Thursday two days ago, we figured it was a good idea to attend a concert in Zurich’s Tonhalle to see the Tonhalle Orchester.
Wrong. I not only do not recommend to go there, I recommend to not go there.
The seats were as one can see in the image. They are hard wooden seats. The word “space” does not even apply remotely. I had to turn my legs at around 50 to 60 degrees to the left, because the front seat was that close. My partner had her legs 60 degrees turned to the left as well. The cost of the seats was about two hundred Swiss francs as far as I vaguely remember.
The concert (“Matthaus Passion”) went from 1930 to 2100 and from 2115 to 2300. The amount of torture in these seats is hard to describe. After a few minutes, the knees started to burn. A few minutes later, the pain in the whole pelvic and lower back region became burning hard. From then on, the pain stayed like that or even got massively worse in between. After half an hour, the pain of the back and shoulders became burnt in.
It was weirdly enough exhausting in an extensive fashion. I fell asleep as I could not produce enough adrenaline any more. I woke up, intense pain back at full speed. Sure, I am not the most asymmetric person ever, and I pain a lot faster than other people in part due to that – but if you check the picture, then “crammed” and “tight” would be actually very reserved and polite words for the actual sitting position that I found myself in. I am around 185 cm tall.
The whole ordeal was at least alleviated by the fact that one had to deposit one’s coat at the wardrobe area, where employees would trade coat against voucher and vice versa. Dropping the coats seemed like a breeze as no people stood in line and no handicaps were clearly visible then. But that all was to change totally when trying to pick up our coats afterwards. The problem was that with Zurich and Tonhalle as Zurich’s most exquisite concert hall, or so they believe, their obsession with external appearances also is nothing less but stellar. So I made it, in the queue, after the concert, after a considerable wait in queue, finally, to the front of the desk to pick up our coats, worn out and wretched from all the pain.
I might just as well not have been there, waiting.
The “ladies” that posed as the employees to trade back vouchers for coats made it their absolute priority to “not see” the arm amputee standing there. While I was most clearly and most unoverseeably at the front of the desk there, they got some 28 or 29 other people their coats, before I got our vouchers traded back to our coats. I was standing there and they did not care shit. They quite simply refused to serve an arm amputee (I did not have my prosthesis on then).
This level of hostility towards a visible handicap was a level that in my experience, is unprecedented for Zurich. It is even worse than Walder Shoestore in Glattzentrum, where they teamed up to provide me with a collective stare once when I tried some shoes on. Since then, I really turned to online shopping – and if anyone asks, they are to blame.
But this is still about the Tonhalle. They sure polish and shine their clear will to hard discrimination and a clear confession to stay with the perfect and good looking, where beauty is superficial and stays that way. And with that, I have to say that the acoustics and the concert would have been nice were concerts just an acoustic experience. The “ladies” at the wardrobe made sure the social experience part was a real disaster, and the seating was far from uncomfortable, but do not get me wrong, not “acceptable” in any fashion, but way down along the other direction, there, were no one can actually sit. It was hellishly uncomfortable.
I am now in total agreement with everyone that wants to tear the whole complex down and put a garden, or a swimming pool, there.
