First Week in Zurich

Today ends my first week at the new company. Basically, I took introductory classes, online tutorials, learned a couple of names, and, most importantly, tried to absorb the culture of this place. It is quite unique and I like it. People are friendly and bright, and the food is good.

Apart from that I'm now registered in Switzerland, had a short and strange encounter with the German consulate which is located in a dark and narrow basement of an office building, petitionnaires are required to wait in front of it, standing, until they arrive at two tiny windows in the wall where they can talk to consulate employees, from Monday till Friday from 9:00 till 11:00am, or so.

Also, I have a Suiss phone number and a Zurich public transportation card. Still lacking is a nice and affordable flat. Hold your thumbs.

Visiting a Flat on Sunday

Today I was visiting a flat in Kreis 8 (across the lake). It was nice, spacious, a little farer away from the center, but with a large balcony and three rooms. But most interesting where the current tenants: A couple of ballet dancers, originally from Portugal and Brasil, who work at the Zurich opera.

The woman had lived in Germany for some time. In the eastern part and then in Karlsruhe. We both agreed that the Swiss look better than the Germans. (People are more healthy here and every man under 45 years apparently spends regular time at a gym.) The couple also reported on strange reactions of some Swiss people towards foreigners.

The man will have a premiere at the opera next week. His first choreography. (He has been a solist dancer in Zurich for a couple of years.) He offers to arrange some tickets. How cool can that be?

In the afternoon, again, watching tourists, Zurchers, and the lake.

Arrival and First Day

Yesterday I moved to Zurich. On Tuesday I had packed all my belongings back home in Hildesheim into boxes, ready to be moved out once I found a flat in Switzerland. It was more a drag than I expected: With all preparations, cleaning, a trip to the supermarket, getting oil for the car, and a last dinner with a friend I was done at 0:00am, and I finally was on the road to Mannheim, my next stop, at 1:00am, and since I drove slowly I arrived around 3:30am, dead tired.

On Wednesday I did some shopping and, since a meeting with a friend was canceled, I visited my parents and did my taxes for last year. On Thursday I did some more shopping -- once you prepare for Swiss prices everything seems suddenly inexpensive in Germany -- and met a friend in the city and later another couple of friends for wine, cheese, and a TV show.

On Friday, finally, I packed my stuff into the car and drove from Mannheim down to Zurich. The journey was pleasantly uneventful except that the 80km from Basel to Zurich took much longer than expected: You cannot drive faster than 120km/h on a Swiss autobahn and the Basel-Zurich one had often a speed limit of even 80km/h. Also, the hunt for the street where I temporarily would live took longer than hoped: Many one-way streets make it challenging to navigate.


But then I finally stood in front of my apartment building. My heart sank when I realized there was no reception and my key had not been deposited in the mailbox. There was a phone number and I was just beginning to practice my Switzerdytsch when the building manager walked by and asked if I lived there. I said: "I hope so", and we introduced each other. He was a very friendly man. When he showed me the apartment, the first thing he explained was the password for the WLAN, then the kitchen, then the bathroom, finally my parking spot. Everything was fine.


I bought some food at a local Migros, checked email and the latest housing ads (I got one visitation, one guy said the flat was already taken as he heard me speak standard German, and two other landlords did not answer the phone). Then walked around the city. It is an astonishingly beautiful place. Tourists and Zurchers relaxed, enjoying or preparing for the weekend.

Zurich - Getting Started and First Impressions

I'm moving to Zurich, Switzerland, in about a week. I'll be working for a large IT company who offered a generous relocation packet, including an three day pre-moving trip for housing search and general orientation. Right now I'm on my way back home from this trip, sitting at Zurich airport, waiting for the plane to Hannover, Germany.

Preparation

Unfortunately, my last two weeks were rather busy with a paper submission for an image processing conference. So the pre-move preparation was a little shorter than optimal. However, I did call all my friends who once lived or still live in Zurich. Actually, I did this before accepting the job offer and their enthusiasm made the decision easier. They did warn me, however, that the Swiss-German relations are sometimes tense: Germans had a reputation of being rather unfriendly and always hurrying. The Swiss, I've been told, did not like to speak standard German but prefered their Swiss-German variation which can be difficult to understand for Germans and which Germans cannot speak.

My friend Arnold's advice was particularly helpful: "The Swiss look at the Germans a little like Eastern Germans look at Western Germans: A bit too loud, a bit too self-confident, not enjoyable to hang around with." His other advice: "Let the Swiss have their share of exoticism. Do not assume they behave and interact like Germans."

As a student I've lived about a year in North America where I leaned that cultural differences are deeper and more profound than they appear at the first glance. Even slight variations of cultural codes can send strange and unintended messages.

The Swiss-German example: The German translation of "Goodbye" is "Auf Wiedersehen". So far, so good. What they don't teach you in German 101 is that nobody uses this long and time consuming expression. That is, nobody in Germany. We say "Wiedersehen" or more frequently "Tschuess", "Tschau", or even the Italian "Ciao". If you are leaving for a long and dangerous journey where you might not come back home again, then your mother, her eyes filled with tears, might shake your hand, give you a kiss and say "Auf Wiedersehen". Apart from that, this doesn't happen.

Not so in Switzerland. Here people take the time to say goodbye properly. It is a sign of respect and politeness. The shorter alternatives are used with friends only, otherwise they are sloppy and impolite.

I've tried three days long to get the "Tschau" out of my system. It didn't work. Not so fast. Every time I said goodbye I used it. Bloody impolite Germans! (Well, not really: Today the Swiss are used to Germans and know that we are not intentionally rude but just spoiled by our uncivilized culture.)

Books

So I bought a small guide to Zurich for some practical information and also another one which was more comprehensive and nicely written. But both were tourist books. Nice and helpful but remaining on the outside.

Maybe more important was a book by the Swiss author Peter Bichsel "Des Schweizers Schweiz" (The Swiss' Switzerland). It is a collection of essays, mostly political, addressing the Swiss, their unions, parliaments, citizens. Bichsels language is remarkable: It is minimal, simple, modest. Every word is necessary. His humor is silent and friendly. Very beautiful.

The second thing is that it is immensely self-critical. Bichsel talks on celebrations and award ceremonies. But he doesn't bother with polite remarks one some nonsense but pinpoints weaknesses of banks, of unions, of politicians, of Switzerland. He always does so in a polite and slightly humorous language. But not harmless at all.

From a German viewpoint, his criticism is a bit strange. From the outside, Switzerland is a country that does a lot of things right. They have a model democracy. Educated people. Social systems that do not leave a struggling citizen alone; then, a common understanding that social welfare should not be exploited. The Swiss are industrious, organized, punctual. They have the best chocolate in the world and the most beautiful landscape. Still, strong self-criticism seems to be part of Swiss intellectual culture. I'll look deeper into that.

LaTeX for Blogger

Once upon a time I used some python scripting to integrate mimtex into PyBlosxom. Now with Blogger a nice integration is already done. It uses greasemonkey and is easily to install from here: LaTeX for Blogger.

Readymade

Richard Dawkins has written a rant about the language used in postmodern philosophy. One of the nicest samples he found:

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. . . From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.

Luce Irigaray, feminist philosopher.