Züri-Fäscht

This past weekend there has been a huge celebration in Zürich that only happens once every 3 years. It's called Züri-Fäscht and it's basically just a big party thrown by Zürich to celebrate being Zürich, as far as I can tell. It is quite obvious from the event that Zürich has no shortage of money.

It happened to coincide with the World Cup this year, which made it even bigger and better. We met up with about 10 of Martin's friends from his lab group to watch the Germany-Argentina game on a big screen by the lake and then wandered around for the rest of the evening taking in the festivities. It's a good thing Germany won because several of Martin's labmates are German and they would have been in really bad moods otherwise.

Of course we went to Züri-Fäscht yesterday but did not bring the camera as there were huge crowds and we didn't feel safe having the camera while in large crowds watching soccer games. But we took a couple of pictures with our cell phone. Both are of Tom, one of the postdocs in Martin's group. Tom likes to drink girly drinks and we decided to capture a few of his drinks on film. Don't even ask how much these drinks cost! It's easy to go broke having a few drinks in Zürich. And I'll admit, I was also sucked into buying one of the margaritas there because I wanted an orange lei and the fun tall cup. But the drink itself was not so great. Not surprising.



This second picture is where we watched the soccer game from ... so yes we got to stand around on those rubber mats for hours on end in 90+ degree weather yesterday. Good thing there was plenty of cold water and beer around!




So this entire weekend is filled with air shows, fireworks, carnival rides, a lot of bands playing all over Zürich, huge crowds (supposedly 2 million people visit Zürich for the event) and lots and lots of good food. None of which we ate because we were too busy watching soccer and wandering around. But it all smelled really good! And the air shows were really impressive. They went on all afternoon right up until sunset (which is around 10pm here right now). Some of the shows had helicopters, some had really old planes, and some had military planes. What I thought was pretty cool was that the helicopters took part in the fireworks show and shot off fireworks from the air while there were fireworks being set off from the ground simultaneously. But, like I said, Zürich has no shortage of money!