Welcome to 2009

Happy New Year, all! 2009's turning out to be a good one. So far, I've learned how not to play the digiridoo and how not to ski. At this rate, I'll have learned how not to do about 240 new things by the time the year's out.

Wir stücken früh

So, I apparently now how to speak German now, at least a bit. Finished the first course this week, passed the final, did quite well aside from the fact I thought that "frühstücken" (to breakfast) was separable ("Ich stücke heute nicht früh.") which it isn't ("Ich frühstücke heute nicht.") This means "I don't eat breakfast today," which, depending on your definition of "breakfast" and what time of day it is right now, may or may not actually be true. 

I wasn't the only person to make this mistake, as the general rule is verb prefixes are separable if they are themselves German words, which "früh" ("early") clearly is. After some discussion we've decided either 1. that we're going to avoid "frühstücken" as a verb entirely ("Heute habe ich das Frühstück nicht gegessen") or 2. be cocky beginning-German students and take back "wir stücken früh". Languages, after all, are changed only by single coinages by single innovators, and if the English loanverb "downloaden" ("ich loade etwas down") is separable, then dammit, so is frühstücken.

An Alpine Sunrise

One advantage of the fact the sun doesn't rise 'til eight in the morning here these days is you can drag out of bed at the usual time and see something like this without any effort.

More Ridiculously Circuitous is No Plan at All

It's two on a Sunday morning, and I'm coming up on the last twenty-four hours of my first six months in Switzerland. I've just rotated the flat (i.e. moved nearly all the furniture a hundred eighty degrees along the outside wall of the living room) on the suggestion of a friend about a month ago and I have to say she was right, it's much better this way.

Half a year ago I stepped off an airplane and looking back I marvel at how clueless I was, which feels good until I realize I'll most probably be able to say the same thing about myself now in another half a year. Indeed this is probably a sign I'm not wasting my time.

In the world outside, not that much has changed it seems. The global economy collapsed, sure, but the real damage had already been done so I can't really count that as a change. And of course, speaking of Change, Barack Obama has become President-Elect of the United States; indeed this would have been the subject of a deeper post on this very blog entitled "Four Eleven Changed Everything" had I been able to come up with anything more to say than the title.  

And in the world inside, I've learned a few important things. First and foremost would have to be that life is in essence unpredictable, or at least it is unpredictable by me. Maybe the rest of you are really good at filling in the blanks ahead of time, but almost every detail of the last half of 2008 has come to me as a complete and total surprise. Trying to fill in a deeper picture than that may be fun and certainly passes the time, but should be labeled for entertainment purposes only.

Despite the downs of the roller-coaster ride it's been, the ups have been immeasurably more than worth it, and I still look out the window occasionally and can't quite believe I've made it here. This should finally clear shortly, I hope, as I need to get the dazed look out of my eyes at some point so I can continue on with the business of living here and choosing what, precisely, that means for me.

There's more I'm sure, but I can't express it in any but the most impossibly trite greeting card language at the moment (what do you want, it's two in the morning?) and I have a train to catch soon.

In Which Your Correspondent Suddenly Remembers He Has a Blog

The last month or so has been a bit of a whirlwind. There's the travel: I finally used the Halbtax card I bought to escape the rain in June and hopped a train to Neuchâtel, then back for a day before business in Valbonne (via Nice, dinner in Cannes), after which I was back in town for a long weekend before flying back out to Vienna, then back here for a week and a bit before flying next Tuesday to San Diego for my stepsister's wedding. There's the work: a document I've been working on since I started here went out Friday, and I spent the weekend mostly clearing the Things I Said I'd Do Before Going To San Diego deck. There's the sport: Mel showed me a nice short loop around the lake easily doable in two and a half hours with a relaxing three-franc boat ride in the middle, and I'm a wall climber again, this time for real because I'm in better shape and frankly, it's a better wall. There's the learning: classes started Thursday, and I've been meeting with a couple of native Swiss Germans relatively frequently to speak German poorly. (By which I mean I speak German poorly. I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing. I can't tell, of course, because I speak German poorly.) There's the furniture shopping: three trips to Dietlikon in the past month, with at least one coming up next, and the apartment's about 50% done (next up: art). And there's the fun: the month-long I Live Here Now and Finally party which is just now starting to slow down, exploring Zurich with friends new and old, finding cheap(ish) good Indian food, good Swiss food, good South African food (mmmm that's good gnu), freaky good vegetarian everything, bars with good live Swiss rock, bars with tweaky DJs, and the old favorite biweekly expat drink-a-thon at the Talacker (always highly recommended before a 6am flight to a 9am meeting). 

This will probably be the only post for this month; stay tuned for rambling posts in October on the nature of safety in Switzerland, the nature of winter in Switzerland, probably some random whining about Sarah Palin and Ben Bernanke, and what it was like coming back to the United States for a week after four months away.

As Promised

The east-southeast view from the balcony, 10 August 2008, showing (bottom to top) the Hardturmbrücke railway bridge over the Limmat, most of Züri-West, the old city (clustered mainly behind the big smokestack), the Zürichberg (green hill on the left), the Albis and the  southwestern shore of the lake (that's Horgen or Thalwil in the right-center distance, I think), and the Alps.

It's The Little Differences, Really, Part Two

I had about half an hour to kill this afternoon in the neighborhood of the university, so I decided to take this week's Economist out to the Polyterrasse, a giant balcony behind the main building of ETH with a great, close-up view of the center of the city. I went out to one of the benches toward the corner (the better for the view though perhaps not for the glare of the sun). These benches are large wooden constructions, about four meters long and a meter and a half wide, with a rounded wooden back sticking up out of one side of the seat for two meters. This has the effect of dividing each bench into three sections: a couple of seats facing one direction, a couple of seats facing the opposite direction, back-to-back, and to the side a large flat space for laying down and reading, indeed, even sunning oneself if the weather is cooperative.

That's when it hit me. This city is full of benches. At the tram stops. Along the lakefront. Along the Limmat. On the Polyterrasse. And they are all flat. No spurious armrests. No ingenious uncomfortability. I mean, I'd gotten used to the fact that there are virtually no homeless people here, or at least, no people sleeping on the streets, except the drunks holding up the trees after a Euro match or Street Parade. But it had never occurred to me that when you have a place for everyone to sleep, you can build the benches with something other than discouraging sleeping in mind.