19 October 2007

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

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

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

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

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

28 August 2007

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

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

Editor's Note

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

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

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

Editor's Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 June 2007

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

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

Editor's Note

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