Dolder Whatever

Today Reto and I went to see the newly renovated Dolder Grand (a big fancy schmancy hotel on a hill overlooking Zurich). Apparently they have been spending a fortune over the last 4 years to shiny the place up, and yesterday, today and tomorrow there are open days where for the mere price of queueing quite a bit you can have a gander around all over the place.

We arrived at the Dolderbahn (the wee train that takes you up the hill to the hotel) at about 2.30pm and the queueing began. The train, which comes by every 10 minutes or so, was just at the end of being packed completely full of people (average age - about 65, I think. Which is fair enough given that it was a workday, and who but retired people and the odd slacker layabout has time to spare to gawk at hotels on a weekday?) so we waited for the next one with an ever-increasing throng of people. We got in the next train (packed in like sardines. If you'd collapsed you wouldn't have actually fallen over we were that tightly wedged in) and moments later came across the next throng of people that we had to queue amongst.

They were letting groups of people into the hotel every 10 minutes or so, so there was quite the crowd waiting outside to get in. Fortunately it was a nice day, and what with the apparent Swiss inability to queue in an orderly or organised fashion, we only ended up waiting outside for about half an hour (in which time I suspect I may have got a little bit sunburnt, which is completely ridiculous). In we went, and around we wandered.

It was a bit ordinary. Well, obviously it was actually really lavish and fancy and there were all sorts of cool designerish chandeliers and interesting wall-substitutes (by which I actually mean these hanging metallic beady things, the poor cousin of which you would see in studenty flats, but here they were in the bars and they were quite shiny and flash) and things made of marble and so on. There were also pools and gyms and "wellness" areas and of course fancy rooms and suites and luxury grand suites and so on, but really ... it all seemed a bit desperately overdone, and there was far too weird and non-cohesive a mix of old stuff (gargoyles and hideous colour schemes and olden days wallpaper) and new stuff (the hangy beady walls and newfangled lighting). And then later I read somewhere that apparently the cheapest room is something like 560 chf a night, and the most expensive is 14 000 chf a night. Which is obviously insane. Why would you want to spend that much money to stay somewhere that is jarringly decorated and inconveniently located? Of course it did have a rather lovely view over the city, and if you were inclined to spend all your time spending all your money, playing golf, being massaged and feeling confused it might be super. If not, perhaps not so much.