An Alternative to Constance

In a blog post I made last year, I mentioned that many Swiss head to the German border town of Constance (Konstanz) in order to do some cheap grocery shopping. Well, a closer alternative has been found, fellow grocery refugees! Waldshut, an other German border town, is 20 mins closer to Zurich than Constance and features 3 huge supermarkets. All of which are open until 10pm during the week. Crucially, this means you can get to Waldshut and back in the evening without paying a single Rappen if you have a Gleis7 travel card.

A vast bounty of treasure awaits those who make the journey over the border!

It's certainly worth making the occasional trip, particularly as German alcohol and meat can be around three times cheaper than their Swiss counterparts! Keep hold of your receipts and fill in the relevant Custom forms and I believe you can even claim back the tax paid. However unlike Constance, Waldshut isn't a terribly nice place to visit. Cheap grocery shopping for the Swiss appears to be the sole purpose of the small town, to which it may well owe it's existence. Or so it seems.

Outside the main train station in Zurich.

In the meantime, Siberian weather has achieved a tight grip of the majority of Europe. Zurich is no exception, temperatures have been as low as -15 and the snow looks set to stay. If things carry on like this for a while, it might be possible to go and ice skate on the Katzenseen in Affoltern.

Bergholz forest in Affoltern.

The temperatures are much worse in Eastern Europe though. Great, that's exactly where I'm heading next week and the week after!

One Day in Germany: Constance

Fast approaching my 2 month landmark of being abroad, I faced the unavoidable task of having to get my hair cut. Everyone in Zurich is well presented and well groomed, so the thought of getting a dodgy trim in the city, due to not knowing where to go and where to avoid hadn't really crossed my mind. What had crossed my mind however was the price, and haircuts – like everything else in Zurich it seems are no exception – they're expensive. Then I had the idea to head across the border into Germany, where I could also do a bit of sightseeing in a new town and buy a few other things I need cheaply. So, Constance it was then.

Constance straddles the border between Switzerland and Germany.

Constance is only just over the border and about an hour's train journey from Zurich, and although the weather was a little overcast when I arrived, the town is really pretty. Lots of old buildings and plenty of tight, twisting streets revealing quite a few gems. Like Zurich, it has it's very own lake - Lake Constance or the Bodensee.

Constance is pretty small, but definitely worth a visit.

Upon my arrival the first hair dresser's I saw were offering a haircut for €17 (£15), much better than what I would've had to pay in Zurich – 50 CHF (£40) and so I made an appointment for the same day. Thanks to the fact that I also had two railway subscriptions (Halbtax Abo & Gleis7), I saved enough to include the cost of the train journey and then some!

It's possible to take a boat around the lake, but maybe I'll save that for another time, when the weather is more appealing.

Having spent so much time in Switzerland already, I had already got used to Swiss prices. My very first thought after walking around Constance was that everything was ridiculously cheap – even if it wasn't relative to Germany! I treated myself to Currywurst for lunch for example, and was hugely surprised to find that I still had [quite a lot of] change for a tenner. Now I realised just why Constance is so appealing to the Swiss as a town to simply go to for the savings made on grocery shopping...

Constance is often frequented by Swiss loading there bags full of cheap shopping before heading back over the border into dearer Switzerland.

Another observation that was immediately noticeable to me, was that I heard High German on the streets! It seemed like a novelty to hear German German again after being in Zurich for so long, I had to keep reminding myself that I was no longer in Switzerland and so saying 'Grüezi' or 'Merci' would only return curious looks.

Although the German spoken in Constance is peppered with the Badisch dialect, it made a change to hear High German on the streets again.

I would definitely recommend a day trip to Constance to anyone in Zurich who could benefit from buying a few things cheaply. It's worth the trip, especially if you have the train subscriptions, and besides, Constance is a nice town in it's own right. Just make sure you go on a sunny day to make the most of it...