the components of drink to mix however I wanted. This included a sugar water and a very strong absinthe that turned white on contact with water. Meanwhile we could hear a group of drinkers in an adjacent room speaking mostly European-accented English (the lingua franca, for now at least).
As usual for our first night in Europe, we went to bed early. But then we later awoke in the middle of the night. We decided to both take ambien in an effort to push our internal clocks more towards the timezone we were in. [REDACTED]
Ducks in a lamp-lit river in Zürich. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen in Vegelateria with some of Sri Chinmoy's paintings. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251103 feedback
previous | next |
