One of my favorite parts of going on a trip is that moment, when you are finally deep enough in, to start evaluating and ranking the experiences you’ve had on the trip. This seems to happen every time my family travels. At some point, either my dad or I (along with my fastidious love of a clean kitchen counter, I definitely inherited this tendency toward vigorous nostalgia from my dad) will pose the question to those around the dinner table. “So,” we’ll say. “What have the highlights of the trip been?”
I actually think this little exercise is a useful thing to keep in your back pocket, for a few reasons. One is that you’re basically creating a verbal gratitude list on the fly, and every self-help guru ever will tell you that gratitude lists are good for your well-being. Two is that, by talking about them, you’re helping yourself encode those memories and therefore retrieve them more easily in the future. (I’m not a scientist and that is probably not actually how memory works. Whatever!) Three is that it helps to fill the conversation at the point in the trip when you have possibly run out of things to talk about. Andrew and I spent two weeks in South Africa for our honeymoon several years back, two weeks of breakfasts and lunches and dinners, just the two of us, and I can promise you that, however much you love your partner or your family, you will, at some point, run out of things to talk about.
So in honor of this family tradition, I’m sharing with you some of the highlights from my recent trip to Switzerland. I take a lot of pleasure from zooming in on the micro-details (I’m a novelist, after all!), and I also take a lot of pleasure from organizing and sorting things, so I’ve decided to present these as highly specific superlatives. This is how I tend to remember my travels: there’s the overall impression left by a place, of course, but the impression is rooted that really excellent cup of coffee, that sunny afternoon in the park, that restaurant you wandered into because it was the only place open.
Best lunch, upscale. I met a friend for lunch in Zurich at Sprungli. She’s a Zurich local, and she had picked the restaurant, describing it as a popular place with finance types and ladies-who-lunch types. I was picturing something kind of like the Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue, and that isn’t a totally misplaced comparison. Sprungli was very chic, very correct. I ordered the asparagus because the asparagus was in season. It was elegant and delicious. The restaurant is on the second floor (or first floor, if we’re being European about it) and we sat by a window overlooking the Banhofstrasse. I arrived a few minutes before my friend and got to enjoy some very good people-watching and tram-watching. On the first floor (or, fine, the ground floor) there’s a chocolate shop, chocolate being what Sprungli is most famous for, so you are basically required to stop for a post-lunch dessert.
Best lunch, casual. One day in Geneva my dad and I went for a long walk through the Petite-Saconnex area, where the UN and other various NGOs are housed. It was a Sunday, so the UN was closed. The neighborhood as a whole felt extraordinarily quiet, like all of the diplomats were out of town, back in their home countries. We’d been walking for a long while, and it was getting on lunchtime. We were in an area with very few restaurants, but there was this one place, right across the street from the U.S. Mission, that was open and was serving lunch. It was called Le Tie-Break, and it was really more of a snack bar appended to a tennis club. (My sense is that the tennis club is frequented by the expats and diplomats in the area.) We walked in, two non-tennis-playing American tourists, and perhaps the waiter was a bit baffled by our presence, but he was nice about it. We had cheeseburgers overlooking the clay courts. It was perfect.
Best jet lag remedy. Our first day in Zurich, fresh off the plane from New York, we were absolutely whacked from the redeye. The hotel room wasn’t ready yet, so, unable to nap, we wandered out in search of caffeine and food. The hotel directed us toward John Baker, a very mod-ish cafe, and it was a great recommendation. When you’re jetlagged and underslept, and you don’t really know where you are, or what day it is, but then you take a sip of that coffee, and you take a bite of that pain au chocolat—praise be! Maybe it doesn’t cure your jet lag, but it definitely helps. John Baker was so good that it became a repeat visit for us. A few days later I went back for their cardamom bun, which was a 10/10.
Best dining room. Continuing the theme of the jetlagged first day, our first dinner in Zurich was at Kronenhalle. This restaurant, I learned, is a Zurich institution. It’s been around forever, and is old-school and well-known enough to have merited mention in John Le Carre’s The Night Manager, which I was reading on that trip (if you’re traveling, I highly recommend theming your reading to your destination; I’m a nerd, sorry!). The food was great (wiener schnitzel, more of that spring asparagus), but the elegance of the dining room might have been the best part: the dark wood walls, the crisp white tablecloths, the spectacular art collection. I was almost falling asleep in my wiener schnitzel, but even with that, I managed to be enchanted.
Best intellectual rabbit hole. Have you guys heard of the Protestant Reformation? Oh, you have? Well, yeah, okay, fine, but have you found yourself thinking about the Reformation every single day, and have you read every single Wikipedia entry about it?? Oh, you haven’t? Because you have better things to do with your life, I suppose? Well, yes, you almost certainly do. Fair point. But a girl can’t help the things she gets obsessed with! As we wandered through the old churches of Zurich and Geneva, the places where those ideas first began to circulate, I found myself thinking, like actually thinking, about the Reformation for the first time. And I found myself thinking about all of the ripple effects of it, and now I find myself wanting to learn more and more about it. I recently borrowed a twelve-hundred-page book from a friend that promises to shed some light on the subject. I have absolutely no idea where this will take me, but I have learned that one of the better things you can do for yourself, in this life, is to follow your curiosity wherever it happens to lead you, even if the direction seems random. See you guys whenever I emerge from this thing, probably in like 2030.
Best view. If you take the train between Zurich and Geneva, make sure you get a seat on the southeast side of the train, which will give you the most spectacular view over the countryside and lakes and mountains. (The southeast side? Lol. My dad explained to me the port side vs. starboard side, and if I remembered that, I would say it here, but I don’t! No need to remind me, I will just forget it again.) The landscape is stunning! As pretty as the postcards. I had somehow failed to anticipate just how present the natural beauty would be. On my next trip to Switzerland I would love to spend some time in the mountains.
Best dessert. On our last night in Geneva, which was also our last night of the trip, we had the loveliest dinner at the Living Room restaurant (part of the Ritz hotel). We sat at a table overlooking Lac Leman, hoping that the clouds would clear up so that we could get a view of Mont Blanc. The clouds never did clear, but nevertheless, the meal was wonderful. But the dessert, if I’m being honest, is what is going to stick with me. I’ve had plenty of molten chocolate cakes in my life, and this particular molten chocolate cake wasn’t seeking to reinvent the wheel, but I think that’s what I loved about it so much. It just was what it was. Like a really good burger, or a really good slice of pizza, or a really good Agatha Christie novel: you know what you’re getting, and there is something nice about that. That said, the chocolate itself was from Philippe Pascoet (a high-end local chocolatier), and it was filled with salted caramel, and it came with a vanilla bean ice cream that was noteworthily delicious on its own, and the temperature and melt factor was just right, so this was definitely a molten chocolate cake that was on its game. The cake was a good reminder that you don’t always need to dazzle someone in order to make them happy. Sometimes you can just be yourself.
The last thing I’ll mention, before I leave you! I wrote a review of Kim Sherwood’s new novel, Double or Nothing, for the Washington Post. Double or Nothing is a James Bond novel (or, more accurately, a novel that expands the James Bond canon), and I had a lot of fun thinking and writing about the ways in which women are establishing an increasing presence for themselves in this world of spy fiction, both as characters within these stories and authors of these stories.