A First-Timer’s Guide to Zurich: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

I landed in Zurich on a grey Tuesday with exactly one plan, which was to find my hotel and figure out the rest later. That’s usually how I travel, and it usually works out fine. Zurich threw me off a little though — not because it’s confusing, it’s actually one of the more orderly cities I’ve been to, but because there’s more going on under the surface than the postcard version suggests.

So if you’re headed there for the first time, whether it’s work, a stopover, or an actual holiday, here’s roughly what I picked up, in no particular order of importance.

The airport is easy. Getting into the city after is where people trip up.

Zurich Airport itself is fine — clean signage, fast customs, trains that actually leave when they say they will (this is Switzerland, come on). What catches people out is what happens after you land, especially if you’ve got luggage, no sleep, and a meeting in three hours.

Public transport into town is genuinely good. A train to Hauptbahnhof takes about ten minutes. But if you’re coming in wrecked, or you don’t speak German, or you just don’t want to think about which platform to stand on, it’s worth looking at a private transfer instead. I ended up booking a limousine service in Zurich on my first trip because a colleague swore by it, and mostly I just didn’t want to be dragging a suitcase around a train station I’d never seen before. Ended up being one of the better calls I made that trip — driver was waiting at arrivals with my name on a sign, and twenty minutes later I was at the hotel instead of still squinting at a departure board.

Old town looks small on a map. It isn’t, not really.

Niederdorf, on the east side of the river, is what most people picture when they think “Switzerland” — cobblestones, church spires, bakeries that look like they haven’t changed a display case in thirty years. You can technically walk end to end in twenty minutes, and that’s exactly what most people do; then they call it seen and move on.

Don’t do that. Go back in the evening instead. The crowds thin out, and it feels almost like a different place. Grossmünster and Fraumünster are both worth stepping into — the Fraumünster especially, it’s got stained glass windows done by Marc Chagall that you’d walk right past if nobody told you to look up.

The lake is the part everyone recommends, and for once everyone’s right.

What nobody mentions is how easy it actually is to get out onto it. There are ferry routes that basically double as scenic cruises and cost the same as a regular transit ticket. On a clear day you can see the Alps way off in the distance, which still doesn’t feel real no matter how many times you’ve seen it in photos.

If you’ve got half a day spare, take the boat toward Rapperswil. Slower than driving, sure, but you skip the parking headache entirely, and parking in central Zurich is its own special kind of stress.

Zurich is expensive. Just — not evenly expensive.

Every guide tells you this, and somehow it still doesn’t prepare you. A basic sandwich can run you more than a sit-down meal costs back home. But it’s not expensive across the board — Migros and Coop are reasonably priced, and if your place has a kitchen, cooking even one meal a day changes the budget more than you’d think.

Restaurants are where it adds up fast. My rule of thumb ended up being: pick one or two meals to actually splurge on and eat simply the rest of the time. Nobody remembers the average dinner. They remember the one really good one, and honestly one good meal in Zurich will stick with you longer than you’d expect.

If you’re not just visiting but actually thinking about a longer stay, the money side gets more complicated fast. I met a couple of British expats over drinks near the lake who’d moved out for work and were still untangling their finances a year in — pension transfers, double taxation questions, the works. One of them said flatly that the Tax mistakes British expats made in Switzerland usually come from assuming UK habits carry over, when Swiss cantonal tax rules can be completely different depending on where you settle. Worth reading up on before you sign a lease, not after. 

A few smaller things, the kind nobody puts in the official brochure: Sunday is quiet; most shops just close, so do your errands Saturday. Trams stop running earlier than you’d expect for a city this size — check the schedule before you’re stuck somewhere at midnight. Tipping isn’t the ritual it is elsewhere; service is already included, rounding up is polite, but nobody’s expecting more. And ask for tap water at restaurants — it’s genuinely good and free; no reason to pay for bottled water.

Was it worth all the hype people give it? Yeah, though not really for the reasons I went in expecting. I figured it’d be pretty and orderly and not much beyond that. It is pretty and orderly, but there’s more texture to it than that — the lake, old town after dark, the way the whole place seems to run on a schedule nobody had actually to enforce. It’s not a city that shouts for attention. You kind of have to slow down to notice it’s even doing anything.

If there’s one piece of advice I’d actually stand behind, it’s this: don’t overplan day one. Leave room to get a little lost in the old town, sit by the lake longer than you meant to, and let the place set its own pace before you try to tick everything off a list.