Züriblögli

Recommendations

2009-04-15T23:58:00.009+02:00

People often ask me for recommendations when visiting or living in Zurich.

Here is a short list.

Travel: I tried to leave Switzerland at least once a month while I was there, and I'm sure you'll take advantage of the travel opportunities, as well. Two of the most underrated cities in Europe that I've been to are Ljubljana and Vilnius. I've had great holidays (with direct flights) in Kenya and Thailand. Swiss Airlines posts weekend travel specials on its website every Wednesday morning. Coop sells discounted flight coupons every year for travel to major European cities. There are often relatively affordable direct charter flights (Edelweiss is one company) to holiday destinations like Thailand and Egypt. Within Switzerland, definitely get a 1/2 Tax (Halbtax) card if you plan on using the trains at all. Buying your Zurich tram pass annually saves a lot of money.

Neighborhood: I lived in Kreis 1, as do many of my friends. It's good for single people who appreciate convenience and location. Kreis 2 is a bit quieter (and close to Google). Kreis 8 has a lot of expat couples and is convenient to the lake. Kreis 5 is the up-and-coming area for the Swiss equivalent of hipsters and techno lovers.

Best fondue: Raclette Stube in Niederdorf

Most interesting restaurant experience: tie between Blinde Kuh (Seefeld), where it's completely dark, and Oepfelchammer (Niederdorf, ask for the Weinstube), where if you climb through the rafters and drink wine upside down, you can carve your name in the wall

Other Restaurants and Bars: Cafe Zaehringer in Niederdorf is reasonably priced, student-run coop that has good soups, veggie options, and is smoke-free on Sundays
Aepli Bar in Niederdorf is one of my favorite bars in Zurich: cute, unpretentious, and campy in a Swiss way
Zeughauskeller in Paradeplatz is the place to go for sausage and beer.
Tearoom Blunt in Kreis 5 is a good place for Moroccan style brunch.

Lumiere on Widdergasse not only allows dogs (as do most restaurants) but has dog food and dog bowls, and will serve your dog dinner while you eat.

Most random museum: Gletschergarten in Lucerne - truly bizarre

Most impressive collection of art in a small space: Sammlung E. G. Buehrle in Seefeld

Best gym: Fitnesspark Munstergasse in Niederdorf has a Turkish bath, awesome for winter!!

Best gummy candy: Baerenland (Marktgasse 11, near the Rathaus tramstop) has the best gummy candy in the world, and I consider myself to be something of a connaisseur. The German owner, Christian, is friendly and gives out more free samples than you can eat.

In the summer: they turn some of the outdoor swimming pools into awesome bars. The Frauenbad in the Limmat is my favorite bar in the world, and it's open to the public on Thursdays in summertime. Rimini (near the Boerse) does the same thing most nights in the summer, but I find it a bit more claustrophobic. Rimini stays open into the fall, because they put up a bunch of heated tents, which are pretty cool. If you can get tickets to see a movie at Orange Cinema in the summer, do it -- they set up an outdoor cinema and you watch movies on the lake, it's great. Go to Ikea and buy one of the little portable grills (they are round and look like a tiny UFO). Perfect for grabbing to take to the lake on lazy summer weekends.

Music: There are lots of summer music festivals in Switzerland, including the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Blue Balls Festival. Live music is great year-round, because the venues are often small, and the concerts are more intimate.

Other things to check out when they come around: Oktoberfest at the Bauschaenzli (if you can't make it to Munich, this is a fun local option); Sechseläuten parade and burning of the Böögg in April; parades and street celebrations all the time... Curling. There are thermal baths around Switzerland that are just awesome - Leukerbad and Vals are just two of them. There's a glass factory in Hergiswil near Lucerne that's cool, and the factory seconds store is deeply discounted. If you hear about a yodeling festival, go to it. They are awesome.

I've moved!!!

2008-05-25T15:52:00.002+02:00

Greetings from California. I've moved, and so the blog will be moving, as well. No more Geocities, thank goodness, since Blogger is much more customizable than it was back in 2004. Everything - posts, pictures, links - will be here from now on.

See you on the interweb.

18 March 2008

2008-03-18T12:00:00.001+01:00

No time for a real post, as I'm trying to get my entire apartment packed up. Packing in the midst of a normal weekly schedule and a desperate last-minute travel schedule (must see... as much as possible... before leaving...) is no easy feat, and is further complicated by the following:

Even though my lease runs until March 31st, I have to be out of the apartment by March 26th, so that the professional cleaners (who charge about $1,000 to clean a 1BR apartment!) and painters can come in before the next tenant.

As wonderful as it is to move into an apartment in Switzerland - everything is sparkling clean and probably more sanitary than the stuff you're bringing with you, it is equally horrible to move out of an apartment in Switzerland for precisely the same reason. They expect things to be in perfect condition. The cleaning fee seems a bit excessive, but I'm told that they go so far as to take apart the faucets to check for any calcification that may have accumulated during your tenancy. The Swiss are nothing if not thorough.

After that, I'll stay with a friend for the remainder of my time in Zurich. Why didn't I just stay in my apartment until the end, you ask? Well, in Switzerland, they make it very difficult to break your lease at any time other than the end of March or September. I'd rather crash with someone than pay an extra six months' of rent.

Because of the discrepancy between the date I leave my apartment and the date I leave Switzerland, I have to sort my packing into more piles than usual: Trash, Recycle, Sell, To Use in Switzerland, To Use for Diving, To Use Immediately in California, and To Use Later in California. This is so that things can stay here or ship at the appropriate times. Argh.

After I move to San Francisco, much of my stuff will be in storage with friends in Zurich, and will follow once I've found a place to stay in California. A great idea in theory, but in practice, it's a bit difficult to get my stuff into their storage space. We all live in the old town, which is charming, quaint, picturesque, and usually closed to traffic.

We can usually get the car to my apartment, somewhat semi-legally, but to get to my friends' apartment, there is a gate that is closed except for early mornings on weekdays and on weekends. Since my time here is running out, my weekends are fully booked with travel and other hijinks. Weekdays, everyone works, and so we can't really spend a morning quasi-legally shuttling boxes between the two apartments.

It takes longer than you would think, partly because, although both building have elevators, they are very small (three very skinny people or half of an obese person can fit in), and you need to take stairs to get to the elevators. Yes. You have to take stairs to get to the elevators.

Furthermore, although the apartments are only about three minutes apart on foot, by car, it takes about ten minutes, because of all of the one-way streets, pedestrian streets, and looping around. If the gate is closed, add on another five or ten minutes of trying to wheedle the guard into letting you in for a quick dropoff. Whew.

Moving has always been one of my least favorite pastimes, but Switzerland takes it to a whole new level of awful. Don't get me started on what I have to do besides the physical move - Big Brother needs me to fill out countless forms and notify countless offices to erase myself from his books.

5 February 2008

2008-02-05T12:00:00.001+01:00

Life is moving too fast for me to document everything for you here in its full, detailed glory!

So, just a few quick notes on the past couple of months before they slip too far into ancient, forgotten history:

1) Flying from Zurich to JFK to San Francisco to JFK to Zurich in the span of ten days is a bit ambitious, especially if it also involves a delayed flight, a canceled flight, job interviews, and seeing friends and family in four cities on two coasts.

2) It is also ambitious to then go to a New Year’s Eve celebration in Zurich, when your total time between flights is less than 24 hours, and your out-bound flight leaves from another city. The traffic after the midnight fireworks will probably keep you from catching the last train to Basel, and throw a bit of a wrench in your plans to go to…

3) ...Marrakech, home of the best, cheapest, fresh-squeezed orange juice you will ever have. Also home to excellent food at the night markets, and fun bargaining opportunities that later leave you wondering why you were fighting so hard for a price that would have saved you only 40 cents off of the counter-offer.

4) You will drink more red wine in Madrid than anywhere else in the world, as you go from bar to bar, having a glass of wine and tapas. Beware when ordering the suckling pig at Restaurant Botin (the oldest restaurant in the world), because they will bring you one-fourth of the whole, fatty, crispy-skinned pig - little baby pig foot included. As for vegetables, the pig comes with two potatoes. Delicious, but not the most balanced meal ever. Especially since they start you off with a ham-and garlic soup that is festooned with pieces of deep-fried bread.

5) No matter where you go, the food and shopping are cheaper than they are in Zurich. Bring an extra bag to carry stuff back.

As for things that are coming up: my friends and I are going curling! Yes, that’s the one with the ice rink, the rocks, and the brooms. Who knows, maybe I’ll be really good at it, and will give up my lawyerly aspirations and become a pro curler.

Failing that, I’ll be moving to the States in May to start an awesome new job in San Francisco, where I look forward to making fun of the granola-loving, Birkenstock-wearing locals as much as I make fun of the cheese-eating, mullet-haired locals here.

Until then, I plan to get as much traveling and diving done as possible (Scandinavia? Baltics? Balkans? Greece? Asia? Who knows??), because once I’m back in the States, I’ll no longer be within a two-hour flight of two dozen countries. On the other hand, I’ll be able to get decent bagels and sourdough bread whenever I want.

Leaving Switzerland is going to be difficult, both in terms of giving up the fantastic life I’ve lived here, and in terms of deregistering with all of the proper authorities, giving the correct notices on the right forms, and doing all those other things that Big Brother requires of good Swiss residents.

On top of that, there are the usual logistics of an international transfer – packing, shipping, moving, starting a new job, and trying to get the timing of all of those (and the level of your bank account) to match up. Wish me luck.

15 January 2008

2008-01-15T11:36:00.000+01:00

Happy New Year!! A lot has happened since the last time I wrote – skiing, interviews in California, family Christmas in New Jersey, seeing friends in New York, New Year’s in Zurich, and a few days in Marrakech, all of which deserve discussion, but I have Switzerland on the brain right now, so that’s what I’m going to talk about.

A college friend was in town this past weekend, so we went into the mountains to go sledding. I grew up sledding in my back yard with cardboard boxes and inner tubes, and I have to say that it’s an entirely different experience taking an old-school wooden sled up a gondola in the Alps to a two-mile (3 km) slope made especially for sledding.

First of all, you go fast. Really fast. And the sled has no steering mechanism. And the trail has all sorts of quick turns and big bumps. They’re sort of like giant speed bumps, and the sled is unpadded, so your butt takes the brunt of the impact. Add to that the fact that on Saturday, when we were there, it was snowing hard, and we didn’t have goggles, so we had to keep our eyes mostly closed to avoid getting stinging snow driven into our eyes at high speed. It wasn’t just sledding. It was Extreme Sledding, very exhilarating, and I highly recommend it, for as long as your butt can take it. I am still exercising caution when sitting down.

That night, twenty of us went for fondue, because it’s not winter if you don’t go out for fondue, and then we went out for drinks afterwards. And my purse got stolen. Stolen! In Switzerland! It was soon found, minus my cash and cell phone. And I am in complete shock. I filed a police report (entirely in my own special brand of German, because the officer taking my statement didn’t speak English), and an insurance report, and the insurance company is transferring money to my account, so there’s minimal material loss, but my faith in Switzerland has been deeply shaken. Sure, bags get stolen in New York, in Madrid, in Paris, but not in Zurich!! What is the world coming to, if your purse can get stolen in Zurich?

There are other signs that the world is spinning out of control. A friend’s Swiss flight back to the States before Christmas was delayed by almost five hours, and another friend’s checked bag was misplaced on the way back. These things may happen on other airlines in the rest of the world, but not on Swiss International Airlines, where you leave on time, arrive early, and pick up your bags ten minutes later.

And just this morning I read an article that clearly signals that the end of days is drawing near. Because of a shortage in Brazilian cow intestines, there is a looming shortage of Switzerland’s most popular sausage, a pork- and beef-based sausage called the cervelat. Six million Swiss people eat a combined 160 million cervelats per year (in addition to the hundreds of millions of other sausages – the 160 million refers to a single kind of sausage!), and this summer, Switzerland is hosting the Euro Cup, when millions of foreign sausage eaters will descend on Zurich and further increase the demand for cervelats.

According to the BBC, a “joint ‘Task Force Cervelat’ composed of scientists, bureaucrats and industry representatives has been formed to tackle the sausage crisis.” We can only hope that they will be able to find a solution to this greatest of problems. I am certain that this crisis is dominating front-page news around the world, so my apologies for beating a dead horse, but I, like all concerned citizens of the world, am worried about not being able to eat my tube-form dead cows and pigs at will.

10 December 2007

2007-12-10T14:56:00.000+01:00

We had a fantastic week in Kenya, fitting in three dives, a safari, a visit to a local school-slash-orphanage to drop off some toys and supplies, and lots of lounging around in the pool. Kenya is many things that Switzerland is not– hot, sunny, and full of friendly people who told us that we should stay in Kenya forever. As with all countries, however, the positives come with some downsides, as well – the tap water isn’t even safe enough to rinse your toothbrush, the mosquitoes tend to spread malaria, and the roads are rather bumpy, even when they happen to be paved.

The population of Kenya is, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly black. We were tourists, though, and therefore came across a fair number of other tourists, but they were almost all white. I didn’t see a single other Asian person in a week of traveling until we were in the Nairobi airport on the way back. It’s really rather shocking to go to a tourist destination and not see a single Asian person (other than myself) taking pictures of everything that moves.

This unfamiliarity with Asians led to some interesting exchanges. Locals repeatedly asked the three of us (two blond-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians and one Asian) if we were siblings. I’ve spent most of my life being mistaken for my sister, or as a sibling of Asian friends, due to the fact that to non-Asian eyes, “all Asians look the same.” I suppose that to African eyes, all non-Africans look the same. One day, I was walking by myself, and a Kenyan asked me, based purely on appearance (since I hadn’t spoken) if I were Russian. Huh?!

Kenyans are exceedingly friendly. Children will stop their games upon seeing a van bearing foreigners and delightedly scream, “Jambo!” which is Swahili for “Hello.” Upon seeing me, however, they would get up and run towards the van, pointing and yelling, “Wachina!” which is Swahili for “Chinese.” I had to laugh, because that was pretty much our reaction when we were on safari, excitedly calling out, “Giraffe! Zebra! Oryx!”

Due to the existence of anti-American sentiment in many places, when asked, we generally said that we lived in Switzerland, which often prompted Kenyans to tell us that our English was very good, and which sometimes led down rather awkward conversation paths about how long we studied English. When bargaining for various knickknacks (no one can leave Africa without buying at least one wood carving, and no one can buy a wood carving without haggling), in the interest of appearing less prosperous, we were a bit vague about our professions – two of us are lawyers, and the third is an engineer for a company that manufactures electrical devices, which we turned into “I work in an office,” and “I work in a light switch factory.” I don’t think we fooled the salesmen at all.

It was a shock to come back to Switzerland – a week of wearing nothing but copious quantities of sunscreen, t-shirts, and shorts does not segue well into cold, wind, and rain. It is a relief, however, to be able to brush your teeth without fear of parasites, and to live mosquito-free.

This past weekend was spent with a friend in Amsterdam, where it is similarly cold and rainy. Next weekend, we’re heading for the mountains, where the cold rain will perhaps be cold snow, instead, and I can go skiing for the first time in fifteen years. Yes, I’ve been here for over three years and haven’t managed to muster up the motivation to go skiing. For shame.

20 November 2007

2007-11-20T16:57:00.000+01:00

“If you’re going to do something, you might as well overdo it” seems to be the theme of my recent and near-future life. I won’t be spending a whole weekend in town for two months. This past weekend, I was in Brussels. The next two weekends (and the week in between), I’ll be in Kenya. Then Amsterdam. Then Davos. The two weekends (and the week in between) after that, I’ll be in the States. Nineteen hours in Switzerland, and then an extra-long weekend in Morocco. Then maybe (just maybe), a weekend in Zurich before I take off for a weekend in Madrid. Whew. It ain't easy trying to be a jetsetter.

And it’s not just the travel that’s being taken to the point of excess. How’s this for a textbook example of gluttony – my friends and I flew to Brussels Saturday morning to try out lunch and dinner at two Michelin-starred restaurants (and the two meals combined took over seven hours), stayed the night, then flew back 24 hours later, just in time to waddle into Thanksgiving dinner #1. I had Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch the next day. Thanksgiving dinner #2 will be this Thursday (we make up for the lack of a long weekend by overdosing on turkey more than once). I will probably have eaten a month’s worth of food in a week’s worth of time. Burp. Incidentally, dinner at Comme Chez Soi was a near-religious experience, and worth every franc spent to get there, and euro spent to eat there.

Speaking of food, it’s common in many languages to use food-based pet names. In English, for instance, people call each other honey, pumpkin, sugar, or sweetie pie. A friend of mine was taken aback however, when her German boyfriend called her (in English) his “honey cake horse.” What?! It turns out he had directly translated a German term of endearment (Honigkuchenpferd, in case you’re curious) into English, assuming that it would make as much sense in English as it apparently does in German. A quick peek at a website listing other German terms of endearment reveals such gems as Humpfimumpfi, and Marzipankugelschweinchen (marzipan ball piglet). Charming, no? They just roll right off your tongue.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the stereotypical German speaker is not known for his (or her) romantic conquests – it’s hard to win someone over when you’re comparing them to farm animals or lesser-known carbohydrates. Never fear, though, just as in the States, there are dating sites and dating shows to help those who cannot help themselves. "Swiss Date" is a long-running dating show that is similar to the "Dating Game," where a bachelor (or bachelorette) asks three contestants a series of questions, and then chooses a lucky winner.

The sad thing, however, is that the show is entirely scripted, so that everyone know what questions will be asked, and the contestants often read their strained joking responses off of index cards held in their laps. I realize that reality shows are often scripted, but it’s best to maintain the semblance of spontaneity by eliminating the visible cue cards. Just a tip.

My friends and I leave for Kenya this week! The two of them leave Thursday morning and will actually spend Thanksgiving evening in Nairobi, where they plan to eat Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant that serves unusual game meats such as crocodile, giraffe, and zebra. I’ll join them on Saturday, and we hope to spend the week relaxing at the beach, going on a safari, enjoying the equatorial weather, and not catching malaria.

6 November 2007

2007-11-06T14:02:00.000+01:00

One of the things I like best (and will miss most) about living in Switzerland is the transportation. Seriously. Before living here, I lived in New York and Boston, and I appreciated the fact that I could get away with not having a car and still get around, but Switzerland elevates the car-free lifestyle to a new level. Not only can I get around anywhere in the city without a car, I can do so on trams, buses, boats, funiculars, and trains.

And everything runs on time – in other places, the schedules are mere guidelines regarding the relative frequency of subway trains or buses. Here they are written in stone – if the schedule says the tram will be here at 10:32, it will be here at 10:32, just in time for you to transfer to the bus that leaves at 10:33. You can plot your trip out to the minute, knowing exactly when you need to leave your apartment, and exactly when you will arrive at your friend’s housewarming party. Not only that, but it works nationwide. If I have tickets to see a concert in Lucerne, I can plot out the exact Zurich tram, train, and Lucerne tram I will need to take to get there in time.

(That said, there have been a few disturbing tram delays in recent weeks – there have been several occasions where a tram I wanted to take was three or even four minutes late. Having lived here for over three years, I was suitably horrified.)

It’s definitely a far cry from inter-city travel in the U.S., where, even if you’re lucky enough to be traveling between cities serviced by Amtrak (read: major cities on the Northeast corridor), the schedules are still only a general guideline, with arrival and departure times being understood to mean “stated time plus or minus half an hour.”

A German friend is planning on going to New York, and was thinking of going to visit his friend in rural New Hampshire. I assumed he was going to rent a car, but he said he would probably take a train, and was surprised when I told him that there probably wasn’t a train going where he wanted to go. Welcome to America, the land of the free and the home of the very large spaces that aren’t serviced by mass transportation.

As wonderful and well planned as the public transportation system is, there are still a few things that puzzle me. Trivial things, but I still wonder about them. The first is that all of the trams in Zurich are numbered. We have trams 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15. What happened to trams 1 and 12?

Another is that the tramlines are color-coded. Blue means 14, yellow means 13, and so on. It makes it easier to read the map and to tell from a distance what tram is on its way. What puzzles me, however, is that there are two red trams, two green trams, but no orange tram. They covered the main rainbow colors (besides orange), doubled two of the colors, and then randomly branched out into pink, black, and brown. There doesn’t seem to be a system, which is very odd in this country that loves and lives for systems.

I sometimes watch the tram drivers at work. At first glance, the cockpit (driver’s seat?) of the tram looks unsurprising – a steering wheel, lots of buttons and switches, a microphone, and so on. And then you stop and realize that you don’t have to steer a tram – it just goes on tracks. And then you observe that the steering wheel is basically a gas and brake pedal in one – the driver turns it right to go faster, and left to go slower. Doesn’t that seem it could get a bit confusing (and swervy) for the tram driver if he drives a car when he’s not at work? Just a thought.

19 October 2007

2007-10-19T16:58:00.000+02:00

Switzerland has turned up on international news radars as it prepares for elections, mostly because of an initiative that has been proposed by one of the parties (any initiative, once it has enough signatures, can be put to a national vote). This particular initiative concerns whether non-citizen felons and their non-felonious families can be automatically expelled from the country, and was proposed by the same conservative party that successfully blocked the granting of Swiss citizenship to third-generation, Swiss-born, fully-integrated immigrants.

This right-wing party has about 27% of the popular vote, and they have been splashed all over international newspapers over their ad campaign that depicts several white sheep (representing good Swiss people) standing on the Swiss flag, kicking out a black sheep. There are games on their website where you can kick black sheep. I don’t know who thought this ad campaign wouldn’t be offensive to foreigners or minorities (but then again, this is also the country where a couple years ago, the transportation authority, wishing to prevent musicians from begging on trams, posted signs depicting a man wearing a poncho and sombrero, because clearly anyone who begs on a tram is a stereotypical Mexican).

In any case, it’s a little lesson about stereotypes – just as not all tram singers are Mexican, and not all foreigners are criminals, not all Swiss are neutral and polite. In some ways, I feel as if I’m in junior high again – back then, being Asian and intelligent (and having a bad perm) marked me as an outsider, a black sheep to kick out from some fabled inner sanctum of acceptance. And here I am again, a black sheep in a country full of white sheep. And I don’t even have a perm anymore.

Anyways, planning for Kenya continues. My new passport came back less than two weeks after I sent the old one in – how’s that for efficiency? The new one has been mailed off to the Kenyans to get a visa. I went to my doctor to get some “just in case” prescriptions for antibiotics and so on. My German isn’t great, and her English isn’t great, so we get by in a mixture of the two. I sometimes forget that when language is an issue, sarcasm often goes undetected, so when she mentioned the possibility of getting bloody diarrhea, I said, “Ooh, that sounds really fun,” and she very earnestly told me, “No, actually, it’s not fun at all.” Oh, really?

My two travel buddies and I went to the university travel clinic last night to get all the necessary shots. We showed up, took numbers, and sat and waited to be called. Then we were matched up with doctors who reviewed our travel plans and told us what shots we would need. Then we waited in line to pay. Then we waited in line to get the shots. With all the red tape and long lines, it was sort of like Disney World meets the DMV.

The consultation with the doctor was done in German (looking back, I’m still amazed that I managed to tell her all the necessary information, and even more amazed that I was able to understand everything she told me), and covered the exotic risks I would have expected, like polio and malaria, but she also spent a fair amount of time cautioning me to stay hydrated on the plane, and to periodically stretch my legs to avoid blood clots. While waiting in line to pay, a German man told me that he was told that because he often leaves Zurich to go into the mountains (in Switzerland), he should get a special shot.

It's apparently a dangerous world out there, once you venture forth among the black sheep.

4 October 2007

2007-10-04T15:42:00.000+02:00

The big news this week is that I’m going to Kenya next month! One of my friends (who is also a coworker) asked me Friday morning if I wanted to go on a trip in November. I expressed interest (everyone knows I’m a bit of a travel fiend), and he said he had a timeshare in Kenya next month. I caught another one of our friends right before she was about to go to lunch, and by that afternoon, the three of us had decided to go.

Sounds simple enough, but as with most fun things, it was a bit more complicated. We had to request the vacation days and wait for approval, and there was a bit of a panic when the ticket prices fluctuated. And then there’s the fact that the Kenyan consulate in Zurich apparently no longer exists, so we have to apply for visas through the embassy in Bern. Not a big deal, you just send your paperwork, money, and passport to them, and they send it back to you a week later with the visa. The passport just needs to be valid for six months after your trip.

Oh. Six months? Mine expires in… April. Wasn’t there something about big delays with American passport renewals or something in the news a while back? Uh oh. I called the embassy here and they assured me that the processing times for American passports being renewed through Switzerland is about three weeks. OK, whew. I just need to send in my passport, a form, two pictures, and some money (which I’ll have to do again to get my Kenyan visa, once I get my new passport back).

First things first, I went to go get new passport pictures taken. The embassy website listed the few Swiss photo places that were known to make regulation American passport pictures, so I went to the closest one. The guy sat me down, and I put on my best “I hope I don’t look terrible because I’m stuck with this picture for the next ten years” smile, and he told me to stop smiling. Swiss people aren’t allowed to smile in their passport pictures, so apparently they don’t want Americans to smile in theirs, either.

Too lazy to argue the point, I suppressed my smile (although not entirely), and thus ended up with a smirking photo that is sure to endear me to immigration officers everywhere. I went to pay and it cost 35 Swiss Francs, or about $30, using the current exchange rate (these days, I am so glad I get paid in francs instead of dollars). For two passport-size photos of me smirking!! If it hadn’t been so expensive, I would have considered getting them re-taken.

Then, I dropped the whole package off at the post office, and sent the fee to the embassy. I’m not sure how it’s done in the US, but here, they don’t want checks or cash, and I’m guessing that an online transfer is harder for them to match to the paperwork, so they want a post transfer. This entails bringing a wad of cash to the post office (because they don’t take credit or debit card, unless you keep an account with the postal service), writing down your address and the address of the recipient, and handing it over with the wad of cash (plus a $16 service charge). The post office then sends the recipient a post card verifying that you did indeed hand over the correct-sized wad of cash, and business gets taken care of. I hope.

In any case, I have to stay in Switzerland for the next few weeks, until my passport comes back, and it’s funny how restrictive it feels to say, “Oh, no, I can’t leave the country for the rest of the month.” Think positive passport thoughts for me, so that it comes back quickly, smirking picture and all, and so I can pass it along to the Kenyan embassy for my visa.

Editor's Note

2007-09-26T12:00:00.000+02:00

I'm preoccupied with other things these days, so I might as well be honest with myself (and you), and admit that I'm only going to try to update this section every other week, instead of every week. Other stuff will still be posted at random, as always...

18 September 2007

2007-09-18T15:42:00.000+02:00

Another post, another jetlagged recovery from a trip to the States. This time, it was an eleven-day, six flight, two wedding, two-state journey, with a job interview thrown in for good measure. I managed to pack everything into my carry-on for the first four flights (Zurich to Atlanta to Kansas City to Cincinnati to San Francisco), because I had awful visions of showing up at weddings and interviews in my grubby travel gear. On the way back, however, as is always the case, I was forced to check a bag, because I had picked up so many oh-so-essential items while in San Francisco, like Twizzlers, reasonably priced socks, and clogs.

We haven’t had a summer worth mentioning in Zurich this year, other than three weeks of warm weather and scattered sunny days here and there, and fall is now firmly entrenched, as evidenced by all of the wool sweaters and dripping umbrellas. I haven’t spent much time in Zurich over the past month, however, so I’ll talk about the traveling, instead.

Don’t ever fly Delta. I booked this trip in May, and had to re-book no fewer than four times in less than four months, because they kept canceling or rescheduling flights. Each time, I would get an email telling me to re-book, so I would call in and sit on hold, explain the situation to an inept customer service rep, get cut off, call back, hold, talk to another rep, explain that yes, the dates were important, because the weddings couldn’t be rescheduled, and no, I didn’t want to take more than six flights, because none of the fliths were direct to start with, and would it be possible to just rebook the one flight in question, so that I wouldn’t have to do seat selection for all six flights all over again? And after much to-do, they would still re-book all six flights. It was like the movie Groundhog Day, except that instead of Bill Murray, there was bad hold music.

On one of my flights, there was a kid two rows behind me who was screaming and gibbering demonically enough that I fully expected to turn around and see him ripping off his head and rolling it down the aisle. No one else in the entire plane seemed to be making any noise. On a nighttime flight, two kids were stampeding up and down the aisles, screaming and bumping into passengers, and their parents didn’t do anything, despite many grumbling neighbors (including me), and useless entreaties from the flight attendants.

While boarding the flight from Atlanta to Zurich, I noticed three babies and two dogs seated close by, and started preparing for a noisy, sleepless flight. I think all of them were dead, however, because none of them made a sound during the whole flight. Instead, the man in the seat next to me was slouching into my seat and hogging my legroom, and I spent most of the flight passive-aggressively pretending to be asleep, while furtively jamming my elbow and knee into him, trying to get him to move out of space I had paid for and re-booked four times.

The process to get a job and move to Switzerland seemed complicated to me at the time, since there were work visas and residence permits involved, but now I think it may be more complicated in reverse. American employers want you to start yesterday, and they don’t comprehend Swiss laws regarding giving two months’ notice at work, and three months’ notice on your apartment (which can only be done twice a year). Not to mention the logistics of de-registering from all the things that require registration. Now I understand why people often stay here for longer than they originally planned – it’s just too much trouble to leave!

Editor's Note

2007-09-11T12:00:00.000+02:00

Just got back from a double-wedding tour of the US. A few pics are up, update still to come...

28 August 2007

2007-08-28T15:39:00.000+02:00

Whew, time flies when you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off. In the past few weeks, I celebrated my birthday with 40-odd friends at my apartment here in Zurich, I took a quick trip back to New York and New Jersey, and I hosted a friend from Ireland for a long weekend, during which I visited my 40th country.

The birthday party was great (besides the fact that one of my friends had his finger broken mid-conversation). My friends chipped in for a group gift that included Reese’s cups (peanut butter and chocolate only go together in the States), Nerds (candy here tends to be either chocolate-y or chewy), a t-shirt from Old Navy (doesn’t exist here), an Extreme Ironing calendar (too weird for the Swiss), candy-flavored Chapsticks (lip balm comes in one flavor here), Mad Libs (too random for the Swiss), and other highly sought-after items.

One friend brought a bouquet of florist-quality flowers that he said he had picked himself. Really? Yes. He went to a nursery where customers pick their own flowers, check the price list, add it up, and leave money in a box, unsupervised. They just trust people to pick flowers and leave money. There are fruit, vegetable, and egg stands that do the same thing. Somehow, I just can’t imagine that working in the States.

My trip to the States was short and busy. I saw about two dozen relatives, 15 friends, had Ethiopian, Chinese, and Korean food, ate bagels, got bubble tea, went to my favorite brunch place, played cards with my old cards crew, bought clothes at my favorite store, got a two-hour massage from my favorite masseuse in the entire world, and then came back to Zurich and went straight to work from the airport.

While back, I ran into a childhood friend at the family gathering, and found out that she’s now good friends with my cousin. I ran into a former coworker from Zurich walking down the street in Manhattan near midnight. In the past, I’ve run into people in Paris, Venice, and every neighborhood of New York – leaving the country clearly does not affect the chances that you’ll see someone you know, there’s just no avoiding it unless you never leave the house.

Last weekend, a friend visited from Ireland, and we gave him the full Zurich experience – a sausage dinner, a cookout by the lake, drinks at an outdoor bar, dinner at the Oepfelchammer (which has a 150 year old tradition of inviting guests to climb through the rafters), a street party (my neighborhood’s annual “block party,” which involved music blaring outside my apartment late at night), and a day trip to Liechtenstein.

Liechtenstein is basically the Delaware of Europe – a small, corporate tax haven. About 35,000 people live in Liechtenstein, but over twice as many corporations are nominally headquartered there. They speak Swiss German and use the Swiss franc. They still use buses run by the postal service. It is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world (meaning that not only does Liechtenstein not touch the ocean, none of the countries touching Liechtenstein touch the ocean, either). The other one is Uzbekistan. That’s pretty much all I know about Liechtenstein.

Leaving for the States again on Friday, this time for a week and a half (which sounds saner than the last trip, but it involves six flights and two weddings, so I’m guessing it will still be pretty busy). Keep your fingers crossed for me that summer won’t be entirely over by the time I get back to Zurich.

Editor's Note

2007-08-22T12:00:00.000+02:00

I've posted a few pictures from my weekend in New York, update to come...

Editor's Note

2007-08-15T12:00:00.000+02:00

Things have been chaotic. Last weekend was Street Parade, which I avoided this year, not being in the mood to dive into the throngs of techno-mad people. Going on an unforeseen trip for a long weekend. In the meantime, I’ve posted a few random camera phone pics that didn’t fit in anywhere else.

7 August 2007

2007-08-07T14:43:00.000+02:00

Two weekends ago, a good friend from law school met me in Krakow, where we hung out for a couple days, seeing the city and making a side trip to Auschwitz before picking up a rental car to go to Slovakia. You may be asking, “Why Slovakia?” Several Slovakians whom we met along the way had exactly that question for us, and our response was, “Why not Slovakia?” Rural Slovakia is beautiful – wild forests, old castles, farmland, countless villages, each with its own steepled church – and plenty of time to observe it all as you’re stuck driving behind a tractor.

My friend is also Asian, and I think we have discovered the last two places on earth that aren’t completely overrun with buses full of Asian tourists – Spissky Hrad and Bardejov, Slovakia. Krakow was an entirely different story, with the city center swarming with tourists from all over the world (especially drunk British men – apparently, flights are so cheap, British men drink so much, and drinks in London are so expensive, that it’s cheaper for them to fly to Eastern Europe to party than to go to their local pub).

Slovakia, on the other hand, hasn’t yet been fully noticed by the outside, and is only just starting to connect to the outside world. We were often hard-pressed to find anyone who spoke any of the five languages we had between the two of us – English, French, German, Korean, and Chinese – a rare occurrence in Europe, where people tend to be bi-, tri-, or multilingual.

A good quick test of how closely a place is tied to civilization and the modern world is the Internet and the water supply. Can you find a computer with an Internet connection? Can you drink the tap water? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then you’re in a modern “First World” country. If the answer is no, then you’re being a bit more adventurous, and are hopefully reaping other benefits in terms of photo ops and cross-cultural understanding. The first Slovakian town we stayed had no Internet café, and even the locals didn’t drink the tap water. The second place we stayed had a computer connected to the Internet, but the computer was running on only 32 MB of RAM, so I think that still gets some points for remoteness from the modern world.

Rather incredibly, my friend and I didn’t get lost on our three-day road trip, despite several factors that were running against us: neither of us has a sense of direction; we don’t speak (or read) Slovakian or Polish; and we didn’t have GPS or a map of Slovakia. That’s right, we drove for two days without getting lost in the Slovakian countryside, with nothing but the equivalent of printouts from MapQuest. We were pretty proud of ourselves, and one of our big regrets is that we caved in and bought a map of Poland (which we didn’t really use, anyways).

The trip was a blast, although I don’t think I’ve ever missed fresh vegetables so much. Polish and Slovakian food (and perhaps Eastern European food in general) is very heavy on meat, potatoes, and pickles. In Slovakia, I ordered a pork chop, and was told to pick a side dish. I asked for vegetables, and the waitress said that there were boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, French fries, potato pancakes, and roasted potatoes. I ordered a salad, instead, and when it came out, it was a plate of pickled carrots, pickled cabbage, and pickled red cabbage. The pork chop was breaded, deep-fried, and topped with a fried egg and a slice of ham. At a restaurant in Poland, the pre-meal bread came not with butter, but with a pot of lard studded with chunks of bacon fat. Delicious? Yes. Nutritious? Perhaps not.

Editor's Note

2007-08-06T12:00:00.000+02:00

I've added Nellie's pics from Poland and Slovakia. Birthday party was a success, update later this week :)

Editor's Note

2007-07-26T12:00:00.000+02:00

It's concert season!! Four concerts in one week, and heading out to Poland and Slovakia for a looong weekend before coming back in town for my annual birthday party. Celebrate with me and forgive my lackluster posting schedule :)

18 July 2007

2007-07-18T14:52:00.000+02:00

It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with Asian people. There just aren’t that many of them here, although the numbers are growing, due to a booming restaurant business and the increasingly common phenomenon of Swiss men bringing back Asian brides. I’m only half-joking. Recently, however, I’ve met a few other Asians, who seem just as surprised as I am to no longer play the role of “token minority friend” when we’re in a group together, especially if they happened to grow up here in Switzerland.

A good friend of mine works for the local subsidiary of a major international company, which happens to be located out in the suburbs. Compared to New York, Zurich can already feel a little bit suburban (population-wise, Zurich wouldn’t even break the top 50 cities in the States), so the suburbs of Zurich are, to put it in the words used by a Swiss friend, “provincial” (as is the case anywhere, the city folk enjoy sneering at the country folk, and vice versa). My friend’s colleague started talking about a “black woman” working in a different department, much to my friend’s confusion, because she wasn’t aware that there were any black people working there. After further probing and clarification, it turned out that the “black woman” was actually Asian, and that the colleague just called her black because she wasn’t white, and really, what else is there?

When I told that story to an acquaintance who has Tibetan relatives who immigrated to Switzerland, she started laughing, because when her relatives took an outing into the “provinces” when they first moved here (granted, this was perhaps twenty years ago), the villagers followed them around, gaping at the “black people,” and trying to touch them. I would have been tempted to say, “Greetings. We come in peace, take us to your leader,” but I wouldn’t have known how to say that in Swiss German.

The other week, I was taking an elevator with three Swiss friends, one of whom is Asian, one of whom is half-Asian, and the third of whom is white. It was the first time since coming here that I’ve been part of a (localized) ethnic majority, so I pointed it out to our white friend, “Hey, do you feel outnumbered and marginalized?” His eyes widened in astonishment, then we all burst out laughing. Of course, as soon as we stepped out of the elevator into the general population, he was once again part of the extremely dominant majority, and the rest of us were back to being the funny-looking outsiders.

Last night, a friend and I organized an after-work hangout by the river, and perhaps two dozen assorted friends, coworkers, and acquaintances showed up, including five (that’s right, five!!) Asians. Four of us were expats, so it wasn’t a new experience to be more than just token minority representatives, although it definitely felt a bit strange to be hanging out with multiple Asians in Zurich. For the one Swiss Asian, however, it was a bit mind-boggling, and the rest of us were highly amused by his amazement that several non-tourist Asian people can hang out in one place without causing a huge tear in the space-time continuum.

It’s mid-July, and the weather has finally warmed up in Zurich. April was hot, but since then, we’ve had a lot of cold, rainy days, and nothing is more disheartening than wearing wool sweaters and scarves in July. So we’ve been grateful for the change in the weather, although a bit annoyed that half the summer was wasted as a faux winter. The rest of the summer looks busy – in the next six weeks, I’ve already got three concerts, three visitors, two parties, and several trips planned. If there’s no rest for the wicked, there’s even less rest for the expat.

11 July 2007

2007-07-11T17:24:00.000+02:00

Last weekend was Zürifäscht (roughly pronounced TSU-ree-FESHT), the once-every-three-years party that takes place in Zurich, well, once every three years. Last time it happened, I had only been living in Switzerland for one month, and I didn’t think I’d be here for a second Zürifäscht, but obviously, I was. After living here for three years and getting to know the place and the people a bit better, I think Zürifäscht was an even bigger surprise the second time around.

First of all, about two million people are in town for Zürifäscht. Considering that the population of Switzerland is about 7.5 million, that means that during the big weekend, over a quarter of the entire population descends on Zurich, which usually has a population of 370,000. If one-fourth of the US decided to go to a party at the same time, you’d have 80 million people all of a sudden showing up in New York for the weekend, which would pretty much be a logistical nightmare. Granted, it would be much easier to deal with two million people than 80 million people, but you have to hand it to Zurich for managing a sudden quintupling of the city’s population with remarkable aplomb.

Secondly, I didn’t quite realize the full scope of the party last time. I didn’t know my way around the city much, so I just followed a Swiss friend around. This time, I saw a schedule of events and the geographic area covered by the festivities, and it’s pretty mind-boggling. We’re talking multiple Ferris wheels (because the Swiss can never have enough Ferris wheels), an air guitar contest, dragon boat racing, Jewish folk dances, a petting zoo, fireworks, air shows, diving contests, bobsled tracks, freefall rides, cotton candy, ring tosses, bars, salsa dance floors, and just about everything else you can (or can’t) imagine.

And this is Switzerland, so it goes without saying that there are sausage and beer stands, plenty of trashcans and toilets, and trashmen scurrying around picking up the litter. Gotta feed the people and keep things clean.

People who happen to come into Zurich for the weekend of Zürifäscht must think that the Swiss are wild, crazy, and into littering. None of which is really true, except for when there’s a triennial party going on. True to form, the party was set up and swept away with mind-boggling speed. Since it’s a big one, it actually took a couple of days on each side, but if you could see the amount of equipment (and garbage) that was trucked in and out, you wouldn’t expect it to be done faster than a couple weeks each way.

Zürifäscht is really the only occasion I’ve seen where the Swiss go all-out with state-sponsored fireworks. Swiss National Day (their equivalent of the 4th of July) is more of a private affair, with measly little store-bought fireworks. Zürifäscht is when the government steps in and buys boatloads of explosives for public display. It only happens every three years, but then they do huge shows (about 30 minutes long) for two nights, so I guess the cost balances out, because each show was a bit bigger than the Boston 4th of July show, which happens every year.

One great thing about Zürifäscht (for Americans, anyways) is that it happens at roughly the same time as the 4th, so once every three years, we get to see a good, old-fashioned, bombastic display of pyrotechnic delights that are a taste of home, amidst the sausage stands and people frantically texting each other, trying to figure out which Ferris wheel they’re supposed to meet under.

4 July 2007

2007-07-04T13:31:00.000+02:00

Happy 4th of July, and here’s to the fact that the 2008 elections are drawing ever closer! Dubya, your days are numbered.

A Swiss friend recently commented that he likes the German mentality more than the Swiss mentality, because the Germans are “more relaxed and laid-back.” That made me laugh, because it really showed how everything is relative. I don’t think that Germans are world-renowned for their relaxed, laid-back personalities, but compared to the Swiss, maybe they are.

One friend who has been living here for a while told me how she once met an older Swiss woman who was grumbling about how the country is falling apart and chaos was taking over. My friend asked her what she meant. The woman said that in the past, if a train was supposed to arrive in the station at 11:14, it would pull in just as the second hand swept past 12, at 11:14:00 on the dot. Now, she complained, the train could show up anywhere from 11:14:00 to 11:14:59! What is this world coming to?

Some work colleagues and I were having drinks at a bar a couple of weeks ago to welcome a new coworker to the office. We had made reservations for a table for 20 for 6 p.m., and the first of our group walked in at about 6:10. There was a lone woman seated at our very large table. She looked up, told us that the table was reserved, and told us to find another table. We pointed out that the reservation was for our group, and started sitting down. She protested that it was already 6:12, and that it was too late for us to show up. After some back and forth, and much grumbling on her part, she vacated our table and went to one of many smaller tables that were free.

There was recently a “Laugh Parade” in Zurich. I didn’t attend, but apparently, people congregated on a Sunday afternoon at a pre-appointed time and place, and then they walked through downtown Zurich, laughing. I’m not sure what they were laughing about, but it was to promote health through laughter. But seriously, who schedules a time and place to laugh at nothing with strangers? The Swiss do.

Scheduling is paramount in Switzerland. Punctuality is right up there with cleanliness and godliness, and scheduling things well in advance is also a great virtue. Take my apartment lease, for example. It’s a pretty standard lease for Switzerland. There are two built-in termination dates each year – April 1 and October 1. In order to actually move out on one of those dates, I have to give the landlord three months’ notice, on January 1 or July 1, respectively. Otherwise, I would have to find a subletter (whom my landlord has to approve), or I would have to pay all of the extra rent myself. This is definitely not a culture that is accustomed to the transient nature of young Americans.

Most Swiss people stay close to home. Zurich probably has the most “transients,” but even they come from only an hour away, and visit home often. I haven’t been to my parents’ house in almost four years, and I have very few friends left from the “olden days,” but I have met many Swiss people my age who still see their parents and childhood friends almost every week. Moving to a town that’s an hour away seems to be as big of a step here as moving from New York to San Francisco in the States.

Even for an American, I’m relatively rootless, but compared to the Swiss, I’m probably akin to a hobo with a work permit.

27 June 2007

2007-06-27T12:10:00.000+02:00

After living here for over three years, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing dogs go almost everywhere that people go – bars, restaurants, boats, trains, trams, shops, you name it, there’s a dog there (except in grocery stores, where they aren’t allowed). I’m no longer shocked (but still appreciative) when waiters bring Fiver a bowl of water without asking, and when they stop to pet him and ask if they can give him some ham, then bring back bowls of sliced tomatoes and carrots, at my suggestion (Fiver loves veggies, and he’s overweight, so it’s for the best).

Fiver gets more attention and approval than I do. The Swiss are generally not inclined to notice or speak to strangers unless a rule is being broken, but if Fiver is with me, there is a steady stream of people – old, young, male, female – following us, talking to him, blowing him kisses, commenting on his appearance, asking me his age, sex, breed, and name, getting permission to pet him, and so on. I’m invisible, but Fiver is the Pied Piper of Zurich.

This past weekend, however, I was not prepared to see a rabbit taking the tram. I think of rabbits as stay-at-home pets, but a woman was carrying her pet rabbit in a grass-lined basket, and brought him on the tram with her. She (and he) seemed to think it was perfectly normal for a rabbit to ride the tram, and no one else took any notice of them. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, since when I first moved here, I often saw a couple who would bring their pet rats on the tram, and the rats would swarm up and around their necks, shoulders, and shirts.

Pets live a good life here – cats living in apartment buildings usually have outdoor feline spiral staircases that allow them to enter and leave the apartment at will. I sometimes think that pets have it easier than people here – they don’t need to worry about store opening hours, special garbage bags, registration and deregistration, laundry schedules, or any of the other strange things that their owners have to deal with.

Speaking of pets, one of my good friends here had a dog who died a while back. She had him cremated at a pet crematorium, and they mailed the ashes back to her. Very efficient. In any case, recently, she received a mailing from the crematorium informing her that they had just completed a major round of renovations and upgrades, and inviting her to come to an open house and cocktail hour. Seriously?? It seems about as appealing as revisiting a funeral parlor after they got a new paint job.

In any case, they raved about their new facilities, including improved incinerators, and were asking all of their valued customers to come have a drink and take a celebratory tour. There was even a pamphlet addressing potential questions, such as, “Can I watch while my pet is cremated?” Has anyone ever actually asked to watch Fido get burned to a crisp?? And would anyone actually watch, if given permission to do so?? It sounds like a terrible skit from SNL, but it’s true.

Met up with friends on Sunday, and took blankets, meat, and a grill to a park, just a typical summer afternoon in Zurich. The next day, we took a friend’s visitors to the quintessential Swiss restaurant in town, and, having decided that we had overloaded on greasy, grilled sausages, we opted instead for… greasy, grilled ribs, and greasy, grilled meat on a sword. Yes, they serve meat on a sword here. Beat that.

19 June 2007

2007-06-19T13:15:00.000+02:00

According to The Economist, in 2007, Zurich is the world’s sixth most expensive city to live in, and New York is the most expensive American city, coming in at 28th worldwide. San Francisco and Chicago are even further down the charts than New York, and the rest of the States are even cheaper. You can imagine, then, the sticker shock that most American expats experience when moving to Zurich. Only those of us who came from New York or London were able to look at real estate listings without gasping, and all of us were surprised at the “reverse Costco effect” when shopping – it seems like in Switzerland, you get half the quantity for twice the price.

The difference has been magnified even further in recent years because of the weak dollar. As much as I disapprove of Dubya and his foreign policy (and pretty much everything else he’s done), his ineptitude in managing the American economy has increased the relative value of my salary here, which is paid in Swiss Francs.

Mercer Consulting does an annual survey on which cities are the best to live in, and for at least the past six years, Zurich has been #1 on the list. You can check back further, if you want, but that seems to be a pretty unequivocal vote by Mercer for Zurich. The survey is based on a bunch of criteria: sanitation, disease, health care, pollution, potable water, and “the presence of harmful animal or insects,” are heavily stressed, but they also consider factors like banking, crime, political stability, education, transportation, housing, and natural disasters.

So basically, the survey is telling us that Zurich is really clean, you can drink the water and breathe the air, and you won’t be mauled by a bear or swarmed by poisonous centipedes. (Although the breathing thing is debatable, if you’ve ever been in a Swiss bar, where the smoky air probably causes lung cancer by the fourth breath).

Oh yeah, also, you won’t get carjacked during a tornado while driving your kids between your lovely home and their modern school. This all makes Zurich the best place to live on earth. Although I agree that Zurich’s a great place to live, I still think that the fact that I can’t get a really good bagel and then take the tram home at 1 a.m. should count against it, somehow.

While we’re talking about surveys, Mercer did a survey to see how much vacation time the average worker gets per year in different countries. The average American employee who has been with a company for ten years gets 25 days per year (including fifteen vacation days and ten paid holidays) – but we all know that the average American employee has not been with his or her current company for ten years, and many American workers (my dad, for example) don’t actually take all of their vacation, anyway.

In Finland, on the other hand, employers are legally required to give all employees at least 30 vacation days per year, plus about fourteen paid holidays. That’s two months off every year! When I thought about it, though, they probably need it up there. The winters are long and dark, and if you won’t see the sun for a few months, you’re going to want to go somewhere else for a while.

But still, two months. Wow, that’s some potential quality of life. I wonder if they often get swarmed by poisonous centipedes up there.

Editor's Note

2007-06-13T12:00:00.000+02:00

I'll post again next week. It's been a busy travelling, hosting, birthday partying, jobhunting season...

7 June 2007

2007-06-07T11:03:00.000+02:00

Two friends and I spent a long weekend in Vilnius the other week. For those of you who don’t know where Vilnius is, it’s in Lithuania. We knew very little about the city before we booked the tickets, but they were relatively cheap, and all the flights to better-known cities were very expensive for the holiday weekend. The Monday holiday in question is called Whit Monday in English, and is celebrated the day after Pentecost, which has something to do with being fifty days after Easter. In any case, it’s a national holiday here, so we wanted to go somewhere new.

Before going to Vilnius, we did some quick Googling and found out that they have a “the only statue in the world honoring Frank Zappa,” which we wryly joked would end up being the highlight of our weekend. Luckily, considering that the “statue” was a stainless steel pole emblazoned with Frank Zappa’s name, there was much more to see and do in Vilnius – the best way to describe it is that it’s the kind of town people are hoping to see when they go to Prague, minus the overwhelming throngs of tourists and jaded locals. Basically, visit Vilnius before everyone else does.

In fact, the tourist industry may need a bit more development in Vilnius – the woman in the tourist office (which, incidentally, was poorly denoted and hard to find), though friendly, had never heard of several of the museums we had read about, and was unable to give us directions. A guy who played violin in the street next to a few of the most popular restaurants in town only knew two songs – he'll have to work on expanding his repertoire before the rest of the tourists show up, because listening to two songs on repeat through a two-hour meal is not likely to predispose people to generosity.

Despite being a small city that has only fairly recently emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, and which hasn’t yet gotten its share of the European tourist market, Vilnius is beautifully restored and boasts several well-curated museums. There are literally dozens of huge churches (I don’t know how they all have decent-sized congregations, since the town is quite small), and there were once over a hundred synagogues (resulting in Vilnius’s reputation as a local Jerusalem), until the Nazis and later the Soviets showed up – now there is only one synagogue left. If that’s not depressing enough, we also went to the KGB Museum (detailing the oppression brought by the Soviets) and the Holocaust Museum.

The juxtaposition of Vilnius, past and present, was particularly jarring as we, being tourists, usually went from museums with exhibits on oppression and starvation to eating huge, Lithuanian meals of bacon-studded potato pancakes. We skipped the boiled pig ear, “pork hand,” “boletus,” “curdled milk,” and pickled fish, and didn’t have room to try zeppelins (potato dumplings filled with meat and covered with bacon and curdled milk).

There was also an international folk music festival while we were there, and I got dragged into waltzing with a smiling old man in traditional Lithuanian costume, which was a surreal moment.

Perhaps the most surreal moment of the weekend occurred one afternoon when the three of us – two Americans and a German who all live in Switzerland – were walking down a nearly deserted street in Lithuania. A police-escorted motorcade came zooming towards us, and the Empress of Japan smiled and did a Queen of England-style wave at us through her open car window. The Japanese Emperor was in town while we were there, and we just happened to cross paths with his entourage as we were between sights. It was an international moment, It’s a Small World-style

Editor's Note

2007-06-06T12:00:00.000+02:00

Oops, Internet will be down for the day, so I'll have to update Thursday, sorry...

Editor's Note

2007-06-05T12:00:00.000+02:00

Had a friend in town for a long weekend, and US taxes are calling, so I'll post on Wednesday, hopefully.

30 May 2007

2007-05-30T12:00:00.000+02:00

I spent a long weekend in Vilnius, but that will have to wait. So much travel, so little blog-space! St. Petersburg is many things that Zurich is not – it’s big, it’s chaotic, it’s noisy, and it’s dirty. The population of St. Petersburg is almost two-thirds of the entire population of Switzerland. It’s not as populous as New York, but I’ve been Swissified, so it was a bit overwhelming, but very exciting.

St. Petersburg is huge – the subway is unfathomably deep underground, and the trains go for long stretches at high speed between stops – unlike in Zurich, there’s no debate between walking or waiting for the next train. You never know exactly when the train will come – there is no set schedule, and although there are timers on the platforms, they only tell you when the last train left. The trains run very frequently, though, so you don’t have to stand there for too long thinking, “If only I hadn’t stopped tie my shoe, I would have caught the train.”

Another strange thing is that a lot of the subway stations have safety doors instead of platforms, so you wait in what appears to be a hallway with heavy-duty elevator doors every few meters. When a train arrives, you don’t see it, but the safety doors open. You hop in as quickly as possible once the train doors open, because the safety doors slam shut with enough force to make you question their usefulness as “safety” doors. Once you’re in the train, you often can’t see the stations for more than a few seconds (because of the safety doors), and all of the station names are in Cyrillic, so it can be quite, er, exciting trying to get where you want to go.

There are hundreds of buses that run on tangled routes. The drivers speak only Russian, you get in, pass them some money, and they hurtle through city streets unfamiliar to confused travelers like me. Where does bus K-113 go? I have no idea, I just hope it’s going in roughly the same direction I want to go. And then there’s the practice that my friend and I dubbed “hitchcabbing,” which we did once while we were there. Basically, if you stick your hand out, palm down, while standing next to the street, somebody will stop. It’s usually not a cab. A lot of people in St. Petersburg earn some extra cash by picking up random people and driving them where they want to go. You get a car to stop, pop your head in, tell them where you’re going, negotiate a price, get in, and hope you didn’t just make a huge mistake.

There are tons of museums, some beautiful, some bizarre – one even has a collection of babies with birth defects, preserved for display. Yes, they have pickled, deformed babies in jars. That was less disturbing, however, than the stern warnings we read about drinking the tap water. Apparently, the tap water in St. Petersburg is so full of heavy metals and critters that even the locals don’t drink it. We were warned to use bottled water, even for brushing our teeth, for fear of catching a fun little parasite that is impervious to antibiotics, can withstand being boiled for up to ten minutes, and which can remain active for years after the initial infection. Eek.

There were many things that we could hardly fathom – the universal use of nylons and stockings by all women, regardless of whether they were wearing shorts, skirts, sandals, or flip-flops; the use of Russian dressing on foods ranging from pizza to sandwiches; the fact that we walked over 35 miles (56 km), despite having taken trams, subways, and buses for the “long” stretches; the strange feeling of watching the sun set at 11:30 p.m. – and many things I didn’t even mention here. It was an amazing weekend, and worth the angst over getting our Russian visas, which only arrived the morning of our flight out of Zurich.

Editor's Note

2007-05-29T12:00:00.000+02:00

Still tired from Vilnius, so for now, there are pictures up from St. Petersburg, and I'll post on Wednesday :)

23 May 2007

2007-05-23T12:16:00.000+02:00

Where to even begin? I don’t think the extra-long weekend in Helsinki and St. Petersburg will fit in one entry, so it will have to be at least a two-part special. Let’s start with Helsinki, since that’s where we went first. We stayed at a Finnish friend’s apartment, and arrived there late at night. We opened the door to her apartment, which led to… another door, about 18 inches in from the first door. This door-in-a-door thing seemed odd, but it showed up in our hotel in St. Petersburg, as well, so maybe it’s a regional quirk, intended for storing wet shoes, umbrellas, or sleds (which is what our friend’s subletter was keeping in the inter-door space).

We closed the curtains to keep out the light (very important, since at this time of year in Helsinki, it’s light past 11 p.m. and it gets light again at 4 a.m., and summer solstice is still a month away), and went to sleep. We got up the next morning to find our way to a salon (haircuts rank high on the list of things to do outside of Switzerland, due to the astronomical cost and high probability of getting a charming mullet at Swiss salons), and as we made our way there, we noticed that the vast majority of the population in Helsinki is blond. Naturally blond.

This observation was confirmed by our hair stylist, who told me that my dark hair was very exotic and unusual (tell that to the billions of people with black or brown hair, and to the millions of them who dye their “exotic” hair blond). After we left the salon, we noticed that many people in Helsinki had “backwards” roots – their hair was dyed brown or black, and the roots were coming in blond. I spent the remaining time in Finland feeling very special and unique, indeed, until we reached Russia, where, as in the other places I’ve been, blondes supposedly have more fun.

Finnish is apparently one of the most difficult languages in the world – they have all sorts of declensions and conjugations, and they use so many umlauts and repeated letters that it seems like they’re just trying to make it more impenetrable to the rest of the world. A sample phrase in Finnish will show you what I mean: “ja käyttää saatuja tuloksia tukena päätettäessä ravintolakilpailutuksesta.”

Finland’s population is well under six million, so all Finns learn additional languages in order to communicate with the rest of the non-Finnish world. The first foreign language that they learn (which is also used on all of their signs, underneath the Finnish) is Swedish, a very judicious choice, seeing as Sweden has a population of over nine million, meaning that a Swedish-speaking Finn can communicate with almost fifteen million people, about a quarter of a percent of the world’s population! To be fair, Sweden and Finland are neighbors, so I suppose Swedish is quite useful for many Finns. After Swedish, most Finns learn English, which allows them to talk to a larger percentage of the world’s non-blond population.

One of my favorite things to do in a new country is to browse for unusual products. The tourist bureau had brochures advertising a necklace that was commissioned to commemorate the historic win of Finland’s heavy metal monster group Lordi in Eurovision 2006. Have you seen Lordi? The three best products for sale in the Finnish grocery store we went to were Lordi gummy candy, instant strawberry soup (just add hot water) and canned braised reindeer. We later saw canned bear and canned elk, as well. Our Finnish friend says that such unconventional (by American norms) meats are standard fare – her family freezes half of a reindeer or half of an elk every year to eat during the winter months.

15 May 2007

2007-05-15T14:45:00.000+02:00

When I lived in New York, and before that, when I sang in college and did international tours, my friends and I used to blow of steam every once in a while by imposing ourselves on a poor, unsuspecting karaoke bar. Because of the nature of karaoke in New York (and apparently also in Toronto), everyone cheered and sang along when we would do a screaming, jumping, heartfelt rendition of “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and no one really minded that we were standing on our chairs and sounding like a pack of rabid animals. That’s what you do at karaoke, right? You go with friends, pick the loudest songs from your youth, and howl them out in a show of friendly bonding.

Not in Switzerland. The Swiss take their karaoke seriously. Unless you go to karaoke at an expat-dominated bar, the mike is dominated by people who favor Celine Dion ballads to show off their vocal prowess. I went to one karaoke night when “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” and the Titanic song were each sung twice. At Swiss karaoke nights, one person earnestly belts it out into the microphone while the rest of the bar politely listens. Although the singers are sometimes impressive, it’s not the rowdy bonding experience that I’m used to.

This past Friday, a few friends and I decided to go to karaoke night at an expat bar, so our audience was decidedly less staid than the patrons of the more Swiss karaoke bars, but even so, I think they were a bit taken aback by our, how should I put it, enthusiasm. We had at least two people on each of the three mikes for every song, and we ran around trying to get the less stunned-looking members of the crowd to join in. Near the end of the evening, one fellow karaoke participant, searching for something nice to say, complimented our English (keep in mind that we were all American or Canadian), and another singer said that he admired our "energy."

The next night, I watched the Eurovision finals for the first time. Eurovision is sort of like Star Search for all of Europe. Every country sends one group or singer, their top pick, to compete, and the top 24 countries make it to the finals. People vote by phone or SMS, and then each country then submits its people’s votes in a strange quasi- electoral college voting system. After having watched the contest, I have to say that I have no idea why they get so serious about their karaoke here, because the performers on Eurovision, their countries’ best, were mostly exceptional only for their "energy."

My favorites, for your viewing pleasure, were the Ukraine (which came in second in spite of, or perhaps because of the cross-dressing Elton John-type singer and his knee-socked go-go boys), Sweden (note the lead singer’s flashy necklace and the guitar player’s 1980’s mother-of-the-bride shirt), France (that black thing around the guy’s neck is a stuffed cat), and Greece (he shimmies better than Ricky Martin).

After much fuss and angst, we finally secured our visas to go to Russia! They arrived this morning, just in time for our evening departure. Whew. The people at the Russian embassy and consulate in Switzerland rarely answer their phone, and they are rather hostile and unhelpful (independently confirmed by my dentist, who also happens to be going there this month, and who had similar difficulties getting a visa). Everything I’ve ever heard about Russian bureaucracy and efficiency has been proven in our dealings with the hotel and the embassy, but I’m hoping that all the amazing things I’ve heard about Russia are equally true. We leave today for Helsinki, Finland, and then spend the weekend in St. Petersburg!

8 May 2007

2007-05-08T12:03:00.000+02:00

This past weekend, my friend (who is from Kentucky) hosted a Kentucky Derby party. He served Southern food and mint juleps, and we used my TiVo and Slingbox to watch the race (I picked the 2nd and 3rd place finishers, so I came out about $5 ahead).

It seemed that half the conversations involved explanations of the Kentucky Derby, TiVo, and Slingbox, so that throughout the evening, you would hear snippets of conversation, “it’s the most important horse race in the U.S.,” “Have you heard of Secretariat?” or “it’s a box that streams live TV to your computer.” Strange to think that such an established event in the States is virtually unknown here – a German friend asked me if it involved chickens, which confused me until I realized his only point of reference was Kentucky Fried Chicken. A significant number of conversations also involved an explanation of grits, “Well, it’s sort of like polenta, I guess?”

Anyways, a friend and I are going to Helsinki and St. Petersburg next week. Well, at least we hope we’re going. It all depends on the Russian embassy. We tried repeatedly calling them in Bern, only to get busy signals every time. We had assumed that, since their website was in English, that someone in the office would speak English. When my friend finally got through to the office in Bern, the man only spoke Russian and German, no English, and he refused to answer any of her questions, asking her instead whether she had looked at the website. The official embassy website didn’t have the information we were looking for (although it did have choice sections like “What is Russian Visa”), but I guess there was no way for the man to know, since it was in English. I called their consulate in Geneva, and was able to get the necessary information in French.

With dubious hope, we wired money to the account she had specified, and mailed our passports, visa invitations (from the hotel), itineraries, pictures, and visa applications to them, and will just have to hope that they return them in time for our departure next week. The Russian visa application for Americans is quite extensive, asking, among other things, for a list of all countries visited in the last ten years, and the dates of the visits. For me, that’s 28 countries, and there’s no way it was going to fit in the space provided. They also asked whether we had any special training in explosives or nuclear devices. I’m guessing the right answers to those questions would be “No.”

This trip was planned to use up one of the Swiss holiday weekends, which are front-loaded, so that we have lots of vacations built into the first half of the year. Although I fully appreciate the abundance of long weekends, it does make travel planning a bit frantic, since this year, May has three long weekends. The first was spent in Strasbourg, the second will be spent in St. Petersburg (assuming we get our passports and visas back in time) and Helsinki, and the third was unplanned until recently. Decent fares are hard to come by on holiday weekends, since everyone scrambles to head out for a break.

But we found one. Vilnius, Lithuania.

We knew very little about the place before booking, other than the fact that we had never been there and the tickets were reasonably priced. Some quick research has turned up the fact that it is home to the only statue in the world honoring Frank Zappa. Not to be outdone, St. Petersburg boasts a collection of pickled babies in jars. This is going to be an interesting month.

2 May 2007

2007-05-02T17:45:00.000+02:00

Sorry for the delay, I took a last-minute trip to France, because it was a long weekend, and it looked like rain in Switzerland. How’s that for an excuse, eh? In any case, after spending the entire afternoon and evening outdoors on Saturday, three friends and I decided to rent a car on Sunday to go to Italy. Sunday morning, we decided that the town we were going to go to in Italy wasn’t very convenient, so we went to France, instead. Strasbourg, to be precise.

We packed the car with four people, a dog, four backpacks, three cameras, enough snacks to supply an entire kindergarten class. I considered picking up a package of trail mix, not because I had any particular desire to eat trail mix, but because the German term for it has always amused me – literally translated, it’s called “student feed,” the food you give students, just like “chicken feed” is the food you give chickens. Upon further reflection, I bought cookies, instead. We had no maps; instead, we put our faith in the GPS system installed in the rental car. The GPS woman proved to be quite stubborn and difficult to work with, and very vocal about her opinions, but in the end, we followed her instructions. She was all we had. But, it worked out, we made it.

Given all the hubbub in the States about passports and crossing borders and so on, it’s remarkable how lax the borders are in Europe. Border patrol between EU countries is almost non-existent. The border police aren’t allowed to stop vehicles unless they have a particular reason – such as an international manhunt, I guess. When we crossed from Germany into France, there wasn’t even a person manning the booth.

Between Switzerland and the EU (non-Europeans often forget that Switzerland is its own little island in the middle of an EU sea), border control seems to be purely for show. As we crossed from Switzerland to Germany, a man in a military beret glanced at the car and waved us on. We could have been illegal immigrants, and he wouldn’t have known. We could have had a bazooka, ten migrant workers, three terrorists, four kilos of crack, (and a partridge in a pear tree) and he wouldn’t have cared. On the way back into Switzerland, they were just as uninterested in checking our passports, human or canine.

Yes, dogs have passports in Europe, so that they can cross borders without being quarantined. Dogs also do all kinds of other things that are usually reserved for humans, at least in the States. Fiver comes to work with me almost every day, and he came to France and stayed in the hotel (the desk clerk seemed surprised when I asked whether dogs were allowed). In restaurants in Switzerland, waiters sometimes bring him water before I’ve even had a chance to order a drink for myself. Last week, I took him to a restaurant where the waiter even brought out a bowl of dog food so that Fiver could eat dinner at the table like the rest of us.

And finally, an “only in Switzerland” moment for your entertainment. Recently, Zurich has been installing lots of 24-hour garbage drop-off points around town, which are basically underground reservoirs topped with lidded metal tubes. You lift the lid, drop in a trash bag, and it drops down the tube into the reservoir. A kid fell into one of the trash reservoirs, and was extracted with minimal fuss, because, being Swiss, the garbage authorities had anticipated the fact that a kid would eventually fall in, and had conducted drills and exercises to ensure that they could quickly and efficiently get the kid out of a garbage chute once it happened. There won’t be a Baby Jessica story in Zurich any time soon.

24 April 2007

2007-04-24T15:36:00.000+02:00

It’s 2007, and Zurich has finally decided to cave in and open up a shopping mall. This is a country where, until a few years ago, it was illegal to have discounts or sales outside of certain government-regulated time periods, for fear of having unfair price competition, and where it is still illegal to have stores open on Sundays (except for in airports and train stations, or except for three specified Sundays each year, for those stores not located in a train station or airport). And now there’s a mall. Swiss style. Apparently, it was so mind-boggling that when it first opened a month ago, it was impossible to actually shop at the mall, because it was so crowded with people who went just to stand and stare.

The stores in the new mall close at 8 p.m. (most stores close even earlier), and are closed on Sundays. And as is practically required in every gathering of stores here, there is a large branch of one of the two major grocery stores. There is also a church, because we all know that that’s why people go to the mall – to pray for good deals and short lines. There’s a library for those who don’t want to buy anything, and a hotel for people who want to live at the mall. There’s a movie theatre with nine screens (which is quite large, considering that the main downtown theatre has four screens). For those patrons who feel that 8 p.m. is just too early to call it a night at the mall, there’s a nightclub.

Summer time is concert time in Switzerland. Although it’s a country of only six-odd million people, Switzerland has numerous music festivals in the summer, attracting all kinds of musicians of varying levels of international fame. I’ve seen Sigur Ros, Jose Gonzalez, Death Cab for Cutie, Royksopp, and Metric here, and I’ll probably see Bjork, Damien Rice, David Gray, Arcade Fire, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah this summer. Not bad.

What puzzles me about the summer music festivals is their nomenclature. For instance, the most famous summer festival is the Montreux Jazz Festival, which is where I saw Sigur Ros last year, where the Chemical Brothers, the Beastie Boys, the B-52’s, and the Pet Shop Boys are playing this year. My knowledge of jazz is pretty basic, mostly covering Monk, Ella, Billie, Louis, and Duke, but I’m pretty sure that “Sabotage” and “Time Warp” don’t get played regularly in jazz clubs. Maybe it should be called the Montreux Not-Necessarily-Jazz Festival?

Another big music festival is held in Lucerne. Van Morrison played there a couple years ago. David Gray will be there this year. It’s a well-known venue for established artists. And it’s called the Blue Balls Festival. Seriously.

Anyways, speaking of summer plans, a friend and I will be taking a trip to Helsinki and St. Petersburg soon. We found out that in order to get Russian visas, we have to give the government our flight and hotel information, our hotel needs to invite us to come to Russia as tourists, and then we can get our visas, after we’ve already booked our tickets and paid for our hotel. Sounds a bit suspect to me, especially since it involves lots of websites that end in “.ru,” which in any other context would make me think I was being scammed. I emailed a few hotels (in English, since my Russian is non-existent) to try to get a reservation. One hotel emailed me back in Russian. I translated their response online, and it’s clear that they understood my English inquiry, since they responded appropriately, so I’m just wondering why they responded in Russian. Or maybe they’re using online translations, as well, and we’ll show up and find out that we’ve ordered two ducks and an armchair, instead of three nights in a hotel room. Wish us luck.

18 April 2007

2007-04-18T14:55:00.000+02:00

I got back Monday evening from my trip to San Francisco, where I indulged in everything I miss out on here in Zurich – family, old friends, food, shopping, and speaking fast English to anyone who will listen. I got back to Zurich just in time to catch the tail end of Sechselaüten, the Swiss semi-equivalent of Groundhog Day, which, as I’ve described before, involves a gasoline-soaked, explosive-stuffed snowman effigy, costumed men throwing fish, apples, and rolls, fake Arabs in brown-face, and (like every good Swiss celebration) a parade with enough marching bands to populate a small country (I’ve come to believe that all Swiss men, in addition to having a military-issue rifle under their bed, also have a brass instrument tucked away in their closet).

After dropping my stuff off at my apartment, I stopped at my friends’ place to say hi to my local crew, who were celebrating the fact that the head of the Böögg (the burning snowman) exploded in just over twelve minutes, which supposedly means that we’ll have a warm summer. I handed out a few American goodies that various people had requested I bring back for them – contact lens solution, soy chips, and toilet bowl cleaner (I also brought back vast quantities of candy, beef jerky, dried mangoes, and cereal).

Then, I proceeded to instill envy in all of them as I regaled them with my doings during my ten days in the States. “I went to Costco! I went to Safeway and Walgreen’s! I had two Cinnabons! I went to Banana Republic and Old Navy, and the salespeople were so friendly! I ate all kinds of food – Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Mexican, French, mint chocolate chip ice cream! Everything was so cheap! I used the icemaker in my sister’s freezer! The washing machine was so big that I couldn’t even fill it!” Sometimes I wonder if I live in Switzerland or an alien planet.

My ticket was booked using some of my dad’s frequent flyer miles, and because coach was booked out by the time I bought my ticket, I flew business. I know this is obvious, but it’s a different world in front of that curtain – seats that recline more than three inches, so much leg room that it’s nearly impossible to kick the seat in front of you, warmed nuts, ice cream, eight movies, steak, complimentary toothpaste and booties, extra baggage allowance, priority seating, and the assurance that your bags will come within five minutes of deplaning. If all seats were business class, I’d fly a lot more.

It’s probably a good thing they aren’t all business class, because I’m not sure I really should be flying any more than I already am. I sat down and calculated all the flights I’ve taken since the day I started work in Zurich, and they total up to approximately 120,000 miles, which is equal to roughly fifteen trips around the world, one weekend at a time, in less than three years. Al Gore probably doesn’t approve of me.

Speaking of Al Gore, when I got back to Zurich, my friends informed me that for the previous week, it had been unseasonably warm, with temperatures going as high as 78 F (25 C). Keep in mind that Zurich is not a particularly hot town, and we usually only have a couple weeks each year where sleeping without air conditioning is actually uncomfortable. To be pushing 80 degrees in early April is a pretty good sign that I really ought to be flying less, or at least buying some carbon offsets to assuage the climate gods. Just don’t tell them about the trip I’ve got planned to Helsinki and St. Petersburg in May, or about the fact that I’m trying to decide what to do with my next two long weekends. Greece looks tempting.

4 April 2007

2007-04-04T14:51:00.000+02:00

I went to the bank to pull out some dollars in preparation for my upcoming trip back to the States, and while I was waiting in line, I started thinking about Swiss banks. Swiss banks really make quite a business of holding onto your money, moving your money, converting your money, and making money off of your money.

Unlike American banks, which only accept foreign currency in bills, Swiss banks also accept coins. Money is money, and change adds up, especially if they skim off a percentage on the exchange. Swiss banks also keep an impressive array of foreign currencies on hand, so that you can walk into a bank and immediately withdraw money not only in francs, dollars, and pounds, but also in baht, forint, and lira. Euros are even easier, since they are dispensed at ATMs just like Swiss francs. It’s great for last-minute people like me, since American banks typically require a week’s notice for ordering foreign currency.

Although there are the usual hurdles for opening a new account at a Swiss bank, the usual forms and identification verification sort of stuff, once you’re a customer at a bank, they make it ridiculously simple to open additional accounts. I walked into the bank one day to inquire about opening an account in dollars, to make it easier to transfer money from Switzerland back to the US without dealing with fluctuating exchange rates. I expected to fill out at least one form. Instead, the man at the counter swiped my ATM card, had me enter my PIN, typed a few things, then looked up and said that the new account was ready and waiting, just like that. And, of course, that it would incur a small monthly fee.

Ah, yes, the fees that come with Swiss banking. “Free checking” and credit cards with no annual fee are foreign concepts here. Free online banking? Nope. Looking at how much money I’m charged in fees here, I have to wonder how American banks can compete, if they’re giving everything away for free.

Then again, maybe it’s a cultural thing – if America is the land of the free, then Switzerland is the land of the surcharge. Even customer hotlines for orders, complaints, questions, or service are toll lines. That’s right, you have to pay to listen to hold music while you wait to order a computer, or if you have trouble with the computer and need to get it serviced. That doesn’t really add up for me – why charge people by the minute for the privilege of buying your product? And if you have a customer who is dissatisfied with a malfunctioning product and needs service, do you think that charging them byt he minute to listen to Muzak is going to make them any happier?

Anyways, back to the banks. One thing that always impresses me is that the bank tellers always speak at least three languages, if not more. How many bank tellers in the States can speak anything other than English? I think there are some American tellers that I’ve come across who didn’t even speak English all that well. It’s sobering to realize that I don’t even have the qualifications for one of the most basic jobs here. That holds true for a lot of people working in public positions in Zurich – the people running security at the airport, the ticket sellers for the tram, the police – most of them speak two, three, or four languages pretty fluently, even though their jobs aren’t necessarily the ones that are generally thought of as requiring a lot of education.

I leave Friday morning for San Francisco, where I’ll stay for a week and a half, so the next update will be in about two weeks.

27 March 2007

2007-03-27T14:34:00.000+02:00

Even after being here for almost three years, I am still amazed by some of the things that are done here. Just when I think that I’ve seen it all, I’ll come across something that makes me do a quadruple-take. Last Tuesday evening, I was on my way to have a drink with friends, and there was a man playing the piano at the tram stop. The outdoor tram stop. It was cold, it was dark, and he had somehow brought his own piano to the tram stop to play the blues. In other cities, people bring their own saxophone or guitar to play for spare change. Here, there’s a guy who apparently wheels his piano over the cobblestones and tram tracks to bring his music to the people. I was tempted to stay longer to see if his fingers would get cold, or if he would decide to take his piano elsewhere, but it’s a good thing I didn’t, since he was still playing his heart out when I was on my way home, three hours later.

I met about a dozen friends at the bar that night for drinks, and we ordered an assortment of food and beverages, which were shared in various combinations. One thing that always amazes me here is the absolute willingness of waiters and waitresses to divide the bill for a large party into separate checks – you can eat dinner with ten friends, and the waiter will go from person to person, totaling up their individual tabs and making change for each one.

This also holds true in bars. At the end of the evening, the waitress patiently figured out each person’s share based on what they told her they had had: “Half an order of meatballs, one-fifth of a pitcher of margaritas, and a glass of wine,” “one bottle of beer, one draft beer, one-third of an order of nachos,” “one Coke, one glass of wine, one-third of an order of nachos, and half an order of meatballs.” Their forbearance is even more astonishing when you take into consideration the fact that tipping is completely optional in Switzerland (on the other hand, waitstaff actually make a living wage here, so it probably it all evens out in the end).

Spring is finally here – the first day of spring was last week, which the Swiss weather gods observed by sending down a big, slushy snowstorm that lasted two days. The Swiss are usually very good about clearing snow and slush from the streets and keeping everything running on time, but for some reason, perhaps because the Swiss people were unable to comprehend and counteract a snow storm in the spring, everything was running in chaos (for Zurich). The first morning of the storm, I waited for the tram for almost half an hour, despite the fact that the tram is supposed to come precisely every seven minutes! I finally reached the office in a state of Swissified shock. Daylight Saving Time started this past weekend, and the weather finally decided to act more appropriately, much to everyone’s relief.

I’m leaving for California in less than two weeks, and my brain has woken up and started reminding me of all things American that I’ve been missing out on that I need to cram in while I’m there. I’ll go to Costco and load up on beef jerky, kettle corn, Twizzlers, Reese's Cups, and instant oatmeal. I’ll go to Dunkin Donuts and have chocolate-covered donuts. I’ll make my friends here jealous by eating an entire box of Girl Scout cookies. And I’ll go to Cinnabon and have a big, goopy cinnamon roll with a tub of extra frosting.

I checked into the possibility of getting a Cinnabon here, actually, and there are a fair number of Cinnabon stores around the world, but none of them are in Switzerland. Iraq and Oman have Cinnabon, but Switzerland doesn’t. There is no justice in this world.

20 March 2007

2007-03-20T15:00:00.000+01:00

I’ve been to Italy seven times now, in all four seasons and in seven different cities, and I still have never had to use an umbrella while I’ve been there. Regardless of the season, coming back to Zurich from Italy usually entails putting on an extra layer or three of clothing and having an umbrella or rain jacket handy. This weekend was no exception. In Rome, we wore sunglasses and t-shirts, but after getting off the plane in Zurich, we put on rain jackets and heavy sweaters. It’s snowing today, that special Zurich brand of slushy snow that never accumulates more than a couple of inches and makes unfortunate splashes whenever you trudge through the streets. It’s not just an Italy vs. Switzerland thing, though, even the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland enjoys a warmer and sunnier climate than the German-speaking region, which makes me think that the weather gods, if there are any, must prefer pasta to potatoes.

It seems as if there are almost as many churches in Rome as there are Starbucks in New York, and we went into a few of them over the weekend. One church boasts that it has the heads of Peter and Paul, other churches have fingers, arms, pieces of skin, and other scraps of various people, long dead. Further research shows that another church in Italy has almost the entire hide of Bartholomew, who was skinned alive. Other churches around Europe claim to have other pieces of the unfortunate Bartholomew.

Assuming that all of these body parts are as advertised, it’s a bit crazy to imagine how it all happened. Take our friend Bartholomew. After he died, someone thought, "He was a great guy, I'm going to keep him." Back then, without walk-in meat lockers, Bart’s remains probably started rotting pretty quickly. Yet this person kept them until he had a talk with some other folks, and then they chopped the body up into little pieces and carried or sent them to their eventual destinations? Alternatively, were the remains all kept in one place until much later, when some priest decided to ship Bart bits to other churches to keep his memory alive? I can’t imagine anyone doing that today. Was Mother Teresa divvied up in anticipation of her possible future sainthood, or will that happen later?

We also went to the Capuchin crypt, which is made up of five rooms decorated with the bones of 4,000 Capuchin monks who died between the 1500s and the 1800s. They didn't just pile the bones up, which is what I had been expecting, they decorated with the bones. It was as if they had run out of ornate wallpaper with scrollwork and flowers, so they made the patterns with ribs, jawbones, and vertebrae, instead. It was like walking into someone’s grandmother’s apartment gone seriously morbid. The bones had originally been buried, but were dug up, cleaned off, pulled apart, and arranged. If those 4,000 monks had been told that one day, their ribs would become 3-D wallpaper, and their femurs would be stacked into peaked arches interspersed with their skulls, would they have changed careers?

On the way back, we realized just how accustomed we’ve grown to the Swiss way of life. We frantically boarded the train to the Rome airport, afraid that we would miss it, and were taken aback when it left five minutes late. Upon our arrival at the airport an hour before our flight (which would have been more than enough time in Zurich), we saw something very strange – a forty-minute line to go through security, and another line to get through passport control! We were flabbergasted, and would have missed our flight, had we not, with much begging, cut in front of hundreds of other people.

13 March 2007

2007-03-13T16:42:00.000+01:00

It’s March, which means that it’s tax time in Switzerland. Lucky American expats like myself get to file taxes twice a year: once with Switzerland and once with the IRS. The only thing more annoying than shuffling through pages of fine print about deductions and exclusions is shuffling through pages of fine print about deductions and exclusions twice, once in a language you can hardly handle in its everyday form, much less in its tax legalese form.

Some Swiss companies deduct tax at source, meaning that your take-home paycheck roughly reflects the actual breakdown of money that you get to keep and money that you have to give to the government. That’s the system I was accustomed to in the States. Many Swiss companies, however, decide not to take out tax at source, or to only take a small amount of tax at source, and instead opt to give a thirteenth salary payment, which is then supposed to be used to pay the taxes once they are due. Sort of an odd idea, to have your monthly salary quoted to you, and then realize that you get thirteen months of salary per twelve-month year.

While I'm on the subject of salary, there’s a proposal up for general vote now that would centralize the health care system here, so that everyone would be covered under the same government provider, and insurance premiums would be prorated according to salary. I don’t see how they’ll convince anyone to vote for it. So what they're proposing is, “Let’s make everything less efficient and more expensive by removing all the competition, and let’s charge rich, influential people more money for the same level of government-provided care as everyone else.” Somehow I doubt that will fly.

On the other hand, one thing that does seem quite practical is that in Switzerland, traffic fines are tied to salary, the theory being that when you punish someone for speeding, you want them to actually feel punished, and a rich person has to pay a bigger fine before he feels as punished as a poor person. Of course, I may also be more satisfied with this application of pro-rated payments because I am never in any danger of getting a speeding ticket, given the fact that I don’t drive in Switzerland. I do, however, have to have health insurance. So I await the outcome of the law with bated breath (and bank account), since I am unable to vote here.

It’s a strange feeling, to live somewhere long enough that you know all sorts of minutiae about the place, but to have no official voice or influence. I know when the garbage is collected, I know how often the trams run, I know what day Santa comes to town, I know where to get the best fondue, I know when my favorite summer time bar is open to the public without a cover charge, but I can’t vote for a local representative or have an impact (however small) on elections regarding health insurance or speeding tickets. Taxation without representation, I should start a revolution. On the other hand, it’s not like my interests are being well represented in the States, as evidenced by the fact that expat taxes were hiked up this year, thank you, Dubya.

The last couple of years, I’ve been absurdly pleased that Europe started Daylight Savings Time a week before the States, giving us a week with more sun, but this year, the States started two weeks before us, leaving us with a fortnight of relative darkness. In retaliation, a few friends and I are heading to Rome this weekend, hoping to get some Mediterranean sun and food. To all my friends who are Stateside, you can have your two weeks of sunshine, I'll console myself over gelato at the Colosseum.

6 March 2007

2007-03-06T12:59:00.000+01:00

Sometimes living in Switzerland is like looking at the back cover of Highlights magazine, where you have two pictures that at first glance look the same, but upon closer examination turn out to have some crucial and sometimes absurd differences. Many of the details of life here resemble things that are part of a normal American life, but only if you don’t look too closely.

I recently saw a poster advertising performances of Hamlet here in Zurich, which seemed normal enough until I considered two things, the first being that Shakespeare isn’t part of the literary and theatrical canon of the German-speaking world, and so live performances of Shakespeare are not as common as they are in, say New York or London. The second was the fact that the poster featured a skull, which may sound normal enough, given Hamlet’s monologue with poor Yorick’s skull. The strange thing in this case, the oddity that would appear in the second version of the poster in Highlights, was that there were bananas coming out of the skull’s eyes. It’s been a while since I’ve read Hamlet, but I don’t remember Hamlet’s speech as “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, of bananas coming out of his eyes.”

The American Idol phenomenon has popped up in Switzerland in the form of Swiss Music Star. It’s the same idea – normal people auditioning on national TV to get a recording contract. There are judges, live audiences, viewer voting, and interviews. The contestants go through the same dramatic roller coaster ride of anxiety, anticipation, nervousness, and joy or despair. The key difference lies in the quality of the performances. Granted, Switzerland is a small country, so their audition pool is not very broad or deep, but Simon Cowell would have a field day here. Even when the show has narrowed it down to the top six finalists, allegedly the six best singers in Switzerland, the show still resembles clips from the first audition rounds of American Idol, the funny clips of the talentless people who think they can sing but are sadly mistaken.

Driver’s licenses in Switzerland were recently (a few years ago) changed from old-fashioned paper licenses to state-of-the-art, plastic, hologrammed cards. Seems normal, right? Two big differences – one is that the licenses are good for life, and the other is that you bring in your own picture. Unable to think outside the box, I dutifully brought in a passport-sized picture taken at a photo booth that looks like a standard American driver’s license picture – the color is slightly off, and I look like I’ve been doing hard time for a hard crime. Swiss people, however, knowing that they will be stuck with the photo for the rest of their lives, send in glamour shots with mood lighting and camera-ready makeup.

Easter is coming soon, and just as in the States, if you walk into a grocery store here, there are displays hawking Easter-themed products – chocolate bunnies, fuzzy stuffed ducks, placemats that look like Easter eggs, and so on. A second look, however, reveals two important gaps in the Easter lineup – Peeps and jellybeans. I find it hard to believe that an entire country full of people have celebrated Easter their entire lives without having Peeps – those fluorescent, near-radioactive marshmallow-related, sugar-covered treats that vaguely resemble chicks. And the rock-hard “dragon eggs” that they buy at Easter time are no substitute for the squishy delights of jellybeans. True, they’ve avoided the dreaded black licorice jellybeans, and the unpleasant surprise of the buttered popcorn Jelly Belly, but those risks come with the holiday, don’t they? Not in Switzerland, they don’t.

27 February 2007

2007-02-27T15:00:00.000+01:00

When I was working at the law firm in New York, new associates shared offices with one other associate for a few months before graduating to our own private offices. These spaces, though small and identical, were our own, and we all felt entitled to have them all to ourselves. It was a bit of a surprise, then, when I came to Switzerland and discovered that like most other offices in Switzerland, my office put several people in each (admittedly larger) room. I did some scouting and found out that other friends - engineers, bankers, and consultants – sat in open-plan spaces, sometimes with over a dozen other people.

So I figured, when in (a much cleaner and smaller version of) Rome, do as the Romans (or Swiss) do. I’ve gotten used to sharing office space. When my officemate is sick or on vacation, I have the entire office to myself (well, to myself and my dog, if he’s at work that day), a fact that I much appreciated during the adjustment period. Now, though, it almost gives me the heebie-jeebies. After sharing an office here for almost three years, at one point with three other people, it feels very strange to be alone in the room. Whatever I end up doing next, if it involves my own office and no dogs, it will feel quite foreign, even though that describes pretty much every job I ever pictured myself taking before I moved here.

Speaking of Swiss offices, one strange thing that I’ve learned is that most people working in Swiss offices bring their own personal mug to store in the cabinet in the communal office kitchen. It can be anything, a Starbuck’s mug, a mug with the person’s name on it, a plain mug, but somehow it is clear that no one else should touch that mug. My office, being very international, only partially follows that policy – some people bring in their own mugs, and some people just lay claim to mugs that don’t seem to belong to anyone in particular. In other offices, however, the Rule of the Mug is taken very seriously.

One of my friends, shortly after starting her job at a Swiss company, used a mug from the kitchen cabinet during coffee break, not knowing that that mug belonged to someone. That someone quickly confronted her (and here we thought that the Swiss were so placid, so non-confrontational, so… neutral), and berated her for using his mug. In fact, he continued to berate her even after several apologies and promises never to violate his God-given mug rights again.

As you probably know, last Tuesday was Mardi Gras, which is celebrated and called Fasnacht in the Catholic parts of Switzerland. The typical Fasnacht celebration is family-friendly, and involves marching bands, costumes, and confetti, and, while quite a spectacle, would probably be a bit of a disappointment to beer-guzzling frat boys picturing a live version of Girls Gone Wild.

The Swiss, ever practical, stagger their Fasnacht celebrations by city, so that the major Fasnacht parades and parties don’t conflict with each other. Basel, for instance, is having its big Fasnacht parade tonight, a week after Mardi Gras, when true Catholics are supposed to be done partying and firmly in the midst of Lenten self-deprivation. No other way to do it though, until they find a way for several dozen marching bands to be in multiple places at the same time.

Zurich celebrated Fasnacht last weekend, so my apartment, which is situated in prime parade territory, was, er, serenaded all weekend with the discordant strains of Guggenmusik (what the marching bands play for Fasnacht, which is probably Swiss German for "Oh my God, do they really call that music?") played, at one point, by people dressed as large yellow chickens.

20 February 2007

2007-02-20T15:25:00.000+01:00

Had a quick weekend in Paris, and even though it was still the middle of February, it was sunny and warm (high of about 15 C / 60 F). I love Paris in the (global warming-induced) springtime. It was one of those little collisions of worlds. There was a friend from high school, a friend from law school, an ex-expat I had met in Zurich, and a coworker. Everyone seemed to get along well, and as far as I know, no blood was shed, nor were any terrible secrets revealed.

We got to our hotel on Friday night, and were informed that our room was on the fifth floor (in America it would be called the sixth floor). We headed for the elevator, and if there is a prize for Smallest Elevator in the World, I think our hotel has a good shot. When I first moved to Zurich, I thought that the elevator in my apartment building was very small. It fits three people, or maybe four, if none of them are overweight, and if they are wearing deodorant and don’t mind full-body sardine-style contact with the other passengers. Then I saw some of the other elevators around town that fit only three people in a tight squeeze. But our hotel’s elevator barely fit two of us with our overnight bags. The placard in the elevator warned us not to load it with more than three people or 240 kg (528 lbs.), but I have no idea where it might suggest we could put a third person or extra weight, unless we were to carry him curled up on a platter above our heads.

We unfolded ourselves out of the elevator on the fifth (sixth) floor to look for our room. It seemed a bit odd that Room 13 would be anywhere but the first floor, but we had faith in the desk clerk’s instructions. We lost some of that faith, however, when we noticed the numbers on the doors in the hallway: 40, 39, 38… We almost turned around to look elsewhere before we looked next door to Room 38, and lo and behold, there was Room 13. Quite inexplicable, and completely unlike anything you would see in the precisely organized German-speaking region of Switzerland.

At dinner with some friends, I was asked to translate some of the menu, and upon seeing some of the more exotic items on offer, I was sorely tempted to give fake translations in hopes of inducing them to order the wrong thing. I was merciful, however, and my friends decided against ordering the “pork groin, ear, foot, and tail,” and the “calf head with brains.” I’m sure the dishes are both quite delicious, as French food didn’t get its elite reputation by accident, but we made less adventurous choices, at least this time around. We only had one weekend away from the somewhat bland restaurant scene in Zurich, so I wanted to make the most of it, and pork groin didn’t seem to be the best way to do it.

Did some shopping and got my hair cut over the weekend, in order to save money. I always end up spending money in order to save it, but I would argue that it’s absolutely necessary when you live in a city as expensive as Zurich. For instance, I got a haircut that cost 30 euros (about $40), which in Switzerland would have cost 100 Swiss Francs (about $80). Even more importantly, the stylist didn’t give me a mullet, which is a favorite among stylists here in Zurich.

Sunday was Chinese New Year, and as I walked around Paris, I realized that Paris actually has a large enough Asian population to make the holiday slightly relevant. It was strange seeing Asian men around Paris – the small Asian population of Zurich is overwhelmingly female, mostly Southeast Asian women who married Swiss men. On the same note, it was strange to see Asian (particularly East Asian) women who appeared to be single, professional, and non-mail-order.

13 February 2007

2007-02-13T15:11:00.000+01:00

I came down with a nasty cough for the second time since moving here, and have come to the conclusion that Swiss doctors have a nice little racket going. Both times that I’ve had a horrible cough (not just a polite, ladylike cough, a big, hacking, phlegm-filled cough that keeps me up all night), I’ve gone to the doctor after a week of misery. Both times, the doctors have listened to my cough, told me that they weren’t sure if it was viral or bacterial, and told me to wait a week to see. If the cough was still there a week later, then it was probably bacterial and would therefore warrant treatment. So basically, I paid the doctors to tell me that they weren’t going to do anything about my horrendous cough, and to say that they would happily take more of my money if I came in again for the same cough.

The first time, I went back a week later, still with a miserable cough, and the doctor then decided I had proven my need for antibiotics by (barely) surviving two weeks of people treating me like I had the plague. This time, I’ve accepted the fact that the doctor sent me home with a cheerful recommendation of extra fluids and ginger, and perhaps a repeat visit, but have been carefully (over)-dosing myself with Nyquil, Robitussin, Sudafed, Tylenol, Advil, and whatever other American OTC drugs I have on hand. I have a stash of antibiotics, and I’ll take those if the second week passes without any improvement, and the good doctor can keep his fluids and ginger.

Before I came down with tuberculosis, or whatever this affliction is, I decided I wanted to clean up my apartment a bit. Those of you who know me or have ever been to my apartment know that I am not the most meticulous of housekeepers. To be honest, I’m a slob, even by American standards, which means that by Swiss standards, I am about as respectable a housekeeper as an adolescent chimpanzee. This explains why, after living here for over two years, I still did not own a mop. I have one of those wet Swiffers, but not a serious mop.

I decided to go pick one up at a big grocery store at lunch. I checked my wallet, and I had 45 Swiss Francs (about $36), and I figured that that would be more than enough to get a basic mop and a sandwich. How much could a mop possibly cost? I figured that in the States, a basic mop would maybe cost fifteen bucks (a completely wild guess, since I’ve never bought one before). Double that to account for Swiss prices, toss in a few bucks for a sandwich, and I’d be fine, right? Wrong. The cheapest mop in the store cost, you guessed it, 45 Swiss Francs. I decided I needed a sandwich more than I needed a mop, dirty floors be damned. I later found a somewhat cheaper mop at another store, but was still flabbergasted – who would pay that much for a thing that you dunk in a bucket and smear around on your floor? I guess the Swiss would. Elsewhere in the world, cleanliness is next to godliness, but I’m convinced that here in Switzerland, it’s the other way around.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and Sunday is Chinese New Year (Happy Year of the Pig!!), so I’m heading to Paris for the weekend to celebrate – get some good food, do some shopping and sightseeing, visit some old friends. Two other friends are supposed to go skiing this weekend, but are unsure whether that will happen. It has been an unusually warm winter here, with very little snow, much to the chagrin of the general Swiss population, who revel in skiing and snowboarding. Looks like upstate New York stole all of the snow from the Alps this year, over ten feet in eight days! They can keep it, if it means I don’t have to be cold and miserable while I’m coughing my lungs out on the way to work.

Editor's Note

2007-02-06T12:00:00.000+01:00

Sick sick sick... will update when I'm better.

30 January 2007

2007-01-30T15:30:00.000+01:00

You know you’ve been living abroad for too long when your own mother can no longer recognize you in pictures. My family sends out an annual letter (it used to be a Christmas letter, then it became a New Year’s letter, and now, well, it’s the end of January, so I guess it’s just a letter). I wrote the letter and emailed Mom the text, and she picked some pictures to go with the letter. When she emailed the final version that is being sent out to my parents’ several hundred friends and relatives, I noticed that one of the pictures that she had included of “me” was of a random woman on my boat in the Maldives. I had sent her pictures, but she decided she liked that one more. It’s a good picture, besides the fact that the woman in it isn’t part of our family.

People always say that the American lifestyle is what makes Americans so fat. American food, American laziness, it all adds up to widespread obesity. And if you look around, it seems to be true. In a contest for The Country Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Manatee Preserve, America would almost certainly take the gold medal.

My personal experience, however, has been completely the opposite. Something about living in New York kept me ridiculously underweight. (The stress? The walk to work? The skipped meals? The hasty meal substitutes?) Since moving to Switzerland, however, my BMI has crept up into the lower end of the “normal” range for the first time that I can remember. After some reflection, I have a few ideas as to why I’ve gained weight since leaving Cheeto-land for Heidi-land.

Cheese. Fondue, raclette, cheese sandwiches, and so on. Butter on everything that doesn’t have cheese, and butter on some things that do have cheese. Cream and whole milk in anything that doesn’t have butter or cheese.

Meat and potatoes. Meat here is exceedingly expensive, and they only recently introduced ground turkey into the standard supermarket fare. Partly because of the high price of meat, and partly because of an apparently genetic national love of starch, potatoes come with everything, in every guise. This is not Atkins country. Plus it's all cooked with extra butter, cheese, and cream.

Door-to-door public transportation. Sure, I don’t drive everywhere like people do in suburban America, but the trams do a pretty good job of picking me up and dropping me off with a minimum of walking. The tram stops are so close that if a tram is going in relatively straight line, you can see the tram coming from several stops away while you wait for it to come to you .

Weather. If there’s no sun (which is sometimes the case for weeks in a row in the winter), I conserve energy by making no unnecessary movements, not even to go to the gym (which charges as much as an exclusive Manhattan gym, but without air conditioning, headphone jacks, and individual TVs). Even a trip to the bathroom becomes a carefully considered decision. When the weather is decent, on the other hand, who wants to go to the gym, just in case the sun disappears again for another two weeks?

I went to the gym twice last week, but I think that my best exercise was actually doing a hard day of cardio, I mean, shopping in sunnier Milan. Maybe I should cancel my gym membership and spend the money shopping, instead. Sounds like a good fitness plan to me - all the exercise without the agony, and you spend the money you would have spent at the gym (and then some) on a brand-new wardrobe for the brand-new you! (Of course, after that, your own mom won’t be able to pick you out of a lineup, but then again, that’s already happened to some of us).

24 January 2007

2007-01-24T12:20:00.000+01:00

“The early bird gets the worm” is a proverb that must be dear to the heart of any good Swiss person. Zurich is a city full of morning people, and on that point, I am definitely a fish out of water with no chance of getting the worm, especially not if I continue mixing my metaphors. In any case, I was always one of those people who worked best late at night - I wrote my senior thesis in sundown-to-sunrise spurts, and much of my Bar exam prep was done without the help of sunlight.

Imagine my chagrin, then, upon discovering that it is perfectly routine to schedule deliveries and appointments as early as 7 a.m. here, and upon learning that my office’s start time of 9 a.m., which would have been early for a New York firm, is considered unusually late for Switzerland. Try to sleep in past 7 on a weekday, and lie in bed, silently (or not so silently) cursing the church bells and construction workers who take over the city, right on time, every day. Make an early morning appointment with a plumber or electrician, and he’ll come five minutes early. Take the tram before 8:30 a.m., and it’s packed.

Even on weekends, the Swiss are morning people. The church bells let you sleep in until 9 (mind you, they still chime every quarter hour, and tick off the appropriate number of BONGs every hour, I’m just counting when the first fifteen-minute-long run of bells goes off), which in my book doesn’t count as sleeping in, at all (then again, I spent much of the year between college and law school waking up just in time for dinner). Shops close particularly early on Saturday, and are closed all day Sunday, so the best bet for shopping is to flock to the stores early and en masse, which the Swiss do with great gusto. Shopping on weekends here is like taking a leisurely stroll through a cattle stampede. I’ve only witnessed it a few times, since I sleep in on Saturday to remind myself that weekends and weekdays are different.

You would think that vacation is a time to kick back and relax, but even in leisure-related matters, the Swiss are always on the lookout for ways to be early. Most flights (even international flights) out of Switzerland allow you to check in up to 24 hours in advance, which you can do online or by telephone if you’re not checking any bags, or at a train station (yes, you can check-in for your flight at the train station, and they’ll deliver your bags to the airport, and then the airline puts them on the plane) or airport if you want to check bags. It’s handy when you have big bags full of dive gear, and have to go straight to the airport from work to catch your flight and don’t want to be running to catch your train with 80 pounds of dive gear. In such cases, it’s worth the extra trip.

If you go for early check-in, though, which is done at certain counters at certain times, you can expect a much longer wait than if you check-in right before your flight. Only in Switzerland would they allow you to check in so far in advance, and only in Switzerland is the super-early check-in line twenty times longer than the normal check-in line. For weekend trips, I show up at the airport about 45 minutes before my flight, and am always surprised if there is anyone in front of me waiting to check-in. I guess it’s because everyone already checked in the night before at early check-in.

After a couple weeks of disturbingly warm weather (daytime highs over 50 F or 10 C, maybe Swiss spring decided to make an early entrance), we’ve had a sudden cold snap following the big storm that swept Europe. All of the trees and flowers that budded and bloomed must be completely confused by the snow that has been falling since last night. I’m definitely confused, so I’m going to take refuge in the warmer temperatures and winter sales in Milan this weekend.

16 January 2007

2007-01-16T12:12:00.000+01:00

Back from London. These weekend trips have become a way of life for us, but in our former lives, it would have been unheard of to set (and attain) a goal of “leaving the country once a month,” which is what I try to do here. The shorter distances and travel times are key, as are the predictable Swiss working hours.

A trip to London is an opportunity to speak English without a sense of expat guilt, and we read signs, billboards, posters, and ads greedily, hoping for reminders of home, before remembering that the English spoken in England is distinctly British, rather than American. We “mind the gap” when taking the “Tube,” and take the “lift” up to our friends’ “flats.” Not as foreign as Swiss German, but not as familiar as American English. If we feel like aliens living in Swiss German country, then American expats in London must feel like undercover aliens in British English territory.

Speaking of flats, I visited a friend who now lives in London, and found out that the rent for his gorgeous, huge apartment in central London is about $2,000, a bit less than my rent in New York or Zurich. Then I found out that the housing market in London has one important peculiarity. They quote rent by the week, and not by the month. My friend’s place is admittedly amazing, but his rent is four times what I paid in Manhattan for a one-bedroom in a doorman building near Central Park, or what I pay now for the top two floors (with roof terrace) of a building in the center of the old town! He then said something about buying real estate in England, and how very few properties can be bought outright, but can only be bought for 60 or 80 years. I'm puzzled as to how you can buy something for 60 years. Sounds like a long-term rental.

Speaking of ways to spend money, we went out for Lebanese food, and while we were eating, a few belly dancers wriggled their way from table to table. One particularly skilled dancer had £20 notes (each one worth about $40) tucked between her breasts by some apparently very appreciative diners. In the US, observers have the option to tip dancers as little as $1, assuming that they stick with bills, since shoving a handful of change down someone’s underwear is probably a faux pas. In England, the smallest bill is a £5 note, or about $10. While it means that whatever tips the dancers get will be pretty generous, I would think that their overall haul would be lower, since all of the “novelty tippers” who just want the fun of shoving a bill in someone else’s underwear would not leave a tip, since they can't shell out less than $10 at a time.

They say that time is money, and if that’s the case, then London is expensive in every way. Getting around the city requires advance planning. In Zurich, the city is small enough and the public transport is efficient enough that you can get anywhere in the main part of the city, door-to-door, in 30 minutes or less. Getting from A to B in central London can take over 45 minutes (and is sometimes faster on foot). Getting to the airport is also an uncertain venture. With four people, we opted for a cab, since it would be cheaper and easier (we thought) than taking the Tube and then the Heathrow Express. It took an hour and fifteen minutes of stop-and-go traffic to get to the airport, which felt like an eternity when we compared it to our five-minute tram and ten-minute train to the Zurich airport.

Zurich can be under-exciting and over-expensive, but it was good to leave the even more outrageous prices of London and take a quick train back into town. I envy the quantity and quality of the food and shopping there, but it's only a quick train and plane ride away.

9 January 2007

2007-01-09T15:40:00.000+01:00

Happy New Year!! I got back from the Maldives a week ago, and I’m slowly returning back to normal. I did five loads of laundry, a load of dishes, and some grocery shopping. I washed and rinsed my dive gear (and showered at the gym, as my bathtub is full to the brim with gear that is slowly but surely drying out again). I sorted through pictures and posted them (have you seen them?) before sending out an update email (did you get it?). I went through my inbox and started chipping away at the backlog. I watched multiple episodes of a few shows and did some big downloads to get caught up on TV. I got my dog back and reminded him what life with rules and dietary restrictions is like (he spent much of break with a friend who is the closest thing to a fairy godmother he’s ever had). I came into work. I started getting back onto local time (the Maldives are only four hours ahead, but add that to the fact that we were woken up at 6 a.m. and went to bed between 9 and 10 p.m., and that’s a pretty serious change in schedule).

The trip to the Maldives was a very different way to spend Christmas and New Year’s than I am accustomed to. For me, Christmas has always meant spending time with my immediate family (except for the one year when I was working at a big firm, and I spent Christmas miserably sick in my apartment, and doing a fund review). New Year’s has been less consistent, but has always been spent somewhere cold, either hanging out with my sister, visiting my parents’ friends, or with going out with friends. I’ve never spent it (or any other major holiday, come to think of it) on a dive boat near the equator.

The diving was good, but the weather was not 100% cooperative – it was warm, but the sun seemed to have forgotten that it is more visible when it’s not hiding behind the clouds. It made things a bit dimmer down below, but we still saw some amazing stuff: more sharks than I can count, half a dozen giant mantas, ten schooling mantas, eagle rays, stingrays (and no, none of them tried to stab me), big Napoleon wrasses, and every other kind of fish most people never knew existed. The current was strong, at times, alternately forcing us to hang on to rocks for dear life, if we were trying to stay in one place, or pushing us along at speeds that Olympic swimmers would never even dare to dream of, if we just let go. In those moments, we were like bubbling, underwater superheroes, zooming over the reef.

The Maldives import most goods besides coconuts and fish, as they don’t have a lot of land or natural resources (I read somewhere that the average height above sea level for the entire country is about one meter). With those restrictions in place, it meant that our on-board menu was somewhat limited, and we ate fish in every shape and guise imaginable. It became something of a running joke, when lunch or dinner was served, to point and ask what each dish was: “What’s that?” “Fish.” “And that?” “Also fish.” “Is this one chicken?” “Fried fish.”

We visited a few islands while we were touring around various atolls. For some reason that I still haven’t figured out, there are no cats or dogs in the Maldives, at least not on the islands that we saw. Most of the islands or tropical places I’ve been have had a range of domestic and feral cats and dogs, but not the Maldives. Maybe all their pets got sick of eating fish and coconuts all day.

Now that I’m back on land (with my dog), I’m settling back into Swiss life. A few friends and I are heading to London this weekend to see other friends, have a few good meals, and see a few things around the city, and we’re also having initial planning talks for a shopping trip to hit the winter sales in Milan later this month. Only in Europe…

Editor's Note

2007-01-04T12:00:00.000+01:00

Happy New Year!! The first batch of pictures from the Maldives is up!!

13 December 2006

2006-12-13T16:52:00.000+01:00

It’s hard to believe, but this will be my last post of the year, as I leave next Monday for the sunny Maldives for a two-week dive trip on a boat. Not really a typical way to spend the holiday season, but if “typical” means braving cold weather, going into the office, and dodging tourists, shoppers, and snot-nosed kids on the sidewalk, I’m happy to be taking the road less traveled.

Santa Claus (or Samichlaus, as they call him here) arrived in town last week, with his pal Schmutzli (a menacing black man with a donkey). As I’ve mentioned in previous years, Santa comes early so that he can hang out, mingle with the people, make house calls, and raise Christmas awareness. I knew that he drove trams sometimes for groups of children (I don’t really see the benefit, since it’s not like you can climb on Tram Driver Santa’s lap and ask for a Wii or whatever it is that kids are asking for this year, since T.D.S. would probably tell you to sit down). Last week, however, I was surprised to see him in another unlikely position, Bulldozer Santa. Yes, Santa was operating a bulldozer in a construction zone, wearing his full Santa outfit (and even a Santa hat instead of a hardhat). My truck-loving nephew would have gone crazy. If Santa is busy bulldozing things and driving trams in Zurich, however, who’s in charge of making presents for worldwide (well, Western worldwide) delivery? I guess Schmutzli and the donkey are holding down the fort.

Just a random train of thought, but I recently bought a new tube of toothpaste at the grocery store (which, incidentally, was Candida brand, which makes me chuckle every time I brush my teeth, since Candida is the Latin term for a type of food poisoning or infection, so it’s the equivalent of brushing your teeth with Salmonella Fresh Mint Paste or Trichinosis Kid’s Gel with Sparkles). Toothpaste tubes are differently shaped (and obviously differently branded) than in the States, but they are still recognizable as toothpaste. Other products are less obvious...

After living here for over two years, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing other things in tubes, as well: mustard, mayonnaise, condensed milk, sweetened chestnut paste (which is outrageously popular here, especially in the fall and winter), and fish paste. (I can imagine the ads -- Are you sick of only being able to eat fish paste in your own kitchen? Now you can have fish paste on the go: it’s delicious, spreadable, and ever so, er, fragrant!) Yeah, I have no idea, although I do have a quirky fantasy of buying one of every tubed food in the store, and combining it into one bowl of super-paste, to see what horrific astronaut-Frankenstein food-from-a-tube will emerge. Given the Swiss affinity for putting foods in a tube, I’m surprised that there isn’t yet hummus-in-a-tube, but then again, hummus is still considered quite exotic in Switzerland, so it can be hard to find it in any sort of container, tube-based or otherwise.

Back to a non-random train of thought. Although the Swiss don’t go overboard with Christmas decorations (most stores keep it to some greens with red ribbons, and some Christmas lights) or Christmas music (I have probably heard maybe three Christmas carols so far this year), they do know how to find other ways to celebrate. December 25 and 26 are national holidays, as are January 1 and 2. Many offices close for the time in between, as well, and when the calendar falls just right (as it does this year), that means that much of the country pretty much shuts down from Saturday the 23rd until Tuesday the 2nd. That’s a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, indeed, when you only have to take three vacation days to get eleven days off in a row.

Hope 2006 went well for you and that 2007 is even better. See you next year!

5 December 2006

2006-12-05T15:25:00.000+01:00

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and as in most industrialized Western countries, that fact is quite evident when you go shopping. There are the usual greens and ribbons and twinkling lights, and the usual fake frost and snow in display windows. Part-time St. Nick’s ring bells outside shops, with their beards awry and their tight Euro-jeans sticking out from under their robes (Santa wears a hooded robe here, instead of the red fur suit that he sports in the States).

Grocery stores stock specialty items, like holiday cookie dough (who knew that there were so many types of Christmas cookies requiring so many different types of dough, most of which are on sale, apparently because the Swiss shun pre-packaged dough, opting instead to grind nuts, sift flour, and bake ten types of cookies without any help from large corporations, thank you very much), and scented toilet paper with reindeer stamped on it. Yes, the paper smells like cinnamon, and yes, it has brown cartoon reindeer frolicking in between cheery “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” greetings (is this stuff sold in the States or England, because I don’t know why else the toilet paper would be greeting bathroom-goers in English? If so, I feel a bit silly that I'm using imported, cinnamon-spiked reindeer TP, but it was on sale, and I was running out.)

On certain appointed dates, stores are open on Sundays. Sunday shopping is a rarity here, a special exception to the rule that Sunday is the Sabbath, a day of rest. Although I spend most of the year wishing that I could buy things on Sundays, Sunday shopping days invariably end up being the Sundays that I least want to spend shopping, due to the frenzy that ensues from all of the Swiss releasing their pent-up Sunday shopping urges in the pre-Christmas carnage.

It's hard to describe, but all I can say is that the feverish crowds are a cross between a sale at Filene’s (for those of you from my college years), Times Square on New Year’s Eve (for my law school-era friends), and a pack of ravenous lions mauling a particularly juicy gazelle (for, er, nature show addicts). There are no big sales or specials, it's just the pleasure of partaking in a rare forbidden pleasure that transforms the normally sedate and orderly Swiss into a rabid mob of Sabbath consumers.

Speaking of forbidden pleasures, there was an “Erotic Fair” the other week, right here in little old Zurich. It was held at one of the biggest convention halls in town, and it spanned an entire weekend (Thanksgiving weekend, actually, so while most of America was eating turkey and watching football, there were many Swiss who spent the weekend testing lube and picking porn). A friend who lives by the convention center said that it was packed the entire time (it wasn’t a Sunday shopping weekend, so people had to seek an alternate forbidden pastime).

In addition to the things I would have expected to be featured at something called “Extasia,” like toys and DVDs and “celebrity” meet-and-greets, there was a live sex show. Yes, a live sex show, and the original intention had been to solicit audience participation, live on stage, with the cameras rolling. The audience participation part was axed, due to morality concerns (live public sex by paid professionals is perfectly fine, but not if it includes upstanding citizens who are otherwise employed). So they were forced to put on a normal sex show, whatever normal might mean, for a non-participatory audience.

I suppose you could say that the convention put the “ho” in “holiday.” (Sorry, I couldn’t resist). In any case, happy “ho”-lidays from Switzerland.

28 November 2006

2006-11-28T16:05:00.000+01:00

Ah, Thanksgiving, that age-old American tradition that entails taking stock of what you have and showing your appreciation by over-indulging in it. Food, shopping, family, and football are the four pillars of an American Thanksgiving, and most Americans try to overload on all four to the point of discomfort over the course of a long weekend. So how is Thanksgiving as an expat in Zurich?

Start off with food: turkeys are hard to come by in Switzerland, as they aren’t particularly popular, and are really only eaten at Christmas-time. Pumpkin pie and cranberries are similarly hard to find, as are candied yams. All of these items can be rounded up or simulated with some effort and ingenuity, provided that you’re willing to spend a lot of money (a nine-pound turkey costs upwards of 70 francs, or almost $60). Thanksgiving here is best done potluck style, partly because the kitchens are small, and partly because footing the bill for an entire Thanksgiving feast would leave you with very little to be thankful for in your bank account.

Shopping. I think I’ve covered the sad, sad state of shopping in Zurich. High prices, poor selection, abominable opening hours. Maybe it’s for the best, so that we can still afford to buy all the food for the big meal.

A German friend was completely baffled by the Thanksgiving and Black Friday tradition, saying he couldn’t understand why people would go eat till it hurts and then go Christmas shopping in November on a day when the stores are completely crowded. Granted, I’ve always avoided Black Friday, but I can see why less crowd-averse people might brave the throngs to get a deal. And really, who is he to talk? Germans and Swiss leave their shoes out in early December, and St. Nick comes by and fills them with peanuts and candy. I’d say that eating shoe-nuts is much weirder than going bargain-hunting.

Family. Um, none of us has family living here, since we left them all behind. Football. Well, American football is pretty much an American phenomenon. One expat friend pays to watch streaming sportscasts on the Internet (but it’s live, so an evening game in the States translates into a middle-of-the-night pixellated computer window here). I have TiVo and a Slingbox, but I don’t watch football. Long weekend? Thanksgiving isn’t a Swiss holiday. Well, it’s not a holiday anywhere except for in the States.

So, how does a Swiss Thanksgiving compare to an American one? Food? Check, sort of. Shopping? Nope. Family? Nope. Football? Not really. Long weekend? Nope. But we ate our turkey (on a Tuesday), saw our friends, and celebrated in a modest salute to the Holiday of Excess.

Saturday night, a bunch of us went to the ETH Polyball, which is sort of like a giant prom thrown by the Swiss version of MIT. It is apparently “the largest ballroom dancing event in Europe,” attracting about 10,000 people every year, who dance salsa, rumba, waltz, cha cha, swing, and do whatever other ballroom dances that are out there that I never learned. It was quite a spectacle, partly because it was populated by fashion-challenged computer science nerds (one of the raffle prizes was a brand new, super-deluxe graphing calculator), and partly because Switzerland doesn’t have prom culture, so this is sort of their idea of what a formal dance should be like (apparently garnered from careful imitation of high school proms in American 80’s movies). Add in all the folks who take the ballroom part of “ballroom dancing” seriously, complete with hoop skirts and ball gowns, and you get a unique mix of Revenge of the Nerds, Sixteen Candles, and Gone With the Wind. Whoa.

Editor's Note

2006-11-23T12:00:00.000+01:00

Happy Thanksgiving! It's been busy here, between visitors, Thanksgiving celebrations (without any time off work), and so on, so update will come next week :)

14 November 2006

2006-11-14T14:49:00.000+01:00

Living in Switzerland requires an ability to keep track of a lot of dates: trash day, cardboard recycling day, paper recycling day, national holidays, canton or city holidays, and religious holidays. I have not proven myself worthy, as I forgot that this past Saturday was November 11th. Well, I knew that it was the 11th, but I forgot the significance of the date, and so I was caught completely unawares when the marching bands started playing outside my window at 11:11 in the morning (yes, I consider 11:11 to fall squarely in the middle of the morning, and am surprised and somewhat disturbed if I get out of bed before the crack of noon on a weekend).

What, you may ask, happens at 11:11 on November 11th? That, my friend, is when Carneval season starts in Switzerland. Yes, the lead-up to Mardi Gras begins in November, and it involves a lot of marching bands blasting their instruments outside my apartment on a morning I had earmarked for sleep. The bands all play Guggenmusik, which apparently is German for “crazy Bandies wearing weird outfits and playing as if they are drunk and standing on a bus that is swerving in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid potholes of enormous proportions.” (I’ve been told that this strange sound is intentional, and that it takes a great deal of skill and practice to have the pitch and rhythm off just the right amount).

And they weren’t content to just play their lopsided music in the rainy street. No, they were determined to share their gift with the world, including the brunch-eating world. A few friends and I, unable to sleep, had decided to grab brunch in a cozy neighborhood joint, only to hear some seasick saxophones lurching around as we tried to eat our eggs. We wandered around town gawking at the costumed bands, who doggedly played through the entire morning, afternoon and evening, despite the cold and the rain. Eventually, we fortified ourselves with a few cups of glühwein (mulled wine), and ventured forth to observe the brass-and-drum-heavy festivities.

After checking in several bars that were overly full, we finally settled in at one bar that was only full. Every thirty minutes or so, a new band would stagger in and the old band would trickle out, and we would be treated to another round of wonky music played by people in wacky costumes. There were people in giraffe costumes playing steel drums, there were pirates dancing along to a marching band version of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” and obviously, since it was a big party involving beer and German speakers, there were clowns singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

The revelry continued into the night, and the confetti and rainwater formed soggy piles on the street. Of course, since this is Switzerland, the confetti was gone by the next day, and I’m sure the musicians are all plotting further outings for Carneval season, to be topped off with the Big One on Fasnacht (Mardi Gras, which is celebrated in late February this time around, actual date varies by city). Leave it to the Swiss to start a party at exactly 11:11 a.m., to clean up before it’s over, to leave sufficient time for further planning, and to let each city have its own staggered celebration. Let the good times roll, in as orderly and organized a manner as possible.

Had a visitor in town last weekend, and another one this weekend, and I’ve already planned several trips for the next five months: Maldives, Paris, London, Rome, San Francisco… (I keep repeating these facts to myself to help myself ignore the fact that by late December, it starts getting dark by about 4 p.m., assuming that the sun ever comes out of the clouds in the first place).

7 November 2006

2006-11-07T15:54:00.000+01:00

A friend who was living here for a while said that he was afraid that he was falling victim to Prison Syndrome, which he defined as a situation in which you’ve been deprived of something for too long, so that anything that vaguely resembles it seems pretty appealing, and your new way of life starts to seem normal.

I live in the oldest part of Zurich, where the streets are cobblestone, the ceilings have beams, and there is no guarantee that your apartment will have any 90-degree angles in it. Recently, the city has started installing these 24-hour trash drop-off points every few blocks, they’re basically like outdoor trash chutes. This means that I can throw away my garbage (in regulation trash bags, of course) any day of the week, any hour of the day. I got excited about this new freedom, until I remembered that when I lived in New York, I could throw my trash out 24/7, as well, except that: (1) I didn’t have to buy special bags to do so, and (2) the trash chute was right outside my apartment, instead of several blocks away, so I didn’t even have to put on shoes to get rid of my garbage.

I went to see a movie last night with a few of my friends. We had purchased our tickets online in the afternoon, so we headed up to the seats we had reserved in the second row of the balcony (yes, some of the movie theaters here have balconies). I knew which ones to get, having been in that particular theater before, so I knew that all of the seats on the floor level are positioned such that you have to crane your neck upwards to see the screen, and the seats in the first row of the balcony are partially obstructed by the railing.

Monday is cheap night at the movies here, and we were quite pleased with our seats that had a good viewing angle unobstructed by poles or railings, and which only cost 12 Swiss Francs (instead of the standard 18). And then I remembered that every seat in the theatres back home is positioned to minimize neck injuries, and that even on a normal night, movies in New York cost the same as they do here on cheap night (elsewhere, tickets cost even less).

On the other hand, you can also get used to a good thing, so that going back to the old ways can hurt. I’ve gotten used to carefree traveling. I leave my apartment an hour before my flight (and remember, every flight is an international flight), and get to the airport 40 minutes before takeoff. I amble through security with my carry-on and still have 10 or 20 minutes to waste before boarding. I faintly recall the days when I had to budget up to an hour to get to the airport, and two hours to clear security and board, and I shudder.

And now I’m shuddering again, because the Zurich airport has just announced new security measures that will require getting to the airport an hour before non-U.S. flights (and probably an hour and a half before U.S. flights). On top of that, there are also those weird restrictions on carry-on liquids (100 mL per liquid), which means that I’ll have to put all of my toiletries in travel bottles from now on, since I absolutely refuse to check bags for trips that are shorter than a week. I know, I know, these travel restrictions are nothing in comparison to what people go through at Heathrow or La Guardia, but I’ve gotten used to the footloose and fancy-free style of traveling here, and considering it’s one of the few ways in which the Swiss can be considered “footloose and fancy-free,” it’s a great loss.

In the last twelve months, I’ve flown out of the Zurich airport thirteen times to visit twelve countries. Multiply that by 20 minutes, and almost 4.5 hours of extra time I’ll have to spend in the airport in the coming year!! It’s a hard life, isn’t it?

31 October 2006

2006-10-31T12:45:00.000+01:00

Happy Halloween!! It’s not a big deal here (and even might not qualify as a little deal), so I haven’t bought any candy to hand out to trick-or-treaters, since I didn’t get any trick-or-treaters the last two Halloweens. If some of them unexpectedly show up during my impromptu little dinner party tonight, I’ll just have to improvise and give them some lentil stew or dog kibble in cheap Ikea Tupperware. I would be even worse than the people who gave out pennies or Necco wafers.

The Swiss are so accustomed to having everyone do everything by the book and to the letter that when something falls outside of the norm, they are quick to jump to terrible conclusions. Small glitches and tiny anomalies indicate gross violations and sinister intentions, and no violation is committed innocently.

My building has a communal washing machine and dryer, which is the norm in Swiss apartment buildings. We are allowed to do our laundry without a schedule, even late at night or on Sundays, which is not the norm. My building, which is small, is mostly businesses, so there are only a few of us who use the laundry facilities, and only two of us who actually live in the building. I have a dog. He has black fur. I sometimes touch my dog, and his fur gets on me and my clothes. It happens. And eventually, I do laundry.

In any case, some of his fur apparently lingered in the laundry machine and made its way onto the laundry of my neighbor. She sought me out, informed me that there was dog hair in the laundry machine, and concluded that I must have my own secret washing machine in my apartment that I use for my own clothes, and that I only do Fiver’s laundry in the communal machine. I insisted that not only do I not have a secret machine, and not only do I wash my things in the same machine that I wash my dog’s things, but on top of that, I hardly ever wash my dog’s stuff, because I’m too lazy to do it that often. She expressed her continued suspicion as to how his fur got in, remained firmly convinced that I was still hiding my secret washing machine upstairs, and strongly suggested that I start doing his laundry with mine, so that she could stop hauling her laundry to her daughter’s house to avoid getting hair on her things. She has since moved away, doubtless in search of an apartment with its own secret fur-free washing machine.

It’s not just dirty, lawless Americans who are regarded with suspicion. Even Germans, known for being orderly and rules-loving, are subjected to the Swiss paranoia with regard to breaking the rules. A German friend bought a parking permit for his German-registered car. The permit was specific to his residential zip code. He parked his car in a parking zone one street over from his street, and then left it there for a few days before going to check on it. There had been a succession of parking tickets left by diligent parking police who noticed that he was in the wrong zip code (unfortunately, his zip code ended at that street).

A week later, he received a notice in the mail that a criminal investigation was being opened against him, since his car had been parked illegally for over ten hours. Never mind the fact that the car was parked only a block from his apartment and had a parking permit that was valid for the entire zip code that was just one street away, it had been parked ILLEGALLY for OVER TEN HOURS!! A criminal mastermind capable of such horrific atrocities is surely also up to his elbows in smuggling, prostitution rings, murder, and who knows what else. He might even be hiding secret washing machines and other appliances in his apartment. Best to start an investigation.

24 October 2006

2006-10-24T14:43:00.000+02:00

The long weekend in Lisbon reminded us of many things we don’t have in Switzerland: fresh seafood, abundant shopping, tank top and flip-flops weather in October, and cheap taxis, as well as panhandlers, flies, and dog poop. We ate, shopped, and squinted at the sun, all while waving flies away from our food and trying to avoid a minefield of canine waste that seemed to be required wherever there was pedestrian traffic. We stuffed ourselves at a Brazilian buffet for prices that are unheard of in both Zurich and New York (where it is pure fantasy to find all you can eat steak for 27 Swiss francs or 22 dollars). In any case, it was a good break, getting away from the prices and gloomy fall weather that plague land-locked Zurich (and it was cool to bring my list of countries visited to 33!!), but it was also good to get back to a city where walking without looking at the ground is not a risky venture.

After returning, I found something in my mailbox. After living in my apartment for over two years, I finally have an engraved plastic nameplate to replace the improvised bit of cardboard I had been using to let the mailman know where to put my mail. Of course, even without the spiffy new nameplate or the now-retired cardboard tag, it’s not difficult to figure out which mailbox is mine, since mine is the only one that is overflowing with junk mail from who knows how long ago.

The other tenants in the building apparently check their mail and clear out the junk on a daily basis. I imagine that they bundle it in with their neat stacks of paper recycling, which I still haven’t mastered, since I don’t know the paper pickup schedule, and can’t tie them into the perfect cubes of paper that are required. And I refuse to spend money to put my grocery store flyers into a regulation garbage bag to throw away with the regular trash. And so I’m reduced to a choice between smuggling junk mail to public trashcans or leaving it in my mailbox. Given my predilection for the option that requires the least effort, it’s not hard to guess which one I picked, and to then figure out why mine is the only mailbox that was vomiting mail this morning.

Although I am not a trash-master, I can say with confidence that I am better than the Swiss (and most other Europeans, other than the British) in one very important skill: waiting in lines. At the gate in the airport, at the train station ticket counter, at concession stands, and basically anywhere that forces people to wait for something they want, the Swiss are unable to grasp the concept of “waiting your turn.” If you’re waiting to get on a plane, or to buy a beer, or to get a ticket to the art museum, take a look around, and there will be at least two people trying to squeeze in front of you. It’s not a question of age or gender, I’ve been line-challenged by old ladies, teenage boys, and middle-aged men alike. The Swiss are unable to form lines, and instead clump up into throngs that push and wiggle their way up to the front.

In some cases, the powers that be have tried to force some semblance of order on the crowd: velvet ropes, numbered tickets, seating by rows. The only ones that work are the ones that say exactly when each particular person is entitled to go next. Other attempts at line management are completely ignored. Airline passengers who wait for their row in the middle of the plane to be called walk onto the plane to find the front rows already fully boarded. Housewives determinedly shove and wriggle their way through the “lines” carved out with ropes and barricades. For a country that likes everything to be orderly and in its logical place, Switzerland is hundreds of years behind in its understanding and enforcement of waiting in line.

Editor's Note

2006-10-19T12:00:00.000+02:00

Still recovering from lots of sleep deprivation, so update will be next week. In the meantime, I've put up pictures from Zurich's Oktoberfest, and pictures from Lisbon, as well...

12 October 2006

2006-10-12T10:52:00.000+02:00

World Animal Protection Day was last week, which I only found out when a Swiss group brought a bunch of live animals to a busy square near my apartment. Specifically, they brought the exact number of animals that the average Swiss person eats in his or her lifetime. Eight cows, 33 pigs, 720 chickens, six sheep, two goats, 25 rabbits, four deer, 390 fish, and half of a horse (they brought a whole horse, but the average Swiss person eats half of one). Mind-boggling. And all I could imagine was a Swiss guy, with a crazed glint in his eye, charging into the animal pens and chomping on deer neck, goat leg, or pig butt.

There are vegetarians who don’t eat any meat, which means that somewhere out there, for every Swiss vegetarian, there is a Swiss carnivore who eats sixteen cows, 66 pigs, 1440 chickens, twelve sheep, four goats, 50 rabbits, eight deer, and a whole horse. Of course, these meats and their proportions are tailored to the Swiss palate (which apparently prefers to eat the entire petting zoo), so I wonder if it’s possible to cash in the deer, rabbits, goats, horse, and sheep for some extra pork? Chinese people don’t have (m)any dishes involving sheep or horse, but pork is an entirely different matter altogether…

I don’t eat five of those animals. Call me narrow-minded, but I’ve somehow got it stuck in my head that horses are transportation, rabbits are pets, sheep produce sweater-material, deer are Disney cartoons, and goats, well, they’re just weird things that you see on farms and don’t really know what they’re for. For me, eating those animals would feel about as natural as eating a bicycle, a cat, a cotton plant, the Little Mermaid, or a weird tractor-y thing that does something I don’t know about out in the fields.

One question I had was regarding the sheer quantity of meat involved. Assume that the average person starts his meat-eating career in earnest at the age of five, and that he eats until he dies at the age of 75 (let’s hope the person still has a decent set of teeth, so that he doesn’t have to drink goat meat shakes at the end). Assuming that he never dabbles in vegetarianism, this means that he eats more than ten chickens and five fish every year, that every five years, he eats more than half a cow, two pigs, and almost two rabbits, and that every fifteen years, he eats more than a whole sheep, almost half a goat, and almost a whole deer. If his wife is vegetarian, I guess he has to eat her share, too.

A second question I had was regarding the cows. Veal shows up in half the dishes served in Swiss restaurants, and it’s a mainstay of Swiss cuisine. Do those calves count towards the cow quota? Does eating one calf’s worth of veal count as eating a whole cow, since a calf grows up into a cow, or does it take several calves to add up to one cow, since calves weight so much less? Or did they just forget to bring calves along?

Another random factoid: the average Swiss person eats about 11 kilograms (24 pounds) of chocolate per year, or 770 kilos (1680 pounds) over the same 70-year period. The average cow weighs 550-680 kilos (1200-1500 pounds). So I guess we could say that the average Swiss person eats nine cows in his or her lifetime, one of which is made entirely out of chocolate.

Heading to Lisbon for a long weekend this week, in search of a last bit of summer before we head into the interminable grey of Zurich winters.

3 October 2006

2006-10-03T15:19:00.000+02:00

I spent the weekend in Munich for Oktoberfest (which occurs, inexplicably, for about two weeks in September). Oktoberfest was like a bigger, drunker version of all of the festivals we have here in Zurich. Lots of rides and tents and permanent-looking buildings that are built and taken down with no hesitation in the face of the amount of labor and planning that is required to bring it all in, assemble it, maintain it, take it apart, and store it ofr next time. Amazing. The Oktoberfest grounds are like a miniature city that sort of resembles a strange hybrid of a beach town's boardwalk (cotton candy and ring tosses and haunted houses), the German part of Epcot (people in costumes) and Spring Break (drunk college kids puking and passing out).

At Oktoberfest, beer is sold by the liter (which, incidentally, is also the unit used to measure gasoline, water, and other things that you buy in large volumes), and teams of roving paramedics constantly roam the grounds with stretchers, looking for unconscious people to schlep back to the central first aid area. To get one of the coveted spots inside one of the big tents, you either needed to (try to) make a reservation in February, or you need to get to the tents by 9 in the morning to compete for a seat on one of the long benches. Getting up can mean losing your seat, but drinking multiple liters of beer starting at 9 in the morning pretty much guarantees that you'll need to empty your bladder at some point. Some hardcore Oktoberfesters just pee at the table, thereby avoiding getting up, losing their seats, finding the restroom, and waiting in line.

Many partygoers sport traditional Bavarian clothing: lederhosen and knee-highs for men, dirndls (long dresses with puffy sleeves and aprons) for women. Some are older Germans, nostalgic for the olden days, some are younger Germans, making an ironic retro statement, and some are tourists, convinced that they blend in with the locals. The tourists usually also have stupid plush novelty hats shaped like kegs or beer mugs, which are probably the second-hottest item at Oktoberfest, after beer (about six million liters are consumed over a little more than two weeks). A lot of revelers also wear cookies on ribbons around their necks. Rock-hard, heart-shaped gingerbread cookies, bigger than Frisbees, with saccharine messages written in German with icing. Nothing says "I love you" like giving your girlfriend a mass-produced cookie as big as (and about as edible as) a toilet seat cover.

The train to Munich was full of people raring to get their party on. There was a constant level of excited chatter, and already-drunk teens and 20-somethings ran up and down the aisles, getting a head start. (They were already planning on doing two full days of heavy drinking; did they really think that the four-hour train ride was critical?) The train ride on the way back, however, was about as lively as a funeral, assuming that people at funerals pass out on the floor or make frequent runs to the restroom to vomit. I felt somewhat out of place, being one of the few people on the train who was both well rested and not hung over.

I started chatting with the guy next to me on the train back to Zurich: a Canadian student interning in Baden. I've met several people with the same story. My friends and I saw one on our flight to Istanbul (although we didn't know his story at the time, he was just wearing a very distinctive shirt). When we later ran into him in a shop in Istanbul (which is a huge city), we said hi. A month later, I saw him at a concert in Montreux, and we were on the same train back up. I mentioned his name to the Canuck I met on the train from Munich, and he laughed and said he had taken over the other guy's apartment. It really is a small world, after all, at least for expats in Switzerland.

26 September 2006

2006-09-26T17:39:00.000+02:00

Let's talk about numbers.

Let's say you get a call on your cell phone from a number you don't recognize. You check the area code and realize it's from [city or state], which is where [name] lives, and decide not to take the call. Not here. Swiss area codes for land lines are assigned geographically, but Swiss cell phones have area codes that are assigned by service provider, which means that everyone using the same provider, whether they live in Geneva or Zurich, has the same area code. That would be like getting a call and saying, "Ooh, that's someone who uses T-Mobile, I won't take that call."
Speaking of phones, there is an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer calls directory assistance and says, "Give me the number for 911!" It sounds stupid, but at various points in the past two years, I've realized that I don't know the number for 911 here. Fire? Poison? Kitten in a tree? I wouldn't know what number to dial (much less how to describe the emergency in Swiss German). Fortunately, my life here has been relatively emergency-free so far. I am somewhat curious as to what would happened if I actually dialed 9-1-1 on a Swiss phone, but have restrained myself, just in case it actually works as an emergency line for stupid Americans, in which case I would have to explain why I was dialing an emergency number. Uh, didn't think it would work. So why did you dial it in the first place? Dunno.

If you go into a building at ground level and take the stairs up one level, what floor are you on? Second floor, if you're American. If you're European, you're on the first floor, because the floor at ground level doesn't count. So all those stairs you climbed up don't earn you any credit, from a Swiss building's point of view. This can get confusing when mixing cultures. When telling people how to find places, or asking directions, there always has to be a clarification as to what, exactly "go to the third floor" means.

When explaining how to find my apartment, I tell people: take a flight of stairs up to the European 1st floor, or the American 2nd floor. Get in the elevator and hit 5, which goes to the European 5th floor, or the American 6th floor. Go in the front door of my apartment, which immediately leads to another set of stairs to the main floor of my apartment (European 6th, US 7th), and my bedroom is upstairs (European 7th, US 8th). So you take the elevator to 5 if you eventually want to end up on the (American) 8th floor of my apartment building.

The discrepancy gets even bigger if the building is more than a dozen stories high (which is actually rare in Switzerland). American buildings usually skip 13, so that you can take just one flight of stairs (assuming that Americans take the stairs) to get from the 12th floor to the 14th floor. They don't do that here. So the American 12th floor is the European 11th floor, but the American 14th floor is the European 12th floor.

A friend who was living in Switzerland for a summer wanted to open a bank account. Nothing fancy, just a checking account. He walked into a bank and said that he wanted to open an account. They said that since he was a foreigner, there was a minimum balance. He (thinking that Swiss banks are like banks elsewhere, which often require an initial minimum deposit of $500 or so) said that was fine. They started bringing him bottled water, giving him pamphlets on money management, and making pitches on portfolio holdings, and he thought, "No wonder Swiss banks are the best in the world. They know how to treat customers right." Somehow, he found out that the minimum deposit was CHF 50,000 (about $40,000), which was a little bit over his student means. He faked a loss of interest and then slunk away.

19 September 2006

2006-09-19T10:20:00.000+02:00

My parents took a "leisure tour" of Italy that involved seeing seven cities in ten days (I'm not sure how that fits in with the "leisure" description), and came to Zurich to see me for a week. The weather was impeccable the entire time they were here: sunny, warm, and dry, and I soon realized that I was repeating myself, telling them over and over again that winters are long, grey, and wet, just so that they wouldn't get the wrong idea about Switzerland being a year-round paradise.

The weather here is fickle at best. In the summer, we alternate between sun and rain, and in the winters, we alternate between grey days and rainy grey days. For some reason, however, my guests have only experienced either the best or the worst, so half of them are convinced that Switzerland is like San Diego at its best, and half of them believe that Switzerland is like London at its worst. I don't think my parents believe that it can be depressingly grey for weeks on end here, and they seemed skeptical of my dread regarding the coming of winter.

Last Monday was Knabenschiessen ("Boys' Shooting Day," which was recently changed to include girls, a competition which involves junior high school kids shooting military assault rifles, and grade school kids shooting pistols), so all offices in Zurich had the afternoon off. My parents and I went to check out the festivities. It was a little bit odd to spend September 11 at a shooting contest, but hey, this is Switzerland. As it turned out, we didn't see any of the shooting, since the shooting range was tucked away from the fairground, and we didn't really look for it.

Previously, I had only been to fairs in the center of Zurich, where space is limited, and I had still always been impressed at the number of games and rides they assembled overnight, packed into a small area, then spirited away the next day. The Knabenschiessen fairground, however, was a whole new level. Every kind of ride you've ever seen at a fair or small-town amusement park was there, sometimes more than once. I counted no fewer than four places you could do bumper cars. Four. The fairground was quite large, since it was out in the suburbs of Zurich, but even so, they squeezed rides in right up to some nearby mid-rise buildings. I watched a man inside a building calmly eating a late lunch while a ride jerked screaming kids back and forth past his window. He never looked out, never indicated that he was aware of the flashing lights or shrieking teenagers, never seemed to wonder if the ride might malfunction and send a dozen people crashing through his window.

My parents took a daytrip to Lucerne, wandered around Zurich, got their morning coffee every day at the Starbuck's around the corner (yes, shame shame, but I don't drink coffee, and so they had to go get it somewhere), accompanied me to the Asian market to tell me which foods I like (I've only seen them in cooked form, and know them by their Chinese names, whereas the market has things labeled in Vietnamese, German, and sometimes English – who knew that I liked a vegetable called Chinese morning glory?)

They met my friends, ate sausage, and went on boat rides (which are included in the normal transportation system – people can take boats, trains, trams, or buses to work). Before leaving, they commented, "Europe is so clean, orderly, and organized." I reminded them of their recent experiences in Italy (Italy is many things, but it is not clean, orderly, or organized), and explained that it's just a Swiss thing, not a European thing. In any case, they approved of Switzerland, but there's no telling if Switzerland approved of them. After over two years, Switzerland and I are still trying to figure each other out.

Editor's Note

2006-09-12T00:00:00.000+02:00

Had a quasi-long weekend, and my parents are in town. Update postponed...

5 September 2006

2006-09-05T14:37:00.000+02:00

A recent study prompted the Swiss government to issue a bulletin warning that about 50,000 people in Switzerland are addicted or in danger of becoming addicted to the Internet. 50,000? That seems very low for a country that has almost 7 million people. Does that number include expats living in Switzerland? If so, then I can almost guarantee that the figure is too low, as there are tens of thousands of us, and I'm sure our rate of Internet addiction is higher than among native Swiss.

If it's accurate, however, what addiction have they found instead of the Internet?? And is it so bad to be addicted to the Internet, it's better than heroin, right? It's cheaper, it's publicly acceptable, and it's something you can do at work or in front of your parents or small children (depending on what sites you visit, obviously). I'm not really sure what the Swiss government is trying to accomplish by warning people of the dangers of the Internet. Maybe they should focus on the smoking problem, since millions of people in Switzerland are addicted to cigarettes, and no one has ever died from secondhand Internet.

There are certain things that I never got around to doing since moving here, partly due to laziness, and partly due to an inability to figure out how long I'll be here, and whether the length of my stay is enough to justify such things. Until recently, I hadn't bought any picture frames and I hadn't bought guest towels. I figured that I could just stick the pictures on the wall in plastic sleeves, and that my guests could use one of the three towels I brought over here as part of my "single person living alone" stock of household goods. I've been here for over two years, however, so I finally decided that I could invest in a few picture frames and another two bath towels. I am not the worst of the lot, however, as I have several friends who have been here for a year or more, and who still don't have a hammer, a screwdriver, or place settings for more than two people.

A few months after I moved here, my bank called me and asked me if I wanted a Swiss credit card. I said no, as I already had a few American cards. They said it had a low, low annual fee of 99 CHF (about $80), and I again said no, as I've never had to pay a credit card fee before. They offered to waive the fee for the first year and to link the card to my account, so that I wouldn't have to bother with monthly payments unless I wanted to, so I finally caved and let them send me a card. Based on that experience, I assumed that getting a credit card in Switzerland is much like getting a card in the States: everyone and their mother will try to throw credit cards your way, as long as you are human and seem to want to spend money.

As it turns out, my experience was the exception to the rule. Several of my expat friends and colleagues have had ridiculously difficult times getting Swiss credit cards. Bank reps have told them that they can't get a card with the permits they have (the same permit I had when I got my card), and that they have to have a minimum account balance to cover the maximum charge limit on their cards at all times (which runs against the underlying concept of credit, besides which, I have gone negative on my account balance and put charges on my credit card without a problem). Perhaps the Swiss knew that I would stick around long enough not only to pay my credit card bills, but also to buy picture frames and bath towels, and they were therefore more comfortable providing me with the credit to make such long-term commitment purchases.

Parents coming in town, just in time for Knabenschiessen (the holiday when local kids shoot things).

How to Pass for a Swiss Person, Part IV, Section 1: Swissification; Jobs

2006-08-29T15:15:00.000+02:00

An expat email forum I read has recently had a thread on applying for jobs in Switzerland. A typical job application here includes a cover letter, CV, references, and a photo. Yes, they want a picture of you clipped to your CV. They also expect you to list your date of birth and marital status on your CV. Imagine the uproar if an employer in the States asked for pictures and marital status before even granting an interview! They also expect you to submit copies of your college and graduate school diplomas; if applicable, these are also forwarded to the government when applying for a visa. Official school transcripts are only acceptable if copies of your diplomas are not available. I remember finding it strange that the Swiss government would rather look at a shrunken-down photocopy of my college and law school diplomas (which would be easy to fake) than official, signed and sealed transcripts that not only prove that I graduated, but also indicate whether I was a decent student.

If you're lucky enough to land a job, then you sign a contract setting forth the terms of your employment. That seems fairly normal, right? Typical Swiss, the contracts set out working hours in precise detail. "Full-time" and "part-time" are too vague. Standard full-time employment contracts for professionals will state that they are to work 42.5 hours, 40 hours, or 37.5 hours per week, with pre-ordained office hours and a fixed-length lunch break at a set time each day. Part-timers get contracts for 80%, 60%, or even 40% of a full schedule, with similar terms regarding start times, lunch breaks, and so on.

Based on a person's contract, you can predict exactly what time they will walk in the office, when they will eat lunch, what time they will come back, and when they will leave for home. Because most people in the city take public transportation, which runs on a precise-to-the-minute schedule, you can also predict exactly what time they will leave the house in the morning, and you can also determine what time they will walk in their front door and take off their shoes. Me? I leave the house at 8:44 a.m., take the 8:52 a.m. tram (missing the morning rush by a good hour, since the busiest commute time is between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., as Switzerland is a country full of "morning people"), start work at 9:00 a.m., have lunch from 1:00-2:00 p.m., finish work at 6:00 p.m., putter around a bit before leaving, and get home by 6:25 p.m., usually with a stop at the gummy candy store downstairs on the way up to my apartment. Swissified? Perhaps.

29 August 2006

2006-08-29T15:13:00.000+02:00

After getting fed up with the non-stop rain and cold here in Zurich (in August, nonetheless!) I fled to Verona for the weekend. It's funny, but when the weather reports in Zurich forecast a 20% chance of rain, there's a good chance you'll need an umbrella. Some Verona forecasts predicted a 40% chance of rain, but the only weather gear I needed all weekend was a pair of sunglasses and some sunscreen. It did rain once during the weekend, and it was a thunderstorm to end all thunderstorms, but it had the courtesy to wait until the middle of the night, and to end well in advance of daybreak. Even though Switzerland is all about having everything as it should be, Swiss weather apparently doesn't realize what August is supposed to be like.

Italians know what weather and shopping should be like. Sunny days, warm nights, summer that lasts longer than two months (we were wearing wool sweaters in the office in the beginning of June, and we've been wearing them again since the beginning of August, despite the Böögg's prediction of a nicer summer at this year's Sechseläuten). Instead of only offering cheap, mass-produced clothes or exorbitantly expensive designer clothes, they also have interesting clothes at all prices in between. Some stores were even open on Sunday afternoon! I felt rather sheepish, being impressed by the fact that their stores sell a variety of goods with a range of prices at convenient times. I guess my consumer expectations have become Swissified.

It is only when I leave Switzerland that I realize how much my expectations have aligned themselves with living in Switzerland. For instance, I always forget that public restrooms are usually not nearly as clean as private restrooms. I forget that walking into a public restroom can assault your nose and make you worry about stepping in puddles of unknown constitution. I forget that people pee on the toilet seat and don't wipe it up afterwards. I forget that there might not be hot water and that the air freshener might be both deeply necessary and pitifully inadequate.

And the public transportation, where do I even begin? Verona, for instance, only had buses. And the buses only ran every 20 minutes, except on Sundays, when they only ran every 40 minutes. Compare this to Zurich, where if you miss the tram, you only have to wait another three to eight minutes until the next one comes, depending on which tram and what time of day it is. While in Verona, I checked the bus schedule and realized that that next bus was scheduled to come in a minute, so I ran out to the bus stop, not wanting to have to wait for another twenty minutes for the next one. A minute passed, then two, and I figured, "Well, it's Italy, maybe they don't run things quite as on time as they do in Switzerland." A few more minutes passed, and I decided, "I must have just missed the bus, there's no way it's this late." Then an Italian sauntered up to the stop, looking completely unconcerned, despite it being a good five minutes after the scheduled stop, and a couple minutes later, the bus pulled up to the stop. Why post a bus schedule that is so precise, if the actual buses don't run on anything resembling the schedule? If things aren't that precise, why not just do as they do in New York, and say that buses will come "approximately every X minutes"?

I'm not Swiss, I'm not Swiss, I'm not Swiss, I'm not Swiss. (If I say it enough, then it's true). But I guess I'm not Italian, either, although I must admit that they have excellent food, weather, and shopping.

Another busy few weeks coming up: my parents will be coming in town, then a college friend, then Munich for Oktoberfest, and more planning to get some weekend adventures lined up...

23 August 2006

2006-08-23T10:37:00.000+02:00

Oops, didn't realize that yesterday was Tuesday, hence the delayed update.

In any case, without further ado, three things I've realized over the past couple of weeks of recuperating...

The first is that the doctors here prefer to take the "wait and see and then come back" approach to treating patients. I had a vicious case of bronchitis a little over a year ago, and the doctor refused to give me any antibiotics until I had been coughing like a TB patient with pneumonia for a week. This time, I went in with a concussion, two massive lumps on my head, a hand-sized bruise on my back, and a visible knot in my back muscles, and the doctor told me to take Advil. That's it, Advil. It was only after I returned two weeks later with continued symptoms that he prescribed some muscle relaxants and time-release, high-dose Advil. I can understand not wanting to over-prescribe antibiotics, to some extent, but if someone comes in with obvious sources of pain, wouldn't it make sense to give them something?

Second, one of the medications I was prescribed is called Brufen Retard. Seriously. I'm taking Retard pills. I know that they aren't sold under the same brand name in the States and that "Retard" probably doesn't have the same connotations here as it does in the States, but still… I'm taking Retard pills that the doctor gave me. The same doctor who looked at an X-ray of my head and said that there was nothing there. I think he might be trying to tell me something.

Third, I learned how accident insurance works in Switzerland. Employers are required to get accident insurance for full-time employees, and the accident insurance covers all accidents, both on and off the job, with "accidents" including anything from falling in your own home to wiping out while snowboarding to totaling your car. As it turns out, there are very specific conditions that must be met for the insurance to be valid. For instance, employees who work 40 hours a week (as I do) are required to have at least one 45-minute break each day, which is why employers have a one-hour lunch policy that requires employees to take a real lunch hour every day. If you skip lunch and eat while working, or if you take a short lunch, it doesn’t count as a full lunch hour, which would therefore theoretically void the accident insurance.

It makes sense for people working in a physical job, where not having a break could decrease alertness and increase risk, but seriously, I sit at a desk and work on a computer. There is no scaffolding or heavy equipment, no power tools or hard hats. If I'm less alert, I might get a paper cut. Maybe. In any case, knowing exactly how accident insurance works here makes me feel like a truck driver: OK, so if I work this many hours, I have to stop and take this many minutes of break before working this many hours again. Maybe I'll get some donuts. Except for there aren't good donuts here.

I'll finish with a random weird moment from Street Parade a couple weeks ago: we were checking out a late-night party in the square that is right by my apartment, and the DJ was mixing beats in with some sort of vaguely classical-sounding music. I suddenly found myself thinking about jewelry, and after some mental probing, realized that the music was the tune that has been used for as long as I can remember in deBeers commercials, the "A diamond is forever" ads, where a shadow man gives a shadow woman a diamond ring. The music is linked so strongly to the brand in my consumer-culture-infested brain that even played in the street, using different instruments, with techno beats added in, the song still made me think of diamonds.

15 August 2006

2006-08-15T11:11:00.000+02:00

Back again, and slightly worse for the wear. My birthday was quite memorable, mostly due to the fact that I ended up with a concussion and a few bruised or fractured ribs, due to extreme clumsiness on my part. When my friends finally dragged me to the clinic the next day, the doctor showed me X-rays of my head and said, "Good, there's nothing there," and when I started laughing, he rephrased to reassure me that I hadn't knocked my brains out, that they were still there, and that there were no clots or fractures.

After the heat wave in July, we had a complete reversal, and cold, wet weather descended on Zurich, forcing me to wear pants, thermal shirts, cashmere sweaters, and rain jackets in the middle of August. Unfortunately, the cold rain spanned the weekend of Street Parade, the annual techno festival held in Zurich that usually features thousands of drugged people running around half-naked with body paint, moon boots, and extreme piercings in order to dance frantically to the overwhelmingly loud music being blasted from every direction. There were still some brave souls who shed their clothing and inhibitions despite the weather, but most people (my friends and I included) decided that we would be happier with sweaters and rain jackets. There was still dancing in the street, but after seeing the last two (sunny) Street Parades, I was less than impressed by the lack of nudity.

In other news, I am finally in possession of my new and improved work permit. For the first two years that I was here, I was on a temporary annual permit, but I have now been upgraded to a permit that implicitly acknowledges that I've been here for a while and might stay a little longer, as well. The Swiss government is funny. I guess all governments are funny, so it's just that the Swiss government is no exception. Despite being in charge of fewer than seven million people, the government here is highly bureaucratic and compartmentalized, so to get your permit renewed, you have to communicate with several offices, which are located near each other and ostensibly have to deal with each other on a regular basis (seeing that almost one-third of Zurich inhabitants are foreigners, and therefore need permits to live here), but the way things actually work, it's as if they are as unrelated as a post office in Kenya and a grocery store in Fiji.

They claim that they will forward your information to the other offices and automatically send you paperwork and updates when your permit requires renewal. And once you've sent your papers in, they claim that they will be processed and you will be notified to come in and do the actual renewal in time for your new permit. Ha. The first time I got my permit renewed, my paperwork was submitted over a month in advance, and the permit was finally issued almost a month late. This time, the paperwork was submitted almost two months early, and I've just received the permit two-and-a-half months late. When we first checked with the offices in charge of processing the paperwork, they said that they were behind. When we checked again, they said that we had never submitted anything. We had the proof of receipt, but they insisted that they didn't have it, and so we were charged a late fee and a processing fee. Apparently, the Swiss are so much more organized than anyone else, that if something went wrong, it couldn't possibly have been their fault, receipt or no. And of course we paid, because without payment, no new permit would be processed and issued, and without a permit, I would get to taste firsthand the cloud that hangs over the head of every stranger in a strange land: deportation. No thanks, I'll pay your silly fine, take my permit, and go through the whole rigamarole in another year. Oh, wait, less than a year, since I'll submit the paper work a month early, and my permit is already almost three months used. Argh.

Editor's Note

2006-08-08T12:00:00.000+02:00

Slight delay this week, due to unforeseen weekend aftermath. Instead, for now, I leave you with this, the description of a Celtic-inspired pendant that was being sold in the duty-free magazine on board our flight back from Dublin:

Salmon of Knowledge Pendant

Handcrafted in silver from a design in the Book of Kells. The pendant depicts the story of Finn and the greatest salmon ever caught. While the salmon cooked, he touched it with his finger. It was so hot he had to suck the pain away which made the old prophecy come true - that he who first tastes the salmon of knowledge possesses all the knowledge their mind can hold.

3 August 2006

2006-08-03T12:53:00.000+02:00

Back from the long weekend in Dublin, and the heat wave has finally broken, so that my bedroom is 26 C (79 F) instead of 32 C (90 F) at bedtime. Much more bearable. It's a three day work week, but there is no rest for the wicked, as this coming weekend is my birthday, so I will go from a long weekend in Dublin to a short week at work to a weekend of celebration. One of these days, I will catch up on my sleep.

Dublin was good, although it was a hassle to get there. We were supposed to fly out Friday evening, but our flight was cancelled at the last minute due to malfunctioning de-icing equipment. Yes, it was hot as hell in the summer, but apparently the planes are not allowed to take off without de-icing equipment, just in case you have to divert to Siberia or something. Two of my friends waited in the long line at the transfer desk, and two of us decided to go out to the main ticketing desk to see if they could do anything about it. It took us 20 minutes of constant, brisk walking through corridors, up and down escalators, in and out of buildings, through passport control, and so on to get to a spot that was probably only 100 meters from where we started. Guess the Zurich airport was not designed for complications. They operate under the assumption that things will work. Period. So there is no reason to design the airport to allow for easy movement between terminals.

In any case, we eventually got to Dublin on Saturday morning, and my friend came to get us at the airport. He's in his mid-20's, a normal beer-drinking Irishman, and he suggested that we go back to his place for breakfast and then we could sit around and have "tea and cakes," which to the American ear sounds rather granny-ish, but it's apparently the normal thing to do in Ireland. So we went back to his place and he started pulling together some breakfast. First he gave us "Scotch eggs," which were whole hard-boiled eggs encased in sausage and breading, then fried. They seemed like they were quite enough for breakfast, but then he fried up three different kinds of sausage, a pile of bacon, and some eggs, tossed in some toast, butter, cheese, and other things, then said that we were just having a small breakfast, comparatively. Compared to what, I shudder to imagine. If that's what breakfast is in Ireland, there is no good reason why Americans are the fattest people in the world. There was enough pork on the table to feed a small village, as long as none of the villagers were vegetarian or kosher.

At various points, my friend expressed his love of the following foods: cheese sandwiches with a salty-sour jelly-like spread; "French-fried toast," which is basically French toast made with salt and pepper and eaten with ketchup; Nutella and butter sandwiches; and peanut butter and butter sandwiches, and was disgusted by some of my suggestions: Reese's cups; French toast with maple syrup; bacon dipped in maple syrup; and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They say that Americans, the Irish, Brits, and Aussies are separated by a common language, but I'd say that we're also separated by rather uncommon foods. Like French toast with ketchup. Eek.

Coming back to Zurich brought one unexpected perk. Tuesday was Swiss National Day (their version of July 4th), and fireworks had been banned in the city itself, since the dry spell and heat wave increased the risk of fires, so if we had stayed, we wouldn't have seen any fireworks. As we descended towards the airport, however, we could see all of the fireworks people were setting off outside of the city center, and for the first few seconds, it looked like faraway paparazzi or signal fires, until we realized what it was, and enjoyed the show from afar.

Birthday party this weekend, wish me luck.

26 July 2006

2006-07-26T10:34:00.000+02:00

We're having a heat wave like nothing I've seen in Switzerland in the past two summers, with temperatures consistently reaching 95 F (35 C), and before you scoff and say that the temperature goes higher wherever you live, stop and consider for a moment the fact that we are walking to work, sitting in offices, cooking meals, doing laundry, carrying groceries, running errands, and sleeping in these temperatures without the benefit of air conditioning. I believe in global warming, especially in the vicinity of my apartment, and if I were a country, I would sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Conditions like these drive people to seek out ways to cool down. Late night walks, wet towels, fans, cold drinks, hanging out in the freezer aisle at lunchtime, you name it, and someone in Zurich is doing it. I've spent a couple nights watching movies at the outdoor cinema by the lake, eating ice cream and catching the breeze. One movie had a lot of Ukrainian dialogue, which was fine, as it also had English, German, and French subtitles, but the other was mostly in French, and they only added German subtitles, so I had to listen to the French and read the German to get the full meaning.

I decided to eat a cold dinner on the terrace one day after work, and so I went to the (air-conditioned) grocery store to get some supplies. I took my time browsing, no sense in rushing back out into the heat, and while I was in the juice aisle, debating between the relative refreshment potentials of pineapple and pear, I saw a bottle that I had never noticed before. I picked it up, read the label, translated in my head, decided I must have missed some other meaning of the words, and asked my friend, "Is this really a bottle of sauerkraut juice?" Yes. "And people drink this?" Yes. Yum, nothing is more refreshing than a tall glass of fresh sauerkraut juice! Except, perhaps, a shot of chilled mustard.

I even considered making a trip to Ikea on Saturday (which is really the worst day to visit Ikea, since everyone and their evil twin goes to Ikea on Saturdays). I ended up not going because: 1) it seemed a bit ludicrous to go all the way to Ikea just for a few picture frames, 2) I wasn't certain that Ikea had air conditioning, and the only thing worse than fighting your way through Ikea on a hot Saturday would be fighting your way through Ikea on a hot Saturday without air conditioning, and 3) I was pretty much paralyzed by the heat, and couldn't drag myself out to go anywhere while the sun was up, anyways.

A few rooms in our office have air conditioners, which were apparently installed by the previous tenant without the proper permits, so the authorities are removing them at some point in the near future. Since we open all of our doors and use them keep the office from turning into saunas, the pending removal hangs over our heads like an executioner's ax. A very hot, sweaty executioner's ax. But in the mean time, I've actually semi-seriously contemplated bringing stuff into the office and sleeping in one of the air-conditioned rooms. Hey, that way I could get some real sleep, and I could even sleep in, since I wouldn't have to worry about getting to work!

This coming weekend is a long weekend for Swiss National Day (their version of July 4th), so a few of us are going to Dublin, where it is supposedly in the 60s. I may get to wear, what are they called, jeans? And what were those other things… oh, right, sweaters. Imagine that. Next update will probably be on Thursday, and the following weekend is my birthday (the annual hijinks are already being planned), and the weekend after that is Street Parade. And now we return to the regularly scheduled programming of sitting around and trying not to sweat…

18 July 2006

2006-07-18T14:06:00.000+02:00

Another weekend, another trip. I spent the weekend in Berlin, to check out the city and Love Parade. On Friday, I mistimed my departure and got to the airport 65 minutes prior to departure, instead of the recommended (in Switzerland) 40 minutes, and was rather annoyed at myself for having wasted an extra 25 minutes that I could have spent, er, checking email or something.

This is the first time I've been to Germany, besides a few layovers in the Frankfurt airport, and one venture across the border shortly after I arrived. It was interesting to try out Angela German, which is sort of a high German/Swiss-German/pidgin hybrid. The German they speak in Germany and the German they speak in Switzerland are extremely different, to the point that many Germans can't understand Swiss German. The grammar is different, the pronunciation is different, and even the vocabulary is different. The Germans (who were amazingly friendly and helpful) humored me, and I managed to get by without having to lapse into English too often.

Berlin was not what I expected, although I suppose if I had thought about it, I would have been less surprised. Most European cities are a mix of quaint and modern, with central areas having a heavy emphasis on old architecture and urban planning: cobblestones, steeples, funny little buildings, and narrow streets. Berlin, on the other hand, sometimes feels like a city that was built in the 1960s. After noticing the difference and thinking about it for two seconds, I realized, "Duh, the city was pounded during WWII, so a lot of the old stuff is gone," but I hadn't thought about it in advance. Things you don't think about when you come from a country that hasn't fought any home-turf battles in over 140 years… Also, Germans like wearing socks with sandals. I didn't expect that one, either.

Love Parade, a Berlin institution for fifteen years, came back this year after a two-year hiatus. Perhaps because it lost some momentum in that time, Love Parade wasn't the crazy spectacle I had been expecting, especially after having heard that it was like Zurich's Street Parade, only bigger and crazier. Comparing this year's Love Parade to Street Parade from the last two years, I think that Street Parade (at least now) has a higher percentage of people willing to make a spectacle of themselves. That said, however, there were still people in costume (including my friends and me), or not in costume (barring thongs and some tape over their nipples), techno music, and rowdy mob behavior. Germans apparently like to climb things: every streetlight had partygoers perched rather precariously on top, some jumping up and down in time to the music, despite being about fifteen feet above the ground.

The surprise hit of the weekend? Big sunglasses. One of my friends hadn't come up with a costume, so we stopped in a novelty shop and he bought a pair of gigantic sunglasses. Between the three of us, we also had a women's tank top (on a man), a feather boa, fake eyelashes, a red-white-and-blue (for France) wig, and so on, but it was the sunglasses that got constant comments, pictures, and thumbs-up signs. Who knew that Germans liked big sunglasses so much?

A relic of the days of East and West Germany and the quartering of Berlin is that they have more airports and train stations than really necessary, since you couldn't very well expect the Soviets and the Allies to share back then. So Sunday evening, we split up and took cabs to our respective airports (too early again, I'm losing my touch when it comes to planning travel down to the minute). And life is back to normal, at least for now. With "normal" meaning hot days without air conditioning, evenings with friends, and weekends by the lake. Pictures coming soon, I promise.

11 July 2006

2006-07-11T10:49:00.000+02:00

Last weekend saw the end of the World Cup, so I watched the final game with a few friends at a bar in the red light district. There was the game, then overtime, then the infamous head-butt by France's star player (which was all the talk the next day around the proverbial water cooler, although we don't have a water cooler, since Swiss offices stock bottled water, both flat and fizzy, that workers keep at their desks), and then the penalty shootout. As soon as Italy won, the French fans slunk away to lick their wounds, and the Italian fans (Zurich has a sizable Italian population, supplemented by the Swiss who hail from the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland) poured out into the streets, converging on the red light district, which is the area that has the largest ethnic and immigrant populations. Incidentally, it also happens to be the area that is least patrolled by the police, which may in part explain what happened after the game.

Soccer fans are insane. They painted their cars in red, green and white, just so that they could drive them through the streets while honking and hanging out of windows and sunroofs, waving huge flags and banners (if Italy had lost, or if they had been eliminated earlier in the World Cup, I'm not sure what they would have done with their cars. I'm not sure what they're doing with their cars now that it's over). Those who didn't have cars painted their faces and bodies, and they brought their flags, banners, bullhorns, air horns, confetti cannons, flares, and fireworks into the crowded squares. It was like a grade school Fourth of July warning video, with people lighting Roman candles, rockets, and flares in the middle of the crowd with little regard for safety.

Anything that was elevated above street level was fair game for climbing. There were fans perched on top of awnings, cars, ticket machines, bus stop shelters, traffic lights, and street signs (the street signs here, unlike in the States, are load-bearing, so every street sign had a soccer fan or two balanced precariously on top, waving a flag, spraying champagne, or shooting rockets in the air). Although it was past midnight, parents had brought their infants and toddlers to come celebrate with the drunks amidst the broken bottles and hissing flares. To the American eye, the whole place was a hundred accidents waiting to happen. Or a battle scene from a movie about some sort of Italian revolution, what with the smoke, explosions, flashes of light, and Italian flags as far as the eye could see.

And the noise! Switzerland is such a quiet country that when there is noise, it's quite a shock to realize that these people do indeed know how to be loud. Car horns are rarely used in normal driving in Zurich (which isn't something you could say about New York or Boston), but are apparently reserved for liberal use after soccer games. People brought two or three air horns each (you can't expect one air horn to last through an entire evening!) Bars blared techno music in the street. Whistles, bullhorns, and yelling supplemented the noise, since car horns, air horns, and ground-shaking techno were clearly not enough.

I don't think there is a single international sporting event that would inspire so much excitement among Americans. Our biggest events are the World Series and the Superbowl, but those are national sports, and even they don't create the same crazed fervor that the World Cup incites (and if mild, reserved Switzerland went this crazy, I can't even imagine what it was like in Italy). Also, they don't go in for the hardcore marketing and advertising that go hand in hand with big sports in the States. After the Superbowl, people talk about the commercials more than the game, but there were hardly any commercials during the World Cup games. It seems that they watch sports for the sake of watching sports? Crazy Europeans.

5 July 2006

2006-07-05T11:48:00.000+02:00

How was your Fourth of July? I did absolutely nothing to observe it. This was not due to a lack of national pride (although I must admit that I feel a healthy dose of shame on that front these days); it was partly because I was horrifically tired, and partly because in Switzerland, the 4th is just the day that comes between the 3rd and the 5th. I arrived in Zurich Sunday afternoon, went to work Monday, went to Montreux after work, saw Sigur Ros in concert, then caught a bus at 2:45 in the morning. And then a train at 4:45. And another train at 6:20. And a tram at 6:40. Showered, changed, and still made it into the office by 8:30. So after working all day, I considered going out to celebrate, then thought I'd stay in and watch TV, a low-key, one-(wo)man celebration. And then I realized that I couldn't even watch TV without falling asleep, so I was in bed by 9 p.m. But I thought about going out to celebrate. And I thought about staying in and celebrating. And it's the thought that counts, right?

Lesson learned: taking five flights with long layovers, spending time in three time zones in ten days, running countless errands in between trying to see everyone you know, jumping back into work, then staying up all night to go to a concert does not leave you well-rested and ready to celebrate a holiday that is not observed in your country of residence.

California was great. My grandfather was quite pleased that his six surviving children, seventeen grandkids (and thirteen spouses), fourteen great-grandkids (with two more in the works), and other assorted relatives made it to Monterey for his 100th birthday. I met several new family members (mostly great-grandkids) for the first time, and none of them puked on me (not even my newly-married cousin's husband). Reunions in the old days included Yeye (my grandfather), the "grown-ups" (his kids), and the "kids" (his grandkids, my generation). Now that there's another generation added, we've started labeling ourselves like iPods. Yeye is G1, my parents are G2, the grandkids are G3, and the great-grandkids are G4. These are actually used. In the schedule that was handed out (yes, there was one), I had to check and see where I showed up, as Angela, G3, or #5 family (my dad is sibling #5), to make sure I was where I needed to be.

You may have gathered this, but my family is a little bit insane when it comes to organization and planning (if you think I'm anal, you will be shocked to find out that I am one of the most scatter-brained members of my family). Reunions are planned by committee, with copious input via our family email group. People are appointed Food Czar, Transportation Czar, Accommodation Czar, Gear Czar (over the years, we have collected family sweatshirts, jerseys, t-shirts, key chains, mouse pads, fleeces, pens, and mugs), Photo Czar, and Activities Czar. Seriously. G4, you may be carefree, puking, and potty-training now, but one day your Anal Gene will kick in and you will be telling G5 that they need to be ready for a group photo at 3:35, no exceptions.

New York was also great, although going back always awakens feelings of nostalgia. There really is no other place like New York, for better or worse. The sunglasses-shielded speed-walk down a squashed-gum sidewalk with an MP3 soundtrack. Dribbles of air conditioner spit coming from above. Grown-up hippies sitting on park benches next to sullen hipsters. Business casual-clad white-collar slaves gulping their drinks down in between furious bouts of Blackberry-ing. Strange(rs) sending drinks from across the bar and then making awkward conversation. Incomprehensible garbled announcements on the subway. The doorman who remembers your name two years later. The ear pop near the end of the elevator ride that means you're finally home.

20 June 2006

2006-06-20T13:06:00.000+02:00

Speaking of the World Cup (because isn't everyone talking about it?) Switzerland beat Togo yesterday (truly a battle of the titans), much to the delight of everyone within earshot of my office. The game started at 3 p.m., and based on the amount of noise that came in through our office windows every time something happened in the game (we knew before checking online when a goal had been scored, because the cheering and honking were so loud), I can only conclude that one of the following is true: (1) everyone was skipping work to watch the game, (2) Switzerland has a much higher unemployment rate than advertised, so no one had to skip work to watch the game, or (3) contrary to popular belief, the game was played in Zurich, outside my office window, and not in Germany.

For the rest of the evening, crazed fans in red shirts were running around banging on drums, driving around honking their horns, sitting in bars leading team chants, meeting perfect strangers and screaming with delight, and generally acting very un-Swiss. Despite being uninterested in soccer and the World Cup, I like what it does to the Swiss. Unfortunately, Switzerland doesn't seem destined to last much longer, so life (and people) here will soon return to normal, whatever "normal" might be.

One thing I have been wondering about team sports here is what language they speak. People who are born and raised in Switzerland don't necessarily share a mother tongue, as there are four national languages here (three of which account for over 90% of the population), and Swiss fans cheer for their teams in different languages, so I can only assume that the team is also comprised of people who favor different languages. Although most Swiss people speak two or three (or four or five) languages, it must be more difficult to muster the right words in your second or third language when screaming in the heat of the moment on the playing field than when giving someone walking directions to the bank. Add to that the fact that the players on the national team usually play on different club teams around Europe, so they aren't fully familiar with each other on the field, and it must make for some interesting communication problems.

The past couple of weeks have been spent in preparation for my upcoming trip back to the States for my grandfather's 100th birthday party. As usual, I've engaged in a frenzy of placing online orders, making calls to customer service, scheduling appointments, getting in touch with friends, and generally trying to ensure that I get the most out of my trip, in terms of my favorite people, administrative stuff, non-Swiss food, cool electronics, and good shopping.

I'll see friends and family who live much too far away these days. I'll go to the dentist, get a haircut, rearrange my accounts, and get random crap at the drugstore. I'll get my fix of Ethiopian food, lobster, burgers, Korean BBQ, and dim sum. I'll finally get a TiVo hooked up to my Slingbox, so that I can watch TV on my computer. I'll buy clothes that aren't from H&M. I'll pick up things that I had always assumed were available everywhere till I moved here: pudding mix, Jell-O, vanilla extract, microwave kettle corn, Tang, chocolate syrup, instant oatmeal. And I'll grit my teeth in frustration at the things that I won't be able to bring back with me: frozen dumplings, good beef, obscene quantities of breakfast cereal and bagels, cases of American-bottled Diet Coke (it tastes different here!), my friends and family, and the entire city of New York.

I'm flying to San Francisco on Thursday and stopping in New York on the way back, so the next update will be in two weeks, probably on July 5th. Till then, enjoy the longest days of the year, and Happy Fourth of July!!

13 June 2006

2006-06-13T11:28:00.000+02:00

The World Cup has started, and the entire world, minus Antarctica and the U.S., is entirely caught up in soccer fever (sorry, I suppose that I ought to say "football fever," since everyone else calls it football). People ask me if I'm going to watch any of the games, or if I'm rooting for any particular team, and I explain that no, I'm not really interested in the World Cup, but it's not because I'm American, it's just that I'm generally uninterested in most spectator sports. If I wasn't into football, basketball, or baseball in the States, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that I'm not terribly excited about the World Cup.

Apparently, I'm not alone. It is so commonplace that husbands or boyfriends become so engrossed in the games that their wives and girlfriends become "World Cup widows." Switzerland's tourism industry is trying to capitalize on that phenomenon, as evidenced by a series of ads placed in in-flight magazines in the preceding months, which depict rugged Swiss men with pitchforks, cows, hiking gear, and other assorted props and costumes that have no relation to soccer. The text reads: "Dear girls, why not escape this summer's World Cup to a country where men spend less time on football and more on you."

First of all, I'm not sure that most women would prefer to spend the World Cup hanging out with a strange man and his cows. Second of all, I'm not sure that the men in Switzerland are actually uninterested in the World Cup. Switzerland is in the World Cup (having rather amazingly bumped Turkey out), and there is World Cup paraphernalia on sale all over Zurich. Every bar that has a TV has signs outside advertising that they are showing live World Cup games. Instead of the usual giant Ferris wheel, the city has put up an outdoor movie screen with bleachers and vendors, so that the crowds can watch the games for free. If there is a game going on, even during working hours, I can hear shouts and cheers coming through my office window, from somewhere in the city. If anything, I think Swiss men have more opportunity to watch the World Cup than elsewhere, since so many people finish their working day by 5, in plenty of time to catch the evening games.

Summer has arrived in earnest. Clear skies, flip flops, skirts, sunglasses, daylight until 10 p.m., ice cream, cook-outs by the lake, terrace parties, they've all come back again, and it's about time. As I've mentioned before, air conditioning is not very common in Switzerland (or in Europe, in general), which is not as bad as it sounds, since summers here are less humid, and Swiss August is nothing like New York August or Chicago August. On the other hand, it can be difficult to sleep when you're hot, and an air conditioner would sometimes be a rather handy thing to have.

With that in mind, I bought a small air conditioner to use in my bedroom when it gets too hot to sleep, and I decided it was time to install it. I realized that needed a longer exhaust hose, as the one that came with the unit was too short, and that I'd need to find a way to cover the opening for the skylight that I'll be using to vent the air conditioner. So I went to the Swiss equivalent of Home Depot with two goals: a longer exhaust hose and a piece of plywood cut to my skylight's dimensions, with a hole cut out for the vent. And then I realized that it was going to be more difficult than anticipated. The employees there speak no English, no French, no Chinese, and little high German, so I was stuck trying to explain what I wanted in a weak combination of high German and Swiss German. (Upon further reflection, I'm not even sure that I would have fared any better in French or Chinese, since my home improvement vocab outside of English is, well, non-existent). How many languages can you say "I'd like a longer exhaust hose for my air conditioner" in?

7 June 2006

2006-06-07T11:38:00.000+02:00

It's hard to believe that we were in Istanbul. Istanbul, the city that straddles two continents. Istanbul, the city in every sophomore year history textbook. Istanbul (was Constantinople), the city that They Might Be Giants sang about. Thousands of years of history and millions of people, interlaced with kids selling postcards, shady men offering private tours, and buses full of German tourists. In some ways, it's a very modern city: huge highways full of cars, teenagers taking pictures of each other with their camera phones, trendy restaurants and bars. When you look more closely, you can see differences: few of those cars are driven by women (we saw one female driver while we were there), a lot of the teenage girls wear headscarves, and some are completely veiled.

One travel website suggested getting a Turkish newspaper to carry around to blend in. That might have been a good tip if we had been in, say, Paris or Berlin, but not in Istanbul. My two friends and I look like the cover of a diversity awareness pamphlet: we represent three professions, three regions of the States, three ethnicities, and both genders. I don't think a mere newspaper would have helped us to blend in, given the amount of staring we inspired while walking down the street. (Plus, there's the minor obstacle that none of us know any Turkish, so any small illusion of native-ness would have fallen apart immediately).

We would blend in if we were walking down the street in Manhattan, and we are of some interest in Switzerland, but we were a tourist attraction unto ourselves in Istanbul. Schoolchildren and adults alike stopped and stared at us wherever we walked, and they found us more picture-worthy than the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. I've never had my photo taken by so many strangers, not even right after Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon came out, and people thought I was Zhang Ziyi. Turkish people from the countryside rarely see people who are black, white, or yellow, and to see all three together was even more mind-blowing, even for cosmopolitan Istanbul natives.

On the first day, a Turkish carpet shop owner came up to us and said, "You're very multi-racial, you just need me." We ended up chatting with him and his business partner (Turkish hospitality is absolutely incredible – we spent most of the weekend with them, drinking, eating, smoking shishas, seeing lesser-known parts of the city). They threw an impromptu cook-out for us, invited their friends (the Turkish mafia, the Turkish Pavarotti, the Turkish Geraldo, their drivers and associates and apprentices) by calling them and telling them that three Americans were visiting, and hired three gypsies to come sing for us.

Not that Istanbul has never seen foreigners before. You can see evidence of the historical diversity of Istanbul, which has been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottoman Turks, and was Christian before it was Muslim, and has traded heavily with Africa and Asia. The Hagia Sophia was a church before it was a mosque before it was a museum, and there are plaques written in Arabic side-by-side with mosaics of Mary and Jesus (which the Muslims left intact, with extra people tiled in next to them: local politicians and other decidedly non-Christian people). There are Turkish people with dark hair, dark skin, and pale green eyes. There are Turkish people with blond hair and Asian features. Maybe the strange thing for them was seeing individual races represented in different people, instead of all mixed together.

Our experience was incredible, bordering on the surreal, to the point that any description of what we did sounds like the lead-in for a bad joke: Three Americans walk into a bazaar, and… Or, a yellow person, a black person, and a white person walk into a carpet store… And how about, what do you get when you mix a lawyer, a banker, an engineer, an opera singer, a TV star, the Turkish mafia, two carpet salesmen, a chauffeur, and three gypsies? An awesome weekend.

30 May 2006

2006-05-30T14:26:00.000+02:00

Huge Twilight Zone moment going on right now: I just realized that this Friday will mark the two-year anniversary of my arrival in Zurich. Whoa. Has it really been two years? Wait, that's too imprecise a time measurement for Switzerland. OK, Friday morning at approximately 7:05 a.m., it will have been 1,051,200 minutes since I landed at the Zurich airport two years ago.

It's been a good two years. I had forgotten until now that the big day would be this Friday, and realized that I'll be celebrating the occasion in a rather appropriate way: going to the airport after work and taking a weekend trip to Istanbul. It seems that my life here is defined by the places I go, the things I do, and the people I see in between getting my work done. So far, I've taken 22 international trips, spent time in 18 different countries, gone diving in six countries, and I already have another four trips lined up for Istanbul, San Francisco/New York, Berlin, and Dublin. I've even managed to check out 15 or so towns here in Switzerland. I've had 15 friends come through Switzerland, and I've met up with several other friends around Europe. Not bad.

Anyways. My two friends who were visiting overlapped for a few days, and we took a quick trip down to Zermatt, did the requisite ooh-ing and ahh-ing on the train ride down, checked out the Matterhorn, and got some sun. The weather in Zurich was less than cooperative, and it rained almost out of spite, so that everything I had to say went something like, "When it's sunny, this [bar, restaurant, terrace, street, neighborhood] is really nice." So my visitors perhaps got less out of their trips than they would have liked, but I got everything I had hoped for: Cheetos, red Twizzlers, tropical Starburst, Skittles, Lactaid pills, Advil, and Reese's miniature peanut butter cups. Oh, and quality time with my friends, of course.

Speaking of food, you would think that after two years, I would no longer consider any of the eating habits here to be strange, especially considering the somewhat suspect things that I eat for "dinner." (Gummy candy counts as fruit, right?) But there are still surprises, even after two years. My friend and I went to get a late dinner on Friday night (that was our first mistake, failing to take into account the fact that the Swiss like to eat early, and restaurants often stop seating people after 10 p.m.), and we were informed that the restaurant we chose was no longer serving its full menu, but that they had a late menu. Sure, sounds good. You would think that a shortened, late-night menu would have mostly standards and popular classics. So why, then, did the menu have pickled beef muzzle? Is this what the Swiss crave late at night? Is it a popular item that sells well at any time of day? Are they trying to offload it on desperate late-night diners? I have no idea.

You can buy fish paste in a tube at the grocery store (don't ask me what for), but there's no grape jelly. You can get every kind of jelly but grape: strawberry-rhubarb, green tea-peach, mango-orange, fig, whatever you want, as long as it doesn't involve grapes. Some typical American foods have made their way into Switzerland. If you go to the "Mexican" section of the online grocery store, you can get Doritos, or even Cool American Doritos (rather than Cool Ranch). "Nick's Easy Rider Pancake Mix" is also available for purchase in boxes that contain enough mix to make breakfast for a family of four.

In any case, it's been two years, and the Swiss still manage to catch me off guard with their pickled beef muzzles. Who knows what surprises the next year will bring? I'm off to Turkey this weekend, so next update will be on Wednesday.

23 May 2006

2006-05-23T11:15:00.000+02:00

A college friend is visiting during her time off between business school and work, sort of the equivalent to my big Australia- California- Delaware- New York- Bonaire trip after taking the Bar Exam. She's traveling around Switzerland for a while before meeting her boyfriend for some touring around Ethiopia. It's difficult to imagine two countries with greater contrast: Switzerland, twice the size of New Jersey, median age of 40, population under 8 million, of which maybe 9 aren't rich and white. Ethiopia, twice the size of Texas, median age of 18, population over 70 million, definitely more than 9 non-white people who aren't rich. Both are landlocked, which means that there isn't much good scuba diving in either country. Not really a relevant fact for most people, but very important to know, in my book.

The stereotype for Ethiopia is a desert wasteland full of starving people that was always on the news some years ago, which, when we would go for Ethiopian food in college or law school, would invariably prompt comments to the effect of "Wait, they have food in Ethiopia?" The CIA describes Ethiopia's climate as "tropical monsoon with wide topographic-induced variation," which basically means that they gets lots of rain and they have everything from deserts to plains to meadowlands to jungles. Learn something new every day.

My friend is going to Ethiopia partly because of its long and rich cultural history, and also for the food. She freely admits that she picks travel destination based on the food, and has ended up in Malaysia and Italy for the same reasons. While she's in Switzerland, she is also trying to get the full Swiss food experience, and is taking day trips to regions that are especially famous for their local cheese and sausages. (I say "especially" because all of Switzerland is known for cheese and sausage, so she's going for the highlights).

Here in Zurich, we've gone for dinner at two Swiss restaurants: one for sausage and rösti, and one for fondue and raclette. I'd never had raclette until now, having always opted for fondue. A few of my fellow expat friends also opted for raclette, since we've been here so long that it was getting to be a bit absurd that we hadn't had raclette yet. Although raclette is often served as a do-it-yourself project at the table, this restaurant served it already made. Since raclette is basically cheese that has been melted on a grill and eaten with potates and pickles, this meant that the waitress brought us individual plates with puddles of melted cheese on them, which somehow didn't really look like dinner. I decided that I prefer fondue, partly because I like fondue cheese better, and partly because melted cheese in a pot makes more sense to me than melted cheese on a plate.

We wanted to order dessert, and were all set to order the chocolate mousse, which is a specialty at this particular restaurant, when the waitress informed us that they don't serve chocolate mousse in the summertime. So, basically, they will bring you vats of boiling cheese (fondue), grilled cheese sandwiches without bread (raclette), sizzling pork sausages, and greasy potato pancakes (rösti), even though it's summertime, but cold chocolate mousse is considered wintertime fare.

A friend from my law firm in New York is getting here on Thursday, which Switzerland has off for the Ascension, and we may go to Zermatt to take pictures of the Matterhorn. Unless we get lazy. The weekend after that, we have a long weekend for Whit Monday, so I'm heading to Istanbul (was Constantinople). Gotta love the random Swiss holidays -- why celebrate things like presidents or veterans when you can celebrate, er, Whit? Some random religious thing I don't observe, but hey, it means I get to go to Turkey!

16 May 2006

2006-05-16T11:17:00.000+02:00

Sunday night. My living room. I was watching the first season of Alias on DVD (thank you, Thai shopkeeper) and the main character had to go to Geneva. The word "Geneva" popped up to let us know that the next scene would take place in Geneva. The scene opened with a shot of... Zurich. My neighborhood, no less.

So yes, I'm back in Zurich, and not just for the workweek. For the first time since March, I spent the weekend in Zurich, and it felt like being in a new and foreign place, partly because it had been so long since I spent a weekend here, and partly because Zurich is a different city in the summer than it is in the winter. For all two weeks of summer, people wear sunglasses, smile in public, and do things outside. On Thursday, I had about fifteen people over to have drinks on my terrace, on Friday, my friend organized an after-work cookout, and I brought my portable grill to the lake, and on Saturday, I went shopping and an expat arranged a pub crawl, so we did more in-city socializing in one weekend than we had in the previous month. When the next 13-month winter comes, the entire city will disappear behind frowns, scarves, and doors again, but for now, we have summer, and the city is alive.

Complete change of topic. I discovered last year that public passive farting (dropping anonymous, toxic farts in crowded, public places, such as at the symphony or on the train) is OK. I've recently encountered another phenomenon: elevator departure farts. Several times in the last week, I've walked into an empty elevator that, based on the smell, had just been vacated, probably by someone who ate too much cabbage. Is that really the nice thing to do, booby-trapping an elevator??

I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised. A few months ago, I went out for ice cream with some friends, and because it was cold outside, the customers all stayed inside the crowded shop to eat their ice cream. A guy, maybe twenty years old, was standing with his back to the corner, facing the entire room, and he was slowly and purposefully picking his nose. He did so repeatedly every few minutes, and after each successful endeavor, he popped his finger into his mouth. I have never seen such a thorough public nose-picking (and booger-eating) done by a person capable of speaking in full sentences.

I thought it was an aberration, but less than a week later, I was having dinner at a nice Italian restaurant near my apartment. As I was conversing with my dinner partner, my thoughts vanished and my voice trailed off as I watched a woman at an adjacent table. She was well dressed, perhaps forty years old, and having a conversation with her dinner partner while they waited for their food. In mid-sentence, without pausing, she deliberately reached up and picked her nose, all the while maintaining eye contact with her friend. This wasn't a subtle napkin wipe or nose rub, it was a deep insertion of her index finger into her nostril with a twist and scrape, a full-on excavation. At the dinner table. In a restaurant. With her friend looking directly at her.

Those incidents put me on the alert, and in the ensuing months, I concluded that public nose-picking is common, and apparently is not socially unacceptable. So it's OK pick your nose and fart at will, as it's not shocking in the least. But try not to jaywalk or do laundry on Sundays. We foreigners have such appalling habits.

A friend is coming in this weekend, and another friend's coming next weekend, so I'll be sticking around Switzerland, looking for more public nose-pickings. My dog is turning 6 (42, if you prefer dog years). He's very happy these days, as he loves warm weather, and has a new girlfriend (my boss's puppy). Yes, it's a bit of a Lolita situation.

9 May 2006

2006-05-09T11:39:00.000+02:00

Welcome to Ljubljana, would you like to buy a vowel? Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia, formerly part of Yugoslavia in the good ol' Communist days. European borders and politics are much harder to keep track of than US borders and politics. In the States, everything has been the same for the past 50-plus years, and even before that, it was just a gradual expansion to include more states in a westward fashion. I suppose you could say that we were once colonies, but even then, Maryland was already Maryland, and before that, it belonged to people who have been largely ignored in history books, so we aren't expected to nod knowingly about the Nanticoke tribe the way we're supposed to know about Milosevic and Slovenia.

We had a great time in Ljubljana, despite the fact that it rained for two out of the three days that we were there. We stayed in a hostel that was once a prison. Each of the cells had been designed and furnished by a different artist, the mattresses were firm, and there was free Internet. Not bad, for prison. Ljubljana is a small city with a very active arts and youth culture that hasn't yet made it onto the European Tourist Circuit, so it's relatively unspoiled: the prices are low, the people are friendly, the sights are uncrowded, and the gimmicks are minimal. I haven't had such consistently friendly and helpful service since… well, since before I moved to Europe. European service can be a bit surly, partly because they don't rely on tips, and partly because they have grown weary of foreigners, but the waiters in Slovenia seem to still work for tips and haven't yet acquired a distaste for tourists. I'm sure they'll learn to hate us, eventually, but for now, they're amazingly cheerful and eager to help.

Ljubljana is a curious mix of Eastern and Western Europe: the city is clean and picturesque, situated (like most old European cities) on a river. The architecture is a mish-mash of periods and styles. True to the city's Eastern roots, there is graffiti everywhere, but it isn't just any graffiti, it alternates between being artistic, clever, and political, and is seen as a significant enough art form to warrant a large exhibit in a local gallery. That alone was enough to make Ljubljana my new favorite city in Europe. Graffiti aside, though, there was also the food and the shopping. There is nothing like combining American consumerism with Eastern European prices.

Things have been such a blur lately, with six weekends in a row spent away from Zurich, that I almost forgot to mention that Sechseläuten was two weeks ago, the day I arrived back from Thailand. As you may recall, Sechseläuten is the Zurich celebration of the end of winter, and they torch the Böögg, an explosive-filled, gasoline-doused snowman, to predict how the summer will be. This year, there was added intrigue because the original Böögg was kidnapped by political activists (not sure what their platform was, unless it was anti-snowman or anti-explosives), and they had to put another one together in time for the festivities, because we all know that you can't welcome summer properly without setting something on fire.

I recently got a letter from the Swiss tax authorities saying that they had (finally) processed my taxes for 2004, and had determined that I am entitled to a refund. A refund of 50 rappen (about 40 American cents). They informed me that they would deposit the refund in my bank account. The letter cost twice as much to send as the refund itself; couldn't they have skipped the letter and tripled my refund, instead? My US taxes are due in another month. I won't have to pay any taxes, but I won't get a refund, either. I've never spent so much time on taxes before, only to get a refund that isn't even big enough to buy a candy bar. Unless you're buying the candy bar in Slovenia.

2 May 2006

2006-05-02T15:32:00.000+02:00

So, Thailand and Myanmar, Part 2. Many people think that Asians "all look same," but despite that, neighboring countries in Asia have separate identities and different traditions. Moving to Switzerland, I thought that having four official languages in one small country would make things difficult, but in Myanmar, the Country Formerly Known as Burma, they speak about 40 different languages, all of which are so different from the language spoken in neighboring Thailand that Thais and Burmese often speak English when trying to communicate with each other.

Thailand's government is a benevolent token monarchy, but Myanmar is a military dictatorship that has kept the most recently elected president (attempted president?) under house arrest for over a decade. You would think that in such circumstances, border control would be a big issue. When it came time for our boat to cross into Burmese waters, however, the Thai customs official pulled up on a scooter, took off his shoes, boarded the boat, and stamped our passports, and then the Burmese customs official took off his shoes, hopped on board, stamped our passports, and took our visa fees. The main difficulty that arose was that some of the bills we gave him (they only take US dollars) were not brand-new, and they only accept current-issue, un-creased, unmarked bills. You would think that with the elected president under house arrest and dissidents breeding discontent, they would have more pressing issues than whether the Benjamins are folded or not.

Despite being neighbors and "all look same," Thailand and Myanmar celebrate their New Years at different times. Thai New Year fell on April 13, and was celebrated on our boat by a lot of crew members running around throwing water at each other and at us, apparently to bring good luck for the coming year. Burmese New Year happened about a week later. That has to be confusing, if you're from adjacent countries, and talking about "last year" or "next year," and having to specify whose years you're using.

We went on shore briefly at a border town in Myanmar, and their abject poverty was made even more obvious by the dead heat and humidity. Not being able to afford sunscreen, locals smear some sort of home-concocted paste on their cheeks to try to block out the harsh sun. The pavement is strewn with trash and spattered with red blotches from the betel nut that a lot of the local men chew. Street children follow foreigners everywhere, trying to scrounge some spare change. The temple is populated with young monks whose families couldn't afford to raise them. Nobody puts on a show of good squalor like Asians do (I should know, since my apartment clearly reflects a genetic gift for squalor). In Asia, I think it's due to a combination of heat, humidity, poverty, population density, and a love of food that really stinks when it goes bad. I'm still trying to come up with an excuse for myself, though.

While in Thailand, I rode a motorcycle (something I've always said I'd never do, the whole death on wheels thing) without a helmet (double death on wheels). After that brush with hypothetical death, I sampled a single grain of rice that had touched food that my Thai dive guide said was spicy, even for him (so he only had one plate of it), and my mouth quickly informed me it was not meant for human consumption, since it was made out of fresh lava. I think it was as risky a venture as riding the motorcycle. When in Asia, do as the Asians do. Then come back and write about it from the safe squalor of your own apartment.

Ljubljana was great, but I'll talk about that next week. Going to Geneva this weekend to meet up with a friend who is visiting (whew, seems like it's travel season for me again).

26 April 2006

2006-04-26T10:37:00.000+02:00

Back in Switzerland. Thailand and Myanmar were amazing, on land, at sea, and underwater. 26 dives. 4 massages. Dozens of mosquito bites. Lots of fish and coral. Countless mangoes. Here's the beginning of an update, but there's too much to fit in one week's entry, so Part 2 will come later. Pictures are up, as well, and there are a lot of them, but they were gleaned from about 1,000.

From the time I have spent in Asia, as well as the time I have spent, um, as an Asian-American, I have cultivated a love for strange food products and English usage ("Engrish"), both together and separately. One night in Thailand, my dive buddy (Sarah) and I decided to get ice cream. I was particularly intrigued by one that had cartoon illustrations of corn and green beans happily exploding out of a Popsicle. Truth in advertising, as it was indeed a mild coconut-flavored Popsicle studded with corn and beans. Convenience stores also carry the requisite hot dogs and meat pies side-by-side with corn or pineapple pies. So yes, you could go to the 7-11 and have a corn pie for lunch and corn ice cream for dessert.

Apparently, wooden planks are the duct tape of the East. Dangerous pothole? Put a wooden board across it. Floor of the car rusted through? Get a 2x4! Not enough seats in the back of the truck? Nothing like a piece of wood to make a bench! Speaking of which, I have never seen as, er, thorough usage of transportation vehicles as we saw in Phuket. Vespa-style scooters that generally seat one (two if you're dating) were used for entire families of four. Add on a sidecar, and you can cart eight people with one scooter! Helmets are only required for the driver, so Mr. Scooter wears one, but Mrs. Scooter, Scooter Junior, and Baby Scooter go without, since scooter accidents couldn't possibly be injurious to passengers. Pickup trucks, which in the States would seat three people if someone takes the middle seat, were used to transport entire workforces, with over a dozen people squinched in the back, sometimes standing, sometimes seated on wooden planks.

I sometimes forget how hot and humid Asia gets, and April is the hottest month of the year in Thailand. Daytime highs around 90F (32C) and nighttime lows around 78F (26C), and the humidity pushed the heat index over 100F (38C) most days. Sarah and I spent our days on land walking slowly between air-conditioned shops, taking breaks to get hour-long foot rubs, which including tip, cost about $7 each. The shopping was cheap, abundant, and aimed at tourists. (Cheesy trinket? No, thanks. Oh, two for a dollar? I'll take four!) I spent a significant amount of mental energy on the lookout for lizards, because they are cool and were all over the resort, and millipedes, because they are disgusting and were all over the resort.

Most of my physical energy on land was spent shopping, sweating, and eating mangoes (grocery store mangoes just don't live up to the real thing). Given our inability to do anything but sweat through our swimsuits and shorts in that kind of heat and humidity, imagine our surprise when we hung out with one of our dive guides, and he showed up in jeans and hiking boots, then told us that on his days off, he usually goes long-distance mountain-biking. He works his butt off for eight days on a boat, then goes and nearly kills himself biking in heat wave conditions in order to relax??

Got back to Zurich at 6:15 in the morning on Monday, went home, dropped off my bags, got Fiver, and came into the office. Monday was a half-day because of Sechseläuten (Swiss version of Groundhog Day with an exploding snowman; why is it that every time I really want to sleep here, there are marching bands outside of my window??) Next Monday is Europe's version of Labor Day, and we're going to Ljubljana for a long weekend, so next update (Thailand and Myanmar, Part 2) might be on Wednesday again.

Editor's Note

2006-04-06T12:00:00.000+02:00

Leaving this Saturday for two weeks of diving with a friend in Thailand and Myanmar, so the next update won't be until April 26 or so. I've put up a new Swiss Guide entry and a load of pictures from Paris to make up for it. Back in a couple of weeks, hopefully with another three dozen dives under my belt. Be very jealous.

4 April 2006

2006-04-04T14:51:00.000+02:00

Ah, Paris in zee springtime, when young people's thoughts turn to zee, how do you say, rioting? Spent the weekend in Paris, where we saw few signs of the protests whose main point was, "We're young and unemployed, but we don't like laws that would make it easier to fire us if we ever got jobs." Some stores were closed to avoid looting (or perhaps because the employees were off looting other stores), there were police and soldiers milling around, and we could see the remnants of temporary barricades used to hem protesters in, but otherwise, Paris was Paris. We tried to stage a few riots and protests ourselves. Not very effective, but amusing, nonetheless.

The French dating scene is bizarre. My friend who lives in Paris brought his French friend out, whom I'll call Jean. Jean has been dating two girls "exclusively" at the same time for a year. They have the same name, which is the feminine form of his name, so I'll call them Jeanne One and Jeanne Two. About eight months ago, they found out about each other, but Jean told each of them that he had broken things off with the other. Jean brought Jeanne Two out, and it was strange, hanging out with Jean and Jeanne Two, and knowing about Jeanne One. Valentine's Day must have been awkward, and he's trying to figure out what to do about his upcoming anniversaries, since he started dating them at the same time. How strange, to date two people who share the same name, which is almost the same as yours.

The French know way more about wine than the rest of us, but there are ways to catch up. One way is to buy a special wine-tasting book with a set of about 40 vials of scents that commonly show up in wine, so that after some self-study, you can look very knowledgeable when you proclaim that a certain wine is "full-bodied with a lot of fruit, a hint of leather, and a slight aftertaste of pepper." I played around with one of these sets once, sniffing at poire, litchi, bois, and brioche (pear, lychee, wood, and bread roll), all of which seemed as if they might show up in a fine wine, then picked up pipi de chat (helpfully translated as "cat piss"). My guess is that if a wine reminds you of pipi de chat, it's probably in a screw-top bottle in a brown bag, and it's not really a wine-tasting kind of situation.

I've grown accustomed to the fact that Switzerland shuts down on Sunday. When I visit big cities, however, I still expect things to be open. Maybe not to the extent that things are open in New York, where you can walk down the street at any hour of any day and find places that are open, but at least to the extent that you could go shopping on the weekend. Sunday afternoon, I wanted to do some aimless shopping: clothes, books, random doodads, I had no real goal, so any stores would have sufficed. I could only find one bookstore (run by a Brit) and one clothing store that were open. Everything else was closed. How can stores in a big city close on Sunday? Do they realize that tourists, who make up a large percentage of the weekend population, are especially careless with their cash? Are they too busy protesting and rioting to care?

On the way back, we left for the Paris airport over two hours before our flight. I sometimes forget that in the rest of the world, you have to leave for the airport more than an hour before take-off. Later, on the train from the Zurich airport back into town, there was a children's car with a slide and a jungle gym, both shaped like dinosaurs, and some other dinosaur-related games. They were sized more for 7-year-olds than for 27-year olds, but that didn't stop my friends and me from playing on them. It was the first time I have ever climbed on a dinosaur while taking the train, and I'm pretty sure that few, if any of you have done the same.

How to Pass for a Swiss Person, Part IV, Section 1: Swissification; Eating Fondue

2006-04-03T13:34:00.000+02:00

Should you eat fondue, here are a few cheats to ensure maximum cheese consumption, thereby avoiding labeling yourself as a foreigner who can't hold his (or her) cheese:

1) Competition is key. Go with enough people that two pots of fondue are necessary, six or more, and you'll feel obligated to do better than the other team. If you're hardcore, you'll also feel obligated to have dessert, to show that you had space.

2) Make sure your potmates are experienced fondue eaters. You're in this together, the fondue pot is communal, and one sub-par eater will increase the amount of cheese the rest of you have to eat in order to finish off the pot.

3) Don't eat any cheese beforehand, don't eat a big lunch, and don't fill up on appetizers. An empty stomach is key, and you don't want to max out your daily cheese quota too early.

4) Break your bread into smaller pieces. Smaller pieces mean more surface area, which means more cheese ingested per cubic centimeter of bread. If you're eating fondue with potatoes (as is done with some kinds of fondue), cut the potatoes into smaller pieces.

5) Dip and stir. Submerge your bread completely in the cheese and stir it around to ensure complete coverage, maximizing the cheese you eat per piece of bread.

6) Cleanse your palate. Feeling overwhelmed by the salty cheese and chewy bread? Is the squishy texture of cheese-soaked bread starting to feel too gooey and heavy? When you start to get cheese-fatigue, have a bite of sweet fruit or a bite of crunchy pickle, and you've bought yourself a little more cheese-eating capacity.

7) Don't give up. Eventually, you'll be eating the whole pot, scraping the burnt cheese off the bottom (the best part of the fondue, according to the Swiss), and waiting impatiently for dessert. And when that time comes, you'll take a quiet sort of pride that you aren't like those other foreigners who can't hold their cheese.

Although native Swiss people probably don't have to use these cheats to ensure their successful consumption of full fondue portions, they have also had a lifetime of training and preparation, so this just levels the playing field to ensure that all people, both Swiss and non-Swiss, can exceed their monthly fat and cholesterol quotas in one sitting.

Editor's Note

2006-03-29T12:00:00.000+02:00

Just booked last-minute tickets to go to Paris for the weekend, leaving Friday morning and getting back Sunday night. And then realized that there are riots there. Nothing like a weekend of food, culture, hanging out, and dodging rocks :)

28 March 2006

2006-03-28T11:48:00.000+02:00

A friend is staying with me for two weeks while she unwinds from med school, travels around Switzerland, and catches up on her paperbacks. Her family is from Kansas, and she's been living in New York for the past few years. We're definitely not in Kansas anymore, nor are we in New York.

First of all, there's (no) security. Switzerland is not part of the post-9/11 world. When I was telling my friend how to get into my apartment, I said that I'd leave spare keys for her with the jeweler downstairs, and that she could go ask for them there. They take a lunch break, so I told her that if they weren't there when she got in, she could just go to the candy store in the next building, tell them that she knows me, and leave her bags there while she wandered around town. There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then she said, "That's very sketchy," and after I thought about it, I suppose it is a bit sketchy.

That's just how things work here. You can leave your keys with the shop downstairs and ask a shopkeeper to watch your luggage, and you know that jeweler won't break in, and the candy man won't steal your bags, and they in turn trust that you won't break into their shops or leave bombs in your bags with them. I can't remember the last time I went somewhere and had my bag checked by a security guy. I think it may have been in the Vatican, but it's never happened to me here in Switzerland, outside of the airport.

Secondly, there's food. (I don't think I have enough space to address all of the funny things about food in this entry, let alone move onto other Swiss idiosyncrasies, but I'll start). The Swiss have strange ideas regarding what to eat and how much of it is appropriate. Fondue. My visitor is a friend from college, and back in the day, we used to have girls' nights, when eight or ten of us would gather in my room, eat a pot of cheese fondue, a pot of chocolate fondue, and a few bottles of wine, and then we would go to a play or stay in and play Taboo. Not your typical college Friday nights, but then again, we weren't your typical college students, for better or for worse. So I came here thinking that I was ready for fondue. I thought wrong. The fondue here is much stinkier, much richer, and much bigger than any fondue we ever had. The amount we would make for eight to ten people is a two-person serving here. And they don't even do chocolate fondue; I think they see it as an affront to both chocolate and to fondue to merge the two concepts.

Then there's sausage. There is a restaurant that serves traditional Swiss food, and they serve sausage by the meter. They recommend a meter of sausage for every four people. That's ten inches of sausage per person, in addition to the bread, salad, and potatoes that everyone eats. I suppose that's still reasonable for some people, but it still astonishes me that they actually have sausage by the meter. I picture it coiled up on a big spool next to the emergency fire hose. And maybe the Sausage Inspector comes every year to make sure their Emergency Sausage meets regulatory standards. The street vendors also sell sausages (without buns, and not by the meter) and kebabs, rather than hot dogs and gyros, but if you're sick of kebab and sausage, other menu staples are horse, deer, and rabbit (which is sometimes listed as the equivalent of "baby bunny wabbit"). Horse and venison are mostly served in the autumn, though, during hunting season, which makes sense for venison, but less so for horse.

For people with a sweet tooth, candy options are pretty much limited to chocolate and gummy candy. Gummy candy comes in all shapes and flavors: there are gummies that taste like Jägermeister, ginger, and chili peppers, and there are gummies shaped like naked couples having sex. And yes, you can buy them from the man who is watching your luggage.

21 March 2006

2006-03-21T11:11:00.000+01:00

Spring is here. The calendar says so: yesterday was the first day of spring, and Switzerland is right on schedule, no surprise. Yesterday, the sun came out and temperatures reached 50 F, prompting crocuses to bloom and people to wear sunglasses. This morning, we had a light shower that was distinctly different from the soggy winter rains, and it washed away the last traces of the salt that was used to counter the snowdrifts from a few weeks ago. Leave it to Swiss weather to carefully observe the proper timing of the seasons. Of course, now that I've said that, winter will come back with a vengeance, for one last spiteful hurrah.

I'm a wimp when it comes to cold weather, and walking around outside, let alone sleeping outside, in below-freezing temperatures has always struck me as one of the worst possible fates (I suppose camping aficionados would disagree). Switzerland has very few homeless people, as their social programs are quite good and the country is quite rich. The only people I have seen sleeping outside are drug addicts who probably have places to go, but are too high to remember them.

One crackhead often sleeps on the doorstep of my apartment building when it's cold. It's one floor up, semi-private, and warmer than most doorsteps, so one of the first signs of winter is that he starts sleeping there more frequently. Despite being high and crazy, he's the most polite homeless drug addict I've ever met (and more polite than many non-homeless non-drug addicts, come to think of it). He apologizes profusely when I have to step over him, and wishes me a good evening. He is sort of like a demented, smelly doorman, greeting me when I come home, questioning people he doesn't recognize when they come to the building, and free-basing when nothing is going on. If you have to have a crackhead sleeping on your doorstep, hope for a Swiss one. Now that it's warmer, he's seldom around, but I'm sure he'll be back come fall.

With spring's warmer temperatures, the ground begins to thaw, which means, that's right, it's time for massive construction projects that weren't practical when the ground was frozen solid. For some reason, they've started ripping up the entire street that runs between my block and the river. They are doing so with remarkable efficiency; the size and number of deep trenches and craters is impressive, given the fact that they've only started digging quite recently, and only dig for 40 hours a week. Unfortunately, some of that remarkable efficiency wakes me up every morning, since the construction workers, being Swiss, always start up every backhoe, jackhammer, and bulldozer at the crack of 7. I have yet to figure out what it is they're doing. Maybe trying to dig a hole to China.

The construction project has necessitated the relocation of the tram stop by about 100 meters. Not a big deal, right? Not being particularly litigious or conscious of such risks, however, they haven't put up huge notices and warnings regarding the change, so that pedestrians blithely cross in front of trams, expecting that they will stop where they have always stopped, whereas the tram drivers keep going full speed for another 100 meters to the new, temporary stop. It's an accident waiting to happen, and I'm sure that once it happens, they'll be well equipped to clean it up very quickly, and hey, they already have lots of big holes to toss the bodies into.

A college friend is coming in town tomorrow and she'll be crashing with me for two weeks. We'll do all of the required things: fondue, sightseeing around Zurich, a weekend trip somewhere, and so on. After living here for almost two years, it's always fun to see the reactions of a newcomer and to re-notice all of the things that have become a part of life. The bells. The clothes. The waiting at crosswalks. The stinky cheese. And above all, last but definitely not least, the Swiss.

14 March 2006

2006-03-14T10:35:00.000+01:00

Ah, spring, when law-abiding citizens' thoughts turn to taxes... For Americans, one good thing about living in Switzerland is that we get to take advantage of lower tax rates (someone who pays 40% in the U.S. would pay about 10% in Switzerland). Uncle Sam doesn't give the taxes up without a fight. All American citizens, no matter where they live, what they do, or how much they earn, have to file U.S. income taxes every year. So even if you're living in the middle of the desert, making no money, and eating scorpions and cacti to stay alive, you still have to file.

Doing that requires lots of paperwork and currency conversions. Count the number of days you were in different countries, not a small feat considering the amount of travel that fits into generous Swiss vacation plans. Call five government offices at strange hours to take into account the time difference and government office hours, going through endless voice prompts, heinous hold music, and bored employees to get conflicting opinions on whether a deduction applies. Figure out what documentation will suffice to prove that you made money but that you don't owe any taxes. Spend more time on your taxes than ever before, all for the net effect of not paying any taxes. It's probably worth the extra time and effort, if the endless paperwork doesn't drive you mad first.

Joy of joys, you also have Swiss taxes to deal with. Yes, you're a foreigner, so they tax you at source so you won't bolt without paying your taxes. (They don't trust us, and have all sorts of deposits and security measures built in, because they seem to genuinely suspect that we will leave our jobs, apartments, and bank accounts just to avoid paying our cell phone bills, taxes, and DSL bills). And yes, they are probably over-taxing you. But if you make enough money, they still "invite" you to file taxes, whether or not you want to go to that party (Swiss people only file taxes when "invited," meaning that if they receive a big packet of tax forms, they file taxes within two months, but if not, they don't have to worry about it). The forms are all in different colors, with two copies of each form, and every form is in German, to make taxes even more fun, especially considering that their forms and deductions are different than the ones in the States. There are deductions for clothes, there are deductions for lunch, there are deductions for tram passes. They ask you about your accounts, in Switzerland and elsewhere. They ask you what religion you are, and they take more tax out for your church. And then they ask you for things that just don't really translate between tax systems, and you fill them in and hope for the best.

One strange thing about Swiss tax forms is that there is no final number, no tallying up of figures to see who owes whom. You just send it in, and they eventually tell you who owes whom what. Whoever owes money pays interest, which they calculate carefully, being accounting masters. Oddly enough, despite being so precise and punctual in every other aspect of public regulation, the Swiss IRS are slow. It takes two years to process tax forms, so taxes filed in 2005 for the 2004 tax year won't be done until 2007.

Foreigners moving to Switzerland get an automatic six-month extension on their first tax invitation. The first tax invitation may not be initially due until May, meaning that the extension goes until November. So American expats do their U.S. taxes whenever they're due, and they plow through their Swiss tax forms and hand them in in November with a sigh of relief, then receive their next Swiss tax invitation in January, with a March due date, on top of their next set of American taxes, and feel that it is indeed true that the only sure things in life are death and taxes. Lots of taxes. Well, actually, not as much tax as before, but at the cost of extra frustration and stress, which probably takes years off of your life. Yup, the only sure things are death and taxes. At least you only have to die once.

7 March 2006

2006-03-07T10:52:00.000+01:00

This past weekend, we had what was, according to the newspapers, the storm of the century. People who have lived here for a long time agreed that they had never seen anything like it in Zurich. We got almost two feet of snow in about a day and a half, and it accumulated faster than the plows, salters, and sanders could stave it off. Add to that the fact that some of the snow fell on a Sunday, when few Swiss are working, and there was some serious snow. There was also wind with gust speeds of over 100 kmph, so there were lots of trees falling down, either from the wind or from the weight of the snow. The trees downed tram power lines, and the snow iced up the tracks, and the entire tram system shut down on Sunday, which is unheard of.

Not wanting to venture forth in the new Ice Age, I decided to stay home all weekend. My apartment was a mess, so I did some cleaning on Sunday, but never fear, I'm not becoming Swiss, because I cleaned against all of their rules. I did two loads of laundry, two loads of dishes, and vacuumed, all of which are heavily frowned upon on Sundays (in some buildings it is strictly banned). I even took a bag of trash out, even though it was Sunday, and trash collection takes place on Tuesdays and Fridays in my neighborhood. It was still in a regulation trash bag, though. There are limits to even the most extreme forms of rebellion, you see.

Despite the weather, the Swiss were out celebrating Fasnacht, the local equivalent of Mardi Gras or Carneval. It involves lots of costumes, marching bands, drum lines, confetti, and parades. Different cities celebrate Fasnacht at different times, depending on whether they are Catholic or Protestant, and on other factors that I don't quite grasp. Basel's Fasnacht is going on right now, with all-night celebrations for several days. Here in Zurich, Fasnacht was celebrated last weekend, and it was quite something to be trudging through slushy piles of snow, hearing a band of drunk men shouting and yelling, and then looking up and seeing that the men in question are all decked out in matching red dresses, blue aprons, red wigs in pigtails, and other finery. That was perhaps the most startling thing about Fasnacht, seeing normally staid and proper Swiss men wearing ornate gowns with shiny metallic ruffles as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

A few friends and I went to Lucerne (or Luzern, if you prefer the German spelling) to check out their Fasnacht celebration last Tuesday (Mardi Gras). It was cold, and it was a work night, but there were still thousands of people out to celebrate. Performers and spectators alike wore elaborate costumes, many with huge, heavy masks. Costumes included Americans, football players, werewolves, cowboys and Indians, couches, bag-heads, chickens, and all sorts of other strange get-ups that had us double- and triple-taking the whole night. Kids had bags of confetti that they lobbed at strangers in the street. The many marching bands paraded around, playing "Guggenmusik," which sounds like what Sousa would have composed if he had been drunk and living on boat. My friends and I went straight from work, so instead of wearing big, crazy costumes, we went as Americans living in Switzerland, and finished the look off with ski jackets, hats, mittens, cameras, mulled wine, and sausages. OK, so we didn't wear costumes.

In any case, it was quite a spectacle, and it's definitely something to see the Swiss staying out late, wearing gaudy costumes, and making noise well into the night. Back in Zurich, I decided not to go see the Fasnacht festivities, due to the extreme weather. On Sunday, I was taking the trash out (don't tell), and since I was just stepping out for a minute, I was wearing flip-flops instead of real shoes. There was a steel drum band in red wigs playing outside my building, playing calypso music in the steadily falling snow, trudging through the slush, and everyone looked at me like I was the crazy one. Only in Switzerland.

28 February 2006

2006-02-28T11:07:00.000+01:00

No matter how long you live abroad, you still retain some connection to where you come from. There is always some mental comparison being drawn between "us" and "them," which sometimes weighs in favor of "us," and sometimes in favor of "them." Your perception of who "us" is and who "they" are may change, but the comparisons are always being made. Even the most well-adjusted expats still retain some ties to their homeland, and it's not always obvious in advance what people will hold onto to remind themselves of where they come from. Just a few examples off the top of my head...

Music. When American bands come through, over half of the audience is American. I went to see Death Cab for Cutie with a few friends, and we heard more American English than Swiss German while we were there. On a side note, Swiss concert-going behavior continues to stump me. After the first couple of songs, the singer, Ben, suggested that a couple right in front of him should get a room, since they seemed to be enjoying themselves so much, and it was really distracting him. Over the course of the concert, he referred to them repeatedly, commenting that they were still making out like they were the only ones in the room, asking how much they spent on Chapstick, wondering if the people behind them were watching them or the band, telling them that they were being disgusting. And yet they continued. I don't know if they didn't understand what he was saying (unlikely, since the Swiss speak good English, especially if they are young), or if they just didn't care. I think most people would be embarrassed enough to stop groping and tongue-jousting, but then again, the Swiss are often shockingly willing to make out with each other in very public places. Park benches, picnic blankets, tram stops, concerts, the city is one big bedroom.

Junk food. Yes, I miss all sorts of good food from New York and from home: Ethiopian food, tapas, Chinese food, sushi, Korean BBQ, but when friends visit, I find myself hoping that they will bring the most random junk stocked by American grocery stores: Kraft Mac & Cheese, Cheetos, pudding mix, red Jell-o, microwave popcorn with lots of butter, sugary cereals, beef jerky, Reese's Miniature Peanut Butter Cups, flavored instant oatmeal, Tang, Fruit Rollups, Pop Tarts... And then there are the things that I wish they could bring that just wouldn't survive the journey: green mint chocolate chip ice cream, cheddar cheese, sourdough bread, and so on. I leave one of the culinary capitals of the world, and most of the things I crave can be found at any truck stop in Nebraska. I live in Cheese Country, and half the foods I crave contain what can only dubiously be described as "processed cheese flavored product."

And then there is the chocolate debate. I grew up on Hershey's. I got it in my plastic pumpkin at Halloween, I bought it at the store, I went to the theme park in Pennsylvania. Hershey's meant chocolate and chocolate meant Hershey's. The Swiss categorically refuse to recognize Hershey's as chocolate, saying that it doesn't taste like the real thing. And it's true that Hershey's isn't like Swiss chocolate. They taste different enough that you wouldn't necessarily think of them as being from the same candy category. But I still eat both. Swiss chocolate lives up to its rep. It is rich and smooth and creamy and decadent, and you feel sick after eating a whole bar, but it's worth it. But Hershey's, well, you can eat two bars without feeling ill, it just isn't that rich. It's no longer entirely synonymous with chocolate in my mind, and maybe it isn't as decadent, but it tastes like home, if the States are home. Swiss chocolate is starting to taste like home, too, if Switzerland is home.

Other people define themselves through politics and language. I define myself through junk food and candy. Mmm... processed cheese flavored product...

21 February 2006

2006-02-28T10:21:00.000+01:00

My college roommate came out for a long weekend to check out all there is to see in Zurich. That took about one afternoon, and then we spent the rest of the weekend in Prague. No, seriously, we went around town a bit, hit the Turkish baths, went to two of the main chocolatiers, and went out for fondue (where she discovered, much to her relief, that fondue tastes much better than it smells). Another day to putter around town would have been great, but time waits for no man, and planes wait for no tourists. On to Prague, then.

Our hotel was full, so they had booked us a two-person apartment, instead, for the same price. The two-bedroom apartment had five beds. Five. What would two people need five beds for? The place I stayed at in Rome two weekends ago had the same thing: five beds for two people, and that was just a room, not even an apartment. European hotels have strange ideas regarding the proper person-to-bed-to-room ratio, apparently.

When I first moved to Europe, it was slightly disconcerting to see signs and newspapers all written in a foreign language, but I got used to it pretty quickly, especially since French and German are easily translated into English. What throws me now is going to a country where the language is entirely incomprehensible. I came across that in Budapest last year, and this past weekend in Prague. Czech is almost entirely unrelated to English, and yet we would still try to read the signs. It�s amazing how strong the reading instinct is when you see signs, even if you know that you won�t understand them. They�re there, so you try.

The other thing that happened in both Prague and Budapest was that it was difficult to figure out how much things cost. Most of the traveling I've done since moving here has been within the EU, Switzerland, England, or the States, so I've gotten used to keeping track of what things should cost in euros, francs, pounds, or dollars, but Hungary and the Czech Republic are still on their own currencies (forints and crowns, respectively), and the exchange rates are odd (something like 23 crowns per dollar, or 17 per franc). Add to that the fact that I think half in dollars and half in francs, being in expat currency-consciousness limbo, and I spent half the time trying to figure out if things were expensive or not.

In any case, I�d heard that Prague has succumbed to the tourist industry in the past ten or fifteen years, but I wasn�t prepared for the extent to which the city is overrun by and run for tourists. Every store, every restaurant, every square was full of tourists and the people trying to get the tourists' money. February is cold and in the middle of low season, so I shudder to imagine what high season is like, and how many tourists must flood Prague in June. We heard more Brits and Americans than Czechs while we were there, and had to remind ourselves that we were in a foreign country, mostly by trying to read street signs.

One day, my friend and I were sitting in a caf�, conversing (as we always do, it being our native tongue) in American English. A man sitting at the next table over, probably about 50 years old, leaned over and apologized for interrupting, but he wanted to know where we were from. He was American, and also spoke with an American accent. We told him that we were American, and he said, �Oh, that explains it. It is nearly impossible for non-native speakers to speak such good English.� Um. I guess I�m relieved that I can speak English like a native, despite my yellow skin and slanty eyes. It was more excusable that a few Czech people we met were surprised and shocked that two Asian girls could come from the States, but to have an American listen to our American English and be surprised that we�re American? People like that remind me why Bush is president and why Americans have a reputation for being ignorant.

And one random note: My webstats broke 20,000, so that means that my random blabbering is somewhat amusing to you guys. Or that you�re very bored and need something to read at work that isn�t porn. Thanks for reading.

14 February 2006

2006-02-14T11:11:00.000+01:00

So. Happy Valentine's Day. I had forgotten that it was that time of year until after I had already scheduled a personal fitness assessment at my gym, so I will be spending the evening being weighed, measured, and put through my paces. My gym buddy told me that it's cool, though, they tell you how much fat and muscle you have in each limb and on your torso, not just overall, and she evidently has 400g (almost a pound) more muscle on one leg than the other. It must be because that's the leg she uses to run around and kick people all the time. If I had known the assessment would be so detailed, I would have made a special effort to only work out one muscle group for a couple weeks in advance, to see how much I could skew the results. Yes, other people are having romantic dinners, giving flowers and cards, and doing other woo-natured things, and I'm wishing that I had had the foresight to work out my left buttock.

I came into work on Sunday in order to be extra-productive, and I thought back on the weekends I used to work when I was at the firm in New York. And then I realized that it was the first Sunday I've worked since coming here (Swiss employment law really protects employees' personal time), and felt rather smug about the fact that I'm getting a comp day in exchange for the Sunday at work. Happy employees make productive employees, in my opinion, and Swiss law seems to support that mindset.

At some point on Sunday, I went to use the restroom, and noticed that something was very different. It wasn't freezing cold. The windows were closed. For some reason, a lot of companies, stores, bars, and restaurants in Switzerland like to keep their bathroom windows open. It's fine in the summertime, but when it's snowing and cold outside, there is nothing pleasant about walking into the restroom and realizing that you should have brought your coat and hat. Switzerland has a good shot at winning the award for Coldest Bathrooms in the World. It gives me flashbacks to Girl Scout camp, and using the latrines at night. Yes, there's a ceiling over your head, but it's cold, and the chill in the air only hints at the coldness that is yet to come when you sit down. You wash your hands, and the water sucks any remaining warmth from your fingers, and then you go back to your desk and try to warm your hands up on your dog so that you can type again. It's very odd. They have heat, they have ventilation, so why do they open the windows and turn the bathrooms into walk-in meat lockers?

So today, the front page of the newspaper that everyone reads had an article about the snowstorm that has hit the Northeast, with a picture of people cross-country skiing through Times Square. The article is continued on the second page, where there is another article whose headline says in German, "Three Swiss Flights Cancelled," and goes on to say that Swiss Airlines has cancelled three flights due to the snowstorm, leaving 235 Swiss passengers stranded. This is top news here, folks. A snowstorm in another country that caused three flight cancellations. It's sort of relaxing to have those kinds of headlines, instead of headlines about wiretaps, roadside bombs, and murder-suicides.

My college roommate is coming in for the weekend, assuming that flights have gone back to normal by tomorrow night. She gets in Thursday morning, and I'll take her on the grand tour of Zurich, which will take about an hour, then we'll go to the Turkish baths, have some fondue, and get a good night's rest before heading off to Prague for the weekend. Neither of us has ever been to Prague, and it's been almost a year and a half since we've seen each other, so good times will be had by all. Except for the people who aren't going with us, which is... all of you. After a long weekend of awesomeness, she takes off Monday morning. Watch this space next week for deep thoughts and reliable observations on the Czech people.