Zurich to Milan

We caught a 7:15 am train from Zurich to Milan - 4 hours up and over the Alps.

I was very excited for this ride as its on of the worlds most scenic routes, and next year it will be largely bypassed by the 35 mile long Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) which has taken 20 years to build.

Here's our route

Here's a detail of the best part. The current short tunnel in yellow; GBT in red. Blue circles indicate spiral tunnels; the route is so steep and narrow that they made these to gain altitude in a short distance

Ready to depart at 7am. Despite my teasing pics of Bee sleeping, when it's time to go she always rallies and is often ready before me

Sunrise over the Zurichsee 

 Nap time :)

Bee got me back! Here's Dave on the (any) train. If you look closely you might see a bit of drool on the window :)

The ticket guy was pretty severe, kicking people out of first class and chastising them for being in the wrong seat. He said "I hate international trains". We were in the right car/seat, so we got off easy. Interestingly, this was the only train so far that they checked tix. They also made an announcement about border control checking passports, but when the Italian border cops walked thru they didn't ask any white people for ID

The south eastern end of Lake Lucerne

At a small station I saw a middle school aged field trip. Just like in the U.S.: girls waiting quietly and patiently, boys rough housing and comparing knives

As we head south the valley narrows and the peaks get higher

In Erstfeld you pass the northern portal of the GBT. Lots of construction activity

As you climb, the road parallels the twists turns and tunnels. The GBT will move most transport from trucks on this road to high speed train

All along thee are beautiful Alpine plateaus and villages. People live here just as they have for hundreds of years (but they have cars and Internet)

Town way up on the ridge

The town of Wassen. It sits between two spiral tunnels, and we passed that church three times: eastbound below it, northbound next to it, then southbound above it. In the pic you can see the middle track

Near the summit tunnel the valley gets very narrow.

Then you go through the summit tunnel for about 10 minutes and pop out in Airolo, Italy. On this end the valley is much wider

More sights: in Quinto there's a funicular way up the mountain. There's a lake up there and those are hydro power pipes to the right of the tracks

There are still plenty of twists and turns on this end. In the distance, just south of Quinto, there's a narrow canyon thru which both the road and tracks pass, and we went thru a spiral tunnel to lose altitude

The valley continues to widen, and other large valleys join ours. This is Biasca; the southern portal of the GBT is near here

Still plenty of Alpine excitement! Waterfalls cascade down the steep cliffs all along the line

And many granite quarries as well

At Bellinzona the new GBT tracks head due south while our tracks climb the mountainside then go thru a pass to Lugano; here's Lake Lugano

Across the lake is the town of Campione d'Italia - looks amazing

Time for a snack! Bee is in Italy eating a Swiss sandwich to which she added cheese from Germany

Milan station

The main concourse is beautiful

We took the metro to our hotel. It was very clean, and there were police on board. Is this just how Milan does it, or are they just putting on a show for all the Expo visitors?

On the 2 block walk to the hotel, we saw this - workmen winching a wheelbarrow up 6 floors. Hope they used strong rope

And that's it for our travels. After checking in we visited Expo 2015, which deserves its own blog entry 

Expo

Expo 2015 (formerly known as the World's Fair) just happened to be in Milan this year. Since we've somewhat had our fill of cathedrals, castles, and museums, we decided to do something different and see Expo. We arrived at about 2pm; it's open til 11.

Expo is on the eastern side of the city, and the metro station is this huge underground thing that extends to the Expo entrance. Ticket offices are in that space; there's room to accommodate huge crowds, but it was nearly empty when we were there.

A couple hundred yards later is the entrance. Again, no crowds

The theme of this Expo is food - lots of buzzwords like "feed the planet" and "sustainability" and "water resources". It's all pretty fluffy and somewhat shallow like an 8th grade science fair exhibit, but that's what Expo is anymore. Nothing like "world's first Ferris wheel" or Nikola Tesla demonstrating his newly invented AC electricity generators. Those days are long gone. Now It's really sort of like EPCOT, and the real attraction is the event and architecture.

And, for an event focused on food, I expected more samples. Seriously - almost no one gave out free samples, it was all €3 for this and €5 for that. Boooo!

The venue is organized as a half-mile-long covered walkway with buildings on either side. Without the cover, the sun would be unbearable. The distance is hard to capture - it took us 3 hours to walk the right-hand side (including seeing exhibits)

Many countries have their own building, but some smaller countries are grouped by their main food product. Here's the Basmati pavilion - 6 or 8 countries that produce basmati rice

And Guatemala inside the coffee pavilion

And in front of Ethiopia, also in the coffee pavilion

Azerbaijan had its own building, with a cool two story tree thing

Spain gets my vote as most creative. They have a room with dinner plates on the walls and ceiling onto which they project video. It's all aligned so they can show stuff on individual plates or use them as a mosaic

Here's a mosaic.

The floor is plexiglas with backlight plates under it, thus all 6 surfaces are animated

Great Britan has this very cool metal hive-like thing that you can go up and inside. It lights up at night

There's also a building called "the Supermarket Of The Future". This is where you see futuristic things like a robot arm selecting an apple for you. It is a working supermarket, but I can't imagine who would by, say, ground beef in the middle of Expo

I thought it was all sort of lame until you see this at the exit. You can send stuff home - now I get it! Bee said that she saw & mentioned this at the entrance but Iissed it because was too busy criticizing the apple robot

At a couple places they had these fun chairs. They're plastic, and you can rotate them in circles. When you lean back it feels like you'll fall over backward, so it takes a bit to gain trust. Bee got really good at it. Everyone who does it laughs the whole time 

Somewhere in the middle was this place that didn't seem to have a country affiliation, but made for a fun pic

Slovenia had its own building, and they featured skis by Elan, the Cosby that invented the now-ubiquitous side it ski. What that has to with food I don't know BUT they had both Dave-era and Bee-era skis

They also had an Oculus VR headset with which you could visit many locations throughout their country. I'd never used one before and it was amazing! Look up and down, spin around, etc - it felt like you were! It was sort of disorienting to take them off - it took about 15 seconds for your brain to realize that you are at the Expo, not on a hilltop in XXXX

Austria had a fun walk-thru path with high-banked plants and mist sprayers. Honestly felt like you were out in the cool forest 

And then we happened upon McDonalds

The Russia pavilion had samples - free vodka shots! We both had one (Bee's 1st taste of vodka) and I wish I had made a movie of it. Take the shot, wait about 3 seconds then her eyes got big and she started coughing, then said "wow - that'll put hair on your chest!"

The U.S. Pavilion was LAME. Lots of red, white, and blue, but nothing interesting inside, and only one guy inside was American. WTF? For actual food, out back was a small asphalt parking lot with food trucks themed as "Food Truck Nation". The U.S. effort is embarrassing - I could do better!

In the small Senegal venue they did henna tattoos

The Kuwait pavilion had really cool computerized water messages. Water would pulse out of the top to form backlight words. This pic is of water drops falling with gravity. Cooler still was when they "wrote" words in Arabic.

New Holland (farm equipment mfr) had a display. Bee sat in the drivers seat of this HUGE combine

And finally, the Brasil pavilion with its enormous walk-on net.

All in all, Expo was a fun thing to visit. As Bee said, I can't imagine coming more than once, but once was good.

Tomorrow we take our final train trip to the French Riviera