Zurich and Lucern

Photographs of Zurich and Lucerne, Switzerland, May 1st 2001 by Martin Sullivan (26 pictures, 793 KBytes, approximately 6 minutes download time at typical modem rates, 2.5K/s).

This is Stuff, off-topic and possibly ephemeral.

Martin Sullivan writes ...

I was working a contract in Zurich and on the 1st of May in Switzerland, it's a public holiday. There was supposed to be some kind of demo-march so I decided to head for the hills and play the tourist. As an experiment and not considering myself a photographer, I took an elderly 35mm camara with me and I also had this weird Action Sampler camera, which had a few shots left in it. Not all the pictures came out, naturally, but here's a selection. The originals, by the way, are on a Photo-CD and if you want a copy, e-mail me. Be warned though, they're big (500K each).

The window in my hotel bedroom. Actually I was just winding the film on, having just loaded it, but it took a picture. This is with at weird Action Sampler camera, so it's art. The Action Sampler is a mucho-cheapo nasty plastic thing in gaudy colours with four lenses that takes four pictures, one after the other extremely quickly, all in under a second.

View from the corner of "Herring Street", I'm in the hotel annex which is above the Raclette restaurant.

The actual hotel is in Neiderdorfstrasse, which is lined with bars, and in the evening, half-cut students.

The river Lamat looking from Bahnhof Bridge toward the lake.

Zurich's main railway station. The front bit is a large empty space where they hold exhibitions and the like, the trains are further back. Under the station there's an extremely large shopping centre. It must have been an impressive hole in the ground when they were building it. There'd normally be any number of trams in-front of the station, but this was the 1st of May and they were were not running in anticipation of the parade/march.

Since Zurich's town centre was closed for the 1st May parade I decided to make my way down to Lucern and do touristy things. The train passed where I'm working so I had a go with the Action Sampler.

I finished off the roll in the Action Sampler taking this photo of Lucern's railway station.

Coming out of the railway station in Lucern arrives directly at the water front of Lucern's lake.

Lucern's lakeside waterfront.

Lucern is famous for its wooden medieval bridges. There are actually two of them, this is one.

This is actually the same bridge from a different angle.

This is a weir on Lucern's river. There were, once any number of watermills, but now a small fero-concrete power station (not pictured) generates electricity.

The entrance to one of the wooden bridges. The inside is decorated with religious paintings of some antiquity and more modern exhortations not to smoke.

One one side of the city a fragment of the medieval defences in the shape of a massive curtain wall and some towers still exist. The walk up to the ramparts is past some very impressive villas, a posh bit of town with lots of little signs telling you the way to the towers and that their paths are private.

A clearer view of one of the Towers.

Once on top of the wall, and one could walk from tower to tower, impressive views of Lucern are afforded. I did a panoramic bunch of shots and may in time "photoshop" them together.

OK, bored with the town and onto the lake, largish ferries run across and around the lake to various touristy little towns. I elected to stay on the ferry for the duration of its round-trip.

Ship ahoy, passin' a starbord, me maties.

All the ships on the lake, except for the stone barges, had large Swiss flags, in case we ran into a foreign port and didn't know where we were.

Returning to Zurich and, slightly disappointedly, not finding it wrecked by anti-capitalist riots it was back to work on the 2nd. The daily grind. Here we see ETH students queuing for the Polybahn, a small fenuncular railway that takes them to their studies. Ey, but we had it tough, in Leeds, we had ta' walk.

Here's another one of those Action Sampler photographs, this time of the PolyBahn in action.

And I'm off in a tram to work.