Rickrolling, a History Lesson and...

The weekend has been quite eventful so far. Friday night, I met my english forum friends at Talacker, and, totally at random, we all got rickrolled. more information here. (For those who are to lazy to click the link; it means being confronted with the song "Never gonna give you up" by Rick Astley when you don't expect it, for example by clicking on a link that promises something completely different.) 

 (Talacker)

On Saturday, Christian and me made our way through some gems of Zurich, discovering gems within the gems. (Uh-huh?)

There was, first of all, the Markthalle at Viadukt, where we found all sorts of spices and a very friendly and helpful shop assistant at the pie stand. Now we got almost all the ingredients for our cocktail bitters together. 

(Btw: D-day for the creation of the bitters is set to next Wednesday, as we're still missing the most important ingredient, the "Feinsprit"; basically a very high class vodka, consisting of about 96% alcohol...(OM NOM NOM NOM *hicks*))

While looking up webpages to link to the blog, i found out that the project "Viadukt" itself has a pretty interesting story in the history of Zurich and so I decided to give you a summary. 

Built in 1894, it replaced the old and rather obstructive train-dams, which blocked any further expansion plans of the city and therefore had to be removed. And of course, in order not to make trains just fall down because there's a dam missing, they needed to build something less suffocating but still stable. And luckily, somebody came up with the brilliant and very ancient idea of building viaducts instead of massive dams and they managed to exchange those constructions so quickly that the trains didn't even realize they were running on different surfaces. Problem solved.

Source

The first businesses already established themselves in and around the construction, such as various quarrymen as well as a tropical fruit merchant.In 1980, the SBB wanted to enlarge the viaduct by 1-2 tracks to get a higher frequency in their train traffic. Unfortunately this would have meant for the people living around the viaduct that the trains would run past their houses at a distance of only 3 meters (which is about 9-10 feet). Naturally they started protesting. Under the name "Verrückt das Viadükt"(move the viaduct), they collected signatures and succeeded. 

The two resulting projects from this story are the Viadukt, which is a gathering of fancy cafes, independant shops and decent restaurants, and the Durchmesserlinie, the underground train station still being built underneath Zurich HB. 

(to be continued...)