It was another unintentional, early morning wake-up for me— I believe it’s the fourth day in a row that I’ve been wide awake at 12:35 am. This time I pulled out my computer and wrote the blog post about our last day in Zurich.

We called an Uber about 8 am and were on our way to Lucerne on a very crowded train; we then took a taxi to the Grand Hotel Europe and dropped our luggage. It was about a ten-minute walk to the Church of St. Leodegar, considered the Catholic cathedral of Lucerne. We had looked online and found that there would be a Mozart church sonata at the 11:00 am service. As it turned out, we arrived about half an hour early and caught the tail end of the previous service which was a contemporary service accompanied by piano, guitar and flute, with a screen projecting the words of the songs. It just seemed a little incongruous with the architecture of the building, in which there was lots and lots of gold!

The 11:00 am service indeed started with a Mozart church sonata for the prelude, played by a medium-size orchestra of perhaps 12-14 players, who played from the organ gallery. The orchestra also played Mozart for the offertory, communion and postlude and there was no choir. The organist played improvisations as introductions for all the congregational music which included hymns and parts of the mass.

After the service Bill Potter and I went walking around the old city in search of food but all the menus we saw were quite pricey and we ended up just buying sandwiches at a bakery. However we did visit two more churches, the first of which was a Jesuit church (Jesuitenkirche). I remarked that this congregation must have money (!) because the furnishings were in very good condition.

Another church we visited was the French church (Franziskanerkirche)

Tonight we met the other members of our tour group in a Welcome Dinner. At our table, we met a family from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Bill had gone to college! Small world.