One of my favorite things about Switzerland is that it is a small country, with cities of different cultures, connected by very good public transportation. This makes traveling for the weekend exceedingly easy. Switzerland is divided into 3 main cultural areas; the German region, the French region, and the Italian region. Each of these areas speaks a different primary language, and has different food, architecture, and feeling and all are spectacularly beautiful with many tourist destinations. This means that traveling in Switzerland never gets repetitive. My favorite trips to make are 1-2 day trips to Switzerland’s major cities. I personally prefer visiting cities to the countryside because I am a city person and prefer museums to hiking; however, there are many areas in the countryside that are easy to visit in one day as well.
My favorite 2 day trip was my aforementioned trip to Geneva. It was a 4 hour train ride from Zürich, which was easily doable and very cheap, with a one night stay in a cheap, but nice hostel. It was really interesting switching from the German region to the French region of Switzerland and a nice change for just 2 days and very little money. The main reason I enjoy switching cultural regions is mainly for the food. I prefer the German speaking region of Switzerland as the people tend to be more flexible about language skills and have more familiar cultural norms; however, being able to enjoy excellent French and Italian food is quite a nice perk of traveling in Switzerland. I really enjoy food and definitely have loved having access to high quality French and Italian foods.
The only downside to switching cultural regions is having to speak another language. Switching from German to French to Italian can get very confusing, especially considering I speak none of those languages. Switzerland also speaks in dialect, meaning that while documents and other official things are written in the high versions of the language, speaking is not very similar. Swiss versions of languages tend to be more polite, meaning speaking the high version, while understandable and normally forgiven, can be considered very rude in common situations, such as when ordering coffee in the German region or asking for a table for 1 or 2 people at a restaurant in the French region. This gets confusing when trying to do something and then realizing that you’ve used high version of the language and are suddenly being offensive. Depending on the mistake and the region, it is sometimes considered more polite to just speak English.
