and 7:00 a.m. As long as you can handle late nights, early mornings and sleeping on the train, this pass is an incredibly good deal!
There’s an entire city built at the base of the Stoos Ridge hike at the top of the steep funicular! This mountain village is isolated from everything, meaning that to get anywhere, the residents would have to take the funicular back down the mountain and then bus into a neighboring city. On our way to our hike, we passed many people leaving for day-to-day activities, like groceries or walking their dogs, casually using the funicular and chairlifts through the mountains.
Most Swiss cities are not like the 24/7, constantly bustling “city that never sleeps.” Most grocery stores and shopping centers will close around 7:00 p.m. at the latest during the week, and at times, even earlier on the weekends. I have recently learned that this includes the train systems. While trains will run late into the night and early morning, they become much less frequent and will run for shorter distances. This means that a trip from Geneva to Schwyz, for example, that took five hours with two transfers during the day, could take eight hours and five transfers at night! Everything closing so early has definitely been one of my biggest culture shocks.
