Help me find interesting places to go near Zurich!

• Near Zurich, where should I go for weekend tourist trips? I'm working in Zurich for the next three months. I want to spend my weekends and a few vacation days being a tourist. My partner and I like charming towns with good hotels and restaurants, interesting and quirky local culture, and relatively quiet things. We're not big hikers and we're not big nightlife people. We're looking mostly for places within a few hours train ride from Zurich. I've travelled some in the region and like Zurich itself, Lugano (beautiful lakeside hotels), Interlaken (train to the Jungfrau, good tourist infrastructure), Strasbourg (great restaurants), Murten (cool walled town), Geneva (good restaurants, urban area). I'm curious about the Jura, Innsbruck, Lausanne, Bern, St. Moritz, Munich. Of course big cities like Vienna, Budapest, Paris, etc also appeal, but those seem to really require a plane ride.

• Answer:

  This will be long, my apologies :). I can wholeheartedly recommend Lausanne (I spent there nearly 6 years at graduate school), it's both a very nice place by itself (beats Geneva in any moment) and a good 'base' if you want to continue elsewhere. It's just around 2 hours by train from Zurich (and now they go like twice per hour). The best part is around the lake - a beautiful http://www.lausanne.ch/view.asp?DomID=62885 with Alps in the background. Take metro from the train station, direction down the hill, the last stop is port Ouchy. Then you can have a very nice walk in either direction. Eastwards you will (soon) finish at http://www.olympic.org/uk/passion/museum/home_uk.asp (not exactly my cup of tea, but there is a nice park around). About restaurants, there is a quite good one (with excellent view) called "Chateau d'Ouchy" in a place that looks like small castle, just left next to metro stop in Ouchy. Tip - get there 'filets de perche' (local fish from the lake). Another option is to walk up the hill from the train station and get lost in small streets in http://www.lausanne.ch/view.asp?DomID=62885 (for example, try to get to the cathedral, but without a map). Lausanne's topography is fun, it's fully 3D (built on hills which are now not obvious, covered with architecture and bridged in many places). Now, some extra trips from Lausanne. If you are already in Lausanne port, you can take a http://www.cgn.ch going to Evian. http://www.eviantourism.com/gb-galerie.html is a charming little town, known mainly for "Evian" bottled water, http://www.casino-evian.com and recently also because there was G8 summit. "Cruise" takes just over half an hour, it's fun by itself (and romantic if you are with your SO). Evian "feels" different than Switzerland (French food is way way better than Swiss). Bonus - if you already have a http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/en/reisemarkt/abonnemente/halbtax.htm (demi-tarif/halb-tax abo), it is valid also on boats. Special tip - in Evian they have excellent cakes, just stroll around the main street and get attracted by shop windows. Another place you could go to is http://www.montreux.ch/index_en.html (called Swiss Riviera). Jazz http://www.montreuxjazz.com/index_en.aspx is already over, but it's nice place anyway. There is no direct connection from Zurich, but it's under 3 hours even with a change in Lausanne. Or again, you could take a boat for more romantic travel. Near Montreux, there is also http://www.chillon.ch/en/index.html, the one that inspired Byron to write "Prisoner of Chillon". Bern was boring (for me). More generic - if you don't want to take plane, TGV fast trains are also quite fun way to travel to France (e.g. Paris), just from Zurich it would be quite long. Maybe you could go instead to Germany (nice trains there are called http://www.germanfortravellers.com/kultur/icetrain.html). For instance http://www.cvb-heidelberg.de/index_eng.html is rather close (~3.5 hours from Zurich with a good connection). It's nice historical university town. A very nice place to eat/drink there is Cafe Journal on the main street. BTW when planning trips in Europe by train, you can check Deutsche Bahn's http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en. I like it better than all other national ones, it has a pretty clean interface (just it bugs to enter age sometimes) and its database covers everything. Have a nice stay in Switzerland. I loved it there :).