Routine and familiarity are comforting. I’ve been going to the same hotel, the Hotel Alex, in the Swiss Alps for 15 years. Same room, same friends, same everything. It’s a great place!
There is an order to the week. There are the owners that know us and greet us daily. There is the bar and the dinners all set out every night. It is a fixed menu that is beautifully crafted by a fabulous chef. There are special dinner nights like fish night when there is a fabulous array of smoked delicacies (Eel is my favorite. All of my childhood years of jellied eels created this addiction). Then there is cured meat night – a gourmands dream and as many types of mountain animals that your cholesterol can take! There’s raclette night when the owner of the hotel sweats over a raclette machine and serves grilled Swiss mountain cheese with potatoes and pickled onions. As much as you want. And these are just the appetizers! There’s always salad and always a fabulous dessert. Breakfasts are part of the extravaganza too. Yep, it’s a calorific buster off week. The skiing keeps the damage down but who is counting really?!
Apart from the food there’s this level of anticipation. Everyone looks at the map denoting ski runs open and weather reports from the top of the mountain. “What piste should I take today?” “Is Italy open?” They are always the same conversations. Reassuring. Then there’s the in-between time at the hotel. The spa and a swim before the dinner make it just a perfect week.
The people who work at the hotel are super nice. They get it. We’re all there to have a good time and escape. They smile and become part of the week.
The Hotel Alex is near to the main cog railway that takes you up the mountain and right by the main station that connects everyone to the real world down in the valley. It’s a bit like Brigadoon. For a week at least it works for me. More info on the Alex can be found on their website: Hotel Alex Zermatt. It is a surprisingly great deal and a fabulous four star hotel. Best in town. Best in show.
years ago. I do not recall much other than their famed Bear Pit, also known as The Bärengraben. Beyond that it was a place between somewhere you had come from to somewhere you wanted to get to. It was a stop for lunch or a break on a monotonous journey along motorways. One things for sure, it wasn’t Rome.
extraordinary that would be in harmony with the artistic movement that it represented – surrealism at the turn of the century. There are 4,000 Klee paintings in the museum amply padded with a Picasso here, a Joan Miro, or Dali there. In all, it truthfully is not much my cup of tea, although I liked the black and white photo depiction of the history of the artists and the period. There is also a children’s section where 
budding young artists are free to connect the dots between aspiration and reality. The cafe was a great place to grab lunch and surprisingly for Switzerland it was relatively a good deal. It’s worth the stop if you like this sort of thing. If surrealism is not your thing, it’s not such a bad place to pass a few hours in between where you have come from and where you are going.
