steinach

This week I had the wonderful opportunity to see a little bit of the Swiss countryside. At least that's how my boss sold it to me when he let me know that I would be working on a client out of town. The client is located in Steinach, which is on the lake on the Swiss/German/Austrian border. It takes almost 2 hours by train from Zurich. So I had my first Swiss train experience. I managed to make it on the right trains and not get lost which is always a plus. The Swiss pride themselves on their trains ALWAYS being on time. And you really can set your watch to the train time. We stayed in the cutest hotel in the next village over from Steinach, Arbon. There were four members of the team (3 from Zurich and 1 from Basel) that stayed overnight all week, the other two commuted from Zurich for the couple days they came out to the client.

Although I've still never been to Germany or Austria, at least I can say I've now seen them!

 As you can see, there were lots of sailboats on the lake. I took these pictures earlier in the week when it was still a little rainy. Thursday and Friday were really nice and the weekend is going to be nice as well.

As I said earlier, the hotel (Hotel Wunderbar) was really cute. I don't really know how to describe it but "cute" is definitely the word that comes to mind. There were only about 10 rooms, so it had a bed and breakfast feel to it. The decorations were very unique - from the big spoon outside to the natural foosball table. There was a pet bunny that liked to hang out in the garden outside my room. And the food at the hotel restaurant was really fresh and delicious! The four of us had a great time getting to know each other and talking about our cultural differences. One girl is from the french-speaking part of Switzerland, another from Bern (the Swiss-German speaking part), and the guy just transferred from Poland. His German is much better than mine and at times when the girls were trying to help me translate menus, we would resort to Lise translating it into French and then if I understood it then I would teach them the English word. One way or another we made sure I knew what I was eating!