Helvetica
This may not be obvious to a non-European, but Confoederatio Helvetica is surprisingly not part of the EU; and so we had to do some additional fact checking with the Embassy. It turned out that while a visa wasn’t necessary, we were advised to carry our passports and our resident permits along.
The border check-post near Basel only checked our windshield-affixed Vignette1, and let us through. Currency is the other issue. Not all establishments accept Euros, or credit cards—we were informed. So the first thing we did, upon arriving at Winterthur, was to go a Western Union counter at the central train station, and convert some petty cash for use.
Zurich is no better than any other metro—perhaps only slightly better, when it comes to traffic. It was supposed to take us twenty minutes from Winterthur, but the weekday’s morning rush pushed us back by an hour.
And we just made it for our onward journey to the heartland.
- A kind of pre-paid annual toll-tax, for using Swiss highways. It’s a good thing I had ordered it for our car via the Swiss Travel System site. You could, of course, buy it at border crossing too—for 40CHF. [←]