Zurich -- safe, pristine, militarily neutral -- can a city get any better? Like many of Europe's second cities, Zurich has enjoyed a cultural boomtime as it reaps tourism from visitors looking for new destinations, while the native population reclaims older neighborhoods for new art spaces, coolseeking restaruants, designery hotels, and trendy shops. Of course, just to get your foot in the door, it helps to know a few basic stops on a first-timer itinerary. After the jump, our suggestions on where to stay, eat, drink, and avoid purchasing a cuckoo clock.

Art

If you've always longed to stay in a hotel room Everything you need to know about Murren, Switzerland - a 800+ year old Alps village accessible to the public only by cable car - divided by season. In winter, Murren overflows with crowds of literal cool kids - wave after wave of extreme sportsters who are all in shape, all hot, and very often sponsered. In the summer, Murren becomes an idyllic Edenesque paradise - the ski crowd bails, the co-op gets restocked, and housing prices plummet like an obnoxious tourist overshooting a jump. At all times during the year, the only open hotspot in the entire village is accessible at the small cafe about a block west of the Catholic church. And by "open hotspot" we mean "hotspot left unsecured by the hostel above the coffee shop". So technically, you don't even have to sit at the cafe to access it - if you don't mind having people visibly judge you for blatantly stealing wifi, you can actually get a better signal by sitting in the staircase-tunnel thing that's on other side of the hostel. If you kind of angle your spine against the rock just right, it's actually not totally uncomf