As a friend of mine defined Zurich in the mid 90s - Zurich - the Swiss city where one of ten is Swiss ...

The irony - she was mail order bride that just got her Swiss citizenship.

The quasi-Xenophobes are well and truly out of their closet.

I am full blown xenophobe, not quasi, but not in this case since I was from her home country and were visiting her for a week - but we spend probably half an hour in Zurich trying to find someone that knows the place and speak German or French at acceptable level to give us directions. It was during the late evening and out of 15 people we stopped like one was swiss.

I'm sorry to hear you had such an outlier of an experience - I've never been met with anything except understanding when asking for directions in any of the national languages.

> we spend probably half an hour in Zurich trying to find someone that knows the place and speak German or French at acceptable level to give us directions. It was during the late evening and out of 15 people we stopped like one was swiss.

Stopped...successfully? And does Swiss German count as "an acceptable level of German" :)? I don't find it hard to believe that 14 people would pass you by (as people would in a major city), but I find it hard to believe that out of 14 people, none would speak the major national languages.

No one passed us by. Everyone was very polite while we tried to communicate. We didn't speak English, and the ones that we met that spoke German or French were also foreigners. Just all of the people that we met that night were foreigners (I can remember Spaniard, Italian and Brazilian). It was 30 years ago. Zurich for me was even then insanely cosmopolite city.

It was mostly amusing. Not bad in any way.