The hotel itself was one of the friendliest and nicest I’ve been in for a long while. It was just big enough to be professional but still small enough that it felt family run with attentive and helpful reception staff who went out of their way to make my stay pleasant.
The rooms were nicely furnished and spotlessly clean and spacious enough to stretch out in or to set up the computer for work. If in Zurich in business you can get access to the Internet through a Wifi connection. My only gripe though, is that it is a third-party provider that charges a rip-off price of about 30 CHF for 24 hours. I don’t see why hotels don’t just stick in a couple of wireless routers and make free Internet access a perk of the hotel. So many do these days that when travelling on business I often choose the hotel purely on that basis because paying an inflated rate for something that is free down the road at the McDonalds just irks me.
Right out the front of the hotel is lovely little square that really gives a feeling for Zurich’s old town. And out the back is another square, this one semi-enclosed and leading down to the river. On the Saturday that I was there, the square filled up with hippies selling everything from scarves and jewellery to massage balls and incense. It was a great and festive feeling. I sat outside drinking a beer and drinking in the atmosphere as the market people played on guitars and packed up for the evening.
Downstairs in the front of the restaurant is the Restaurant Swiss Churchi. The smell of melted cheese from all the fondues going on was a bit overpowering, and truth be told it seeped all the way up to the second floor of the hotel, but the food was great. I had a fantastic salmon risotto one evening and an excellent pasta dish another.
There is also no shortage of things to do in Zurich. The shopping is fantastic, although every third shop seems to sell camping gear and hiking boots (the Swiss do love their mountains) and, needless to say, it was impossible to miss the touristy shops selling Swiss Army Knives.
The main museum has a great section on Swiss history with a fascinating display on immigration and ethnicity that takes a poke at the fact that in the 1930s even the Swiss became obsessed by the racialism of the period and tried to determine (by measuring the skulls of army recruits) whether they classified as a race of unique alpine people.
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