Katzensee und Schifferstechen

At the restaurant playground

The other day I mentioned how, around here, it usually pays to ride a bus or tram route to its terminus, because there's almost always something interesting to be found.  Today we rode the 32 bus line, which stops just around the corner from our house, all the way to it's northernmost stop, a half-hour away.

There's actually not a lot at that final bus stop, but if you're willing to walk a little over a kilometer, you come to the Waldhaus Katzensee, THE BEST RESTAURANT EVER.  Well, that was Alex's opinion, at least.  Because not only did they have buttered noodles and ice cream on their menu, but they also had a large playground adjacent to the outdoor seating, with a bunch of coin-operated rides: those ubiquitous revolving swings, a little merry-go-round, and the fastest little electric cars that I ever did see. Seriously, they scooted. Here's a little snippet:

Joey slept through most of lunch, but we nudged him awake so that he could devour the noodles that Ella wouldn't deign to eat: once again, she fell victim to a heavy dose of chives thrown across her lunch plate, and she decided it was worth going hungry and giving up ice cream, even, to skip eating the nasty green things.  But it was Joey's gain.  I need to amend his motto: "Joey doesn't share food...unless it's someone else's."

Alex helped Joey out on the race track. It worked well
until Joey insisted on taking over gas-pedal duty....at
which point there were a series of crashes.

Coin-op crane, for digging in a pit of wine corks

And so after the boys had eaten their food (with kiddie meal platters ranging from "The Snoopy," or spaghetti and meatballs; to "The Simpsons" or two hot dogs and fries; to "The Tinky-Winky," also known as chicken nuggets) they got to run off and play, leaving Dennis and me to split a beer.  This parenting gig can be so easy sometimes.

We didn't get to see them, but somewhere, too, there were
(bug-)flesh-eating plants. Wicked!

After we exhausted our ride tokens, we took the kids for a walk through the woods behind the restaurant, up to the Katzensee (or "Cat Lake," to Alex's delight) beach.  I read that this is one of the warmest places to swim in the summer months and an excellent place to skate in the winter, because it is a small and shallow lake.  I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it warm, but it was so great for the kids: Alex was able to walk really far out, and the kids had a lot of fun spotting fish in the reedy edges. And there was a Spielplatz (Number 121) and a little sandy beach for digging.

Fortunately, with all these distractions, the kids didn't notice the little FKK (Freikörperkultur, or nudist) area off to the edge of the lake: it was pretty sheltered.  And so remained my children.

We swam until the kids were sufficiently sandy and chattery, and then we wandered back to the restaurant to ride the Dampfbahn, a little 1:6 scale model steam train, the tracks of which circle the restaurant grounds.  The kids and I sat right behind the conductor, and so we got to watch him shovel teeny-tiny pieces of coal from a tiny scuttle into a teeny-tiny, glowing-hot furnace. And then we were off for our teeny-tiny ride.  It reminded me quite a lot of the little trains running through the Holden Arboretum in Ohio.

The kids were huge fans, squealing when we went through a tunnel.  When we drove past a little model clock tower, with a chiming tower, Alex took the words right out of my mouth, exclaiming "Oh, well now, that's awfully cute."

It would have been reasonable to call it a day at that point, but there was a big to-do in Zürich this afternoon, so we stopped off downtown on the way home to witness a bit of the Schifferstechen festival.

The last time we saw those wacky guilds of Zürich (called Zünfte), they were parading through the streets of downtown for the Sechselauten parade.  Today they made an appearance once again, this time for an elaborate water jousting match in the Limmat river. I'd never heard of such a thing, but apparently this is an extremely old sport, performed in Europe since the middle ages.

Gotcha!

The Zürich guilds face off once a year on a stretch of the Limmat right in the middle of downtown Zürich. The representative competitors got all dressed up in their traditional guildwear (the smithies wearing long leather aprons, for example) and rowed out on their skiffs.

Two by two, they made their way into the middle of the river. After the fanfare of a small brass band, while one boat held still, the other road the current toward it and slo-o-o-owly, the jousters batting at each other with their poles. More often than not, they lost their balance before even being touched by their opponents.  But it was totally funny, and Ella really liked picking jousters to champion.

One of the city-operated water taxis

Funnily, whenever a water taxi came down the river, the guilds had to paddle quickly to the side of the river. No one, but no one, gets in the way of the Zürich public transportation system.  But one of the ferry operators showed his sense of humor and climbed on top of the glass roof of his ferry, pulling out a pole of his own, to a roar of approval from the crowd.

It was much to late, coming up on 5:00, by the time we crawled home. But Joey, although he'd been away from the house for about seven hours, still didn't want to go home: he instead was inspired tostay at the playground and practice one of the other obscure-but-oddly-popular-in-Switzerland sport, Steinstossen, hefting rocks in the five-pound range and heaving them into the stone heap in the playground.  I wonder what would happen if I gave him a lance.

I did tape a little video today: amusement for you, instructional for Joseph.