Ali – This past weekend we had our first American houseguest. Our good friend, Flo, was a poor postdoc in Boston when we met her slaving away in a Harvard lab. She married an Italien guy with a Harvard MBA and moved to California where she is now a highly paid big pharma regulatory wiz. Her husband’s job involves looking good in skinny suits I think but I’m not totally sure. Anyway her company, Roche, flew her business class from California to Zurich for management training. At first blush this seems sort of ridiculous but I figure with all the rich bankers here, Zurich probably knows a thing or two about bossing people around.
Gustav! Dummkopf! Is my Lamborghini ready? Schnell, schnell!
Flo arrived Saturday morning fully rested and sponge-bathed from her business class overnight flight. Saturday we toured the city, which she confirmed looked like an old European city, and visited FIFA house, as it was open to the public for the Open House Zurich Day. I didn’t get a good picture of the corruption but here is Maya kicking a soccer ball.
Sunday, however, we decided Flo needed to experience some Swiss hiking. Maya had a play date so just the adults headed to Utliberg – which you will recall from an earlier post about the Swiss conspiracy to get rid of the world’s idiots – to find the mythical Utliberg tea Hütte.
We had been hearing about these tea Hüttes, which supposedly lay at various points off the trail. They offer local delicacies – soups, küchen, tarts, etc – made from ingredients that are brought up the mountain on the backs of hardy Swiss volunteers, or so the legend went. Our Google search for directions to one of these babies was relatively unproductive so we decided to just catch the Utliberg express with the other lame tourists and figured all would become clear. How hard could it be to find a hut on a mountain??
We hopped off a couple stops from the top and headed over to the trail map. There, alongside several trails, were symbols I have never before seen on a trail map: tea cups! 
Either Disney had opened several Mad Hatter spinning tea cup rides on Utleiberg (in which case we were going!) or we had found the tea Hüttes (in which case we were going!). So we took off along the trail with Flo using some borrowed trekking poles because we told her they were like crack for hikers. We hiked along for a while using the Force to feel our way there. But finally we started to doubt our Jedi skills and decided to ask the next 70 year old Swiss hiker who came our way. Of course we found one -70 year old Swiss hiker that is – within 10 minutes and asked auf Deutsch for directions. He did what most of the Swiss do when we speak to them in German – asked us if we would like to have the information in English or in German. Then he walked us back down the trail to the turn we missed (probably not convinced we could handle the directions in either language).
Shortly after, we arrived at the Jurablick tea hütte, which was tucked back in the woods at the end of a side trail. Walking up I had a brief thought that many fairytales involve unfortunate things happening in huts in the woods. ….but I really wanted a beer so….
Now blick means view in German and indeed this little Hütte was perched on the edge of an overlook that provided postcard panoramas 
We went inside and looked at the menu all in Swiss German, which meant that we have no idea if stewed lost hiker or foreign tourist soup were listed. I opted for a beer and chestnut cake with whipped cream. Joe and Flo went with the apple tart. 
We all agreed that this was the way to do hiking. The tea Hütte even offered the most luxurious outhouse I’ve ever seen
Back on the trail we hiked to the peak to get Flo a good view of Zurich and then headed back down. 
That night Flo treated us to dinner at the oldest continuously running vegetarian restaurant in the world, which is hard to believe given that Indians have been eating vegetarian food for quite a while and Swiss are sort of sausage and cheese people.