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.

The Color of Hell

The apartment is coming together, slowly. While shedding the cloud of stuff that had orbited me in Pittsburgh was an almost religiously therapeutic experience which I would recommend wholeheartedly to all, it turns out that clothes irons, cooking pots, and mops are all kind of useful. So I'm picking up needful things one tramload and Saturday afternoon shopping trip at a time. Next up: Sihlcity. Again.

The first thing I did on moving in though, and I think by far the most productive in terms of return on effort, was applying faux wood grain shelf paper to the shelves in my built-in bedroom closets. The maniacal application of shelf paper - Schrankpapier should you need to buy any in Zürich without resorting to interpretive dance, in which the concept of shelf paper is difficult to express; I speak from experience - to each and every horizontal surface is one of those thankfully lost arts practiced only by our grandmothers, so there could be only one reason beyond some sort of misguided transgenerational cultural exchange for me to instruct myself in its dark secrets: that whatever the shelf paper was pressed into service to cover was far, far worse.

So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you the former appearance of my bedroom shelves, a pattern which can only accurately be described as the Color of Hell.

(And now, in the interests of maintaining some sort of universal balance between good and evil, here is a cute picture of a duck)

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Spiders

I was sitting on the balcony last night, my ears recovering from the quite loud, somewhat interesting, yet ultimately disappointingly clubby beats of my brief Bellerive-to-Mythenquai flirtation with Streetparade, registering to vote in the November U.S. presidential election, when I noticed a spider scurrying along my right leg, building a web over the folds in the fabric of my still-slightly-too-baggy jeans.

I came out this morning, to have a blood orange juice - and only a blood orange juice as I still need to purchase a coffee machine - and a look at the Alps. My balcony table and chairs - until next Monday the only chairs I own; I spend a lot of time on the balcony - were completely covered in spiderwebs, an elaborate construction winding from the door to the near chair, connecting the table to the wall to the window frame via the balcony wall, then across the far chair and around the side of the building to the opposite window frame. It was so impressive that I admired it for about three whole seconds before clearing it with more than a few waves of the hand and having a seat.

There are a lot of spiders here. 

This is probably a consequence of simple economics, because there is a lot of spider food here as well. Perhaps owing to the fact that the Limmat is less than a hundred meters downhill, there are quite a few moths. So many so that walking home along the Klosterfahrweg along the north shore of the river at dusk, the streetlights seem almost to mere metallic stalks frantically orbited by miniscule points of luminosity. So many so that I've learned to keep the lights off when opening the windows after dark to cool the flat down. Otherwise spontaneous generation of moths buzzing around inside the paper lanterns results.

In other news, it turns out that I am indeed a legal resident of Pennsylvania for electoral purposes, and will be as long as I live abroad without moving back to the United States. So my vote will be worth something in the presidential election, or at the very least, it will be an Allegheny County election official disregarding, disqualifying, or misplacing my absentee ballot rather than a Shelby County one.

My Ridiculously Circuitous Plan is Three-Fifths Complete

From the twenty-third of March, two thousand five to the fifth of August, two thousand eight: my one thousand, two hundred thirty-one day tenure as a homeowner ended yesterday with a wire transfer, a HUD-1 form via fax, and a closing in Erie, Pennsylvania. The new owners got an amazing deal, as they should in the current market. I'm happy with my end of it as I'm no longer holding onto a debt denominated in a currency I want nothing to do with for a while yet secured by an asset in a city I have no particular desire to ever return to. So it's what we call a win-win, then.

An interesting footnote here is that the whole experience was bracketed by meetings of the IETF. I spent a fair amount of time during the 62nd meeting in Minneapolis working out the details of the purchase, and of course it was at the 72nd in Dublin last week that I signed the bulk of my half of the paperwork for the sale. Although, to be fair, this is probably simply indicative of the fact that I do so much travel for work that such trips make a convenient set of reasonably evenly spaced signposts by which to remember what happened when.

In other news I'm settling in a bit more. I have Internet access at the flat now, which should not be worth mentioning, but is, because I am a geek. I'm a long way from my sysadmin days, three lifetimes ago in Atlanta. Me-as-a-sysadmin would not have taken thirty minutes of screwing around with the cable modems to realize that the reason Cablecom had shipped me two was that one was for the phone and one was for the Internet, and that no amount of coaxing would get the phone one (alas, the first one I unpacked) to give me an IP address. Although me-as-a-standards-geek would point out that they probably also SHOULD have clearly labeled each, or at least a little note in the box explaining the situation. Ah well. We'll call it another universal: the standard of cable company customer service is invariant with respect to culture.

To the Health of the Vice Consul of the United States for the Republic of Ireland

Have just returned from Ireland. I had a chance to see a little of the city of Dublin, wandering about a bit through the Temple Bar - Trinity College - Grafton Street triangle last Sunday afternoon, and again on Tuesday; the weather, I take it from every cabbie who drove me around here that we really, really lucked out on the weather. Summers there are generally... wet.

Arrival was a bit of a shock. After two months in Zurich, the differences between Ireland (or rather, I should say the area around Dublin) and the United States seemed so minimal as to be disorienting. Okay, so all of the signs are in English as are far more of the overheard conversations, but it's more than that. The architecture and design, and the feel, of the city seem quite reminiscent of the Northeast. I told a friend a last week that "they were trying to build this, and they built America instead" which is probably true but doesn't capture the feel exactly either. It might simply be that we (English speakers or Westerners) all tend to build cities the same way nowadays (sprawling and automotive) and Dublin outside its core is as new as a lot of second-ring suburbs in the States. Second-ring suburbs where everyone drives on the wrong side of the road.

I didn't have a chance to get out of the city (well, out of the city beyond Rathcoole) before leaving, but fully intend to take advantage of the fact that Ireland's a two hour flight away in the indeterminate future.

Last Tuesday was spent shuttling around Dublin taking care of documentation for the closing of the house in Pittsburgh. All my signatures were notarized by the Vice Consul of the United States for the Republic of Ireland. Last Tuesday night was spent drinking numerous toasts to her health over a Guinness or five.

Home Sweet Home

I moved into the flat yesterday. By "moved in", I mean most of my stuff is there, I have a motley and assorted collection of furniture, much of which is still boxed and flatpacked in the hallway, and I slept in the new bed last night. Maybe I'm really tired, maybe I'm finally home, or maybe [redacted] francs just buys you a damn good bed, but last night marked the first time I've ever slept through my first night in a new place.

Then I woke up and sat out on the balcony for a few minutes, to look over the city and the mountains before starting my day. I think I'm going to like it here.

Pictures are still to follow. I took a few yesterday morning. However, the cable I need to connect the camera to the computer so I can actually get the photos edited and online is packed. Somewhere. Ah, well. It's an amazing view. Trust me on this one.

Yesterday marked the first time I've driven in Zürich, to go get a bunch of must-have stuff at Ikea and to pick up a free sofa bed out in Niederhasli. My impressions: 1. it's a pretty reasonable place to drive around, although parking is incredibly scarce in the city, as it should be; 2. Zurich's suburbs look very nearly American from behind the wheel of a van; 3. it takes a frighteningly short drive from the center of the city to get you out in the cornfields stuck behind a tractor; and 4. I understand now why most of the people I know who drive here do so via GPS. I've driven through one particular intersection in Milchbuck from every conceivable angle. I've seen more of Oerlikon than I'd like to have. And it's quicker to walk from the Hauptbahnhof to the ETH Hauptgebaude than the way I drove it, although to be fair I often do not take quite so many wrong turns when walking it.

Next up: assembling Ikea furniture. Again.

We Have Keys

I went by my new flat Monday morning to pick up the keys and do the walkthrough. It was a good Bastille Day. First off, it was much bigger than I'd remembered, and in somewhat nicer shape. The kitchen will need less work than I'd remembered. There is no counter space, but a giant, very 1950's cabinet on the wall opposite the refrigerator so I don't need any under-counter storage, and I'll probably just get a table or butcher's block to stick in the 120cm between the refrigerator and the oven to act as a counter. No need to bother with trying to have a breakfast nook in there, though I have the space, because while the kitchen has a balcony (which I'd not noticed before) and a very nice view of the street, it's not nearly the view I have out the living (and dining) room windows. Pictures still to follow. I took a camera yesterday, but the fog was in.

The landlord's nice, which is always a plus, especially when he lives in the building. 

I'm still staying at the flatshare in Hirslanden, because I have no furniture, and the hardwood floor, while beautiful, is hard, and wooden. Furniture here, it turns out, is like furniture in the United States: it is either used, it is expensive, or it is crap. Actually, that's not quite the case. The bedding is completely different. There do not seem to be any such thing as box springs (there are a needlessly wide variety of somewhat springy slat-like suspension systems) and the mattresses seem to be primarily made of different types of plastic foam glued and slotted together in various terribly complex arrangements. All except the cheap ones. The cheap ones are essentially 12 cm polyurethane foam blocks with 2cm cotton pads on top, and still cost 400 francs a go.

Taking the day off tomorrow to go buy furniture. Wish me luck coming in on time and under budget.

It's The Little Differences, Really, Part One

Every reasonably-sized city in the Western world is basically similar. One can understand life in Zürich quite easily by thin metaphor and direct reference to New York or San Francisco or Berlin. Of course, the language is different, and the local history is unique, but local history is unique everywhere, and the difference between an accent, a dialect, and a language is simply a matter of degree along a continuum of mutual intelligibility. The emergence of global capitalism over the past century or so has served to further bind the set of cultures already based upon the common classics of the Enlightenment, medieval Christendom, and the Roman Empire before them.

I'm not saying at all that I'm disappointed with the relative lack of difference; indeed, this is precisely what made moving here possible. But it does mean that it's largely the little differences that grab the attention.

Today's little difference: Swiss expiration dates. Most perishable items here seem to have two dates printed on the top, labeled A and B. A is the sell by date, after which I presume the item is taken off the shelf; B is the consume-by date. I have to say I like this way better; I've always been rather strict about expiration dates (for some reason, milk never smells quite right to me sniffing the carton) and here I actually understand what the expiration date means.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

I have now joined the ranks of adoptive Zürchers who can (and seemingly invariably do) say, in the language of their choosing, "with luck, and patience, you will find a flat." Compared to many of the stories I've heard, I have been lucky, without having to have been particularly patient.

The search was not without compromise. My new flat is not in the middle of where I want to be, but it's quite close to two separate tram lines. Like my flatshare, it's probably 25 minutes on foot or by tram, take your pick, to my office; I've seen places that were closer. It's not all that close to the lake, though I can walk down to the Limmat in a couple of minutes if I really need to see the water. And it's not been renovated in a while, though it's in excellent repair for not having been. The kitchen could use a little work. But it's big (two rooms and a wide corridor, with a kitchen big enough to work with; it feels larger even than my first apartment in Shadyside). It's quiet (enough). It's got more closet and shelf space than I know what to do with although this could be hazardous in my quest not to acquire yet more stuff after having just successfully ditched all the old stuff I didn't need not six weeks ago. And it has a stunning view of the city and the mountains from the living room and balcony. Pictures to follow.

But most of all, I don't have to count apartment hunting as a hobby anymore. In lieu of a giant post on the entire saga, as I'm going now to climb the Uetliberg in celebration of the fact that I'm not trudging around the back alleys of Albisrieden today, here are my pieces of advice to those who would follow me here:

• Believe people when they tell you it is not easy here. At any given time, three in one thousand housing units are available to let. Flats here are nearly thrice as scarce in those in Manhattan, and Zürich does not have a developed rental brokerage market to compensate. Plan accordingly. 
• The open market is an excellent way to explore the city, to spend time reading on the tram, and to discover where you do and do not want to live, but it does not appear to be particularly effective in actually getting you a flat. Marginally desirable places advertised on homegate will have twenty to thirty visitors, probably five to ten of whom will apply. Good places will have a line all the way down the stairwell from the fourth floor (counting from zero, as the Swiss do) out the front door ten minutes before the besichtigung begins. Great places are not available on the open market at all.
• The semi-open market (i.e., associated with a university, a company, or some other organization with limited membership) is much better. The quality of the apartments listed isn't necessarily much better, but at least there's less competition. I found both my flatshare and my apartment from the Universität Zürich / ETH housing office (if you're affiliated, it's the best eight francs you'll ever spend). Of course, the apartments listed tend to appeal to the organization they're listed with. ETH lists a lot of unacceptably (for me) studenty places, just as I'm sure most of the housing bulletin board at UBS is way outside my price range.
• The informal market ("I know a guy who knows a guy who has a place he's got to leave"), however, seems the way to go, but this involves 1. having lots of friends 2. who have lots of friends 3. who have flats 4. that they don't want anymore 5. that you do. Building this network takes time, and is probably not realistic to get plugged into in a month or two. I've had three potential leads this way, all in the last week or so, only one of which was a real possibility. It took me an hour to reply to the email. By then, the place was gone.
• Pride is your enemy. Be prepared to beg. So is understatedness. I was reluctant to bother my future landlord during the week I'd heard nothing, as my usual policy in dealing with people I don't know all that well is I'm busy, I presume you're busy too, and you don't need to deal with me bugging you to tell you things you already know ("I want the apartment") and to ask you questions you probably don't know the answer to yet ("so can I have it already?"). I was advised on several occasions that this was a Bad Idea, and I got over my impulse to quiet patience yesterday afternoon to send a quick "hi, have you made a decision? I am humbly at your service should you need any more documentation." I don't know that it made the difference, but I had a call back and an acceptance within half an hour.
  

So. Cheers to all! Party at my place!

On Nationalism

On the door of my office, there are two of those little car-window flags hanging off the nameplate. One of them is Swiss, one is Italian, one for each of my officemates. They're there for the European football championships, which appears to be the one context in which Europe allows itself to embrace nationalism anymore. This is probably a good thing, as Europe's embrace of nationalism up to about sixty or so years ago tended to end up in the embrace of large amounts of territory gained and then invariably lost, always at terrible cost.

What's left of that impulse led to thousands of people draping flags and wearing jerseys stretched along the lakefront and the Limmatquai from the Zurichhorn to Central, and a minor fistfight or two at the end of a disappointing match but none of the rioting associated with the Ultras in the American idea of European hooliganism. 

Theus, who put the flags on our office doors, sincerely apologized for leaving me out, for not being able to find an American car-window flag in Zurich. First, this is unsurprising although my Confederate Battle Flags in Inappropriate Contexts counter hit two this morning with an older Swiss man wearing a T-shirt from Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, Tennessee but what I did find surprising was my reaction to the offer. I really, really didn't want an American flag on my office door.

What is surprising about this, you may ask? After all, I've voted with my feet, and I'm not particularly inclined to come back in the foreseeable future. But I'll always be American, identified at least by my accent in English now and most probably in German later, by the experience of my first formative thirty years, by my culture and my worldview. And while I'm ashamed of things done by my government in my name, and concerned by the continued fallout from a litany of poor policy choices stretching back beyond the beginning of this century to the middle of the last, I'm proud of my country, and of the promise of its history.

But I have no flag. I've never been one to wave the stars and stripes, especially since its defamation after Nine Eleven Changed Everything. But I realized, seeing the tricolors of Germany, France, and Italy, Switzerland's white cross, even Turkey's crescent and star, proudly worn by the kilometers-long crowd, that its defamation is complete. The flag defined by 4 U.S.C. 1 is not my flag. It is the flag of a small coterie of smaller men of a single party, driven by the will to power to maintain their position by fear, men I will not assent to supporting by waving their banner. It does not represent the promise of my history. It's become a symbol of the threat of its end.

On Luck (or, The Apartment Search, Volume One)

In software development, we have a saying: "Good, fast, cheap: pick any two." I'm sure many other technical fields have a similar saying. Essentially, it expresses if you want something done right, it's either going to take a while or be expensive. I am finding that this applies to searching for an apartment in Zürich. 

The only word that comes up consistently in speaking with people here who actually have a place to live here is "luck." "I was lucky." "You need some luck." "With a lot of patience, and a little luck, you'll find a place you like." So. Good. Fast. Cheap. Lucky. "Good" here means a reasonably sized place in a reasonable location. "Fast" here means getting a place in a reasonable amount of time, as I have a sublet now, and an excellent roommate, but it's short term and would like to be out by the first of August if at all possible. "Cheap" here means under 1500 CHF/mo, which I cannot go over until I dispose of the house in Pittsburgh. So, that leaves Lucky.

So far, I've seen quite a few variations on Fast and Cheap; in other words, not Good. I have decided that I do not want an apartment that is actually a Renault dealership (I've seen two of these actually). I do not want an apartment that is actually Bahnhof Wipkingen (one of the city's most abused, least useful stations, which means it's still serviced about as well as, say, much of the LIRR or SEPTA). And though it means I could have a view of the lake and two large, recently renovated rooms for under 1500, I'm reasonably certain I don't want to live in Horgen; while Swiss suburbs are not quite the affront to the senses as, say, Dulles, or Alpharetta, they are still suburbs, and I'm not particularly inclined to have to ride the train in for half an hour every morning, and to worry about the Last Train each night. Yes, I know. It's immeasurably better than the Port Authority. But I'm here now. I want to do way immeasurably better than the Port Authority.

The places that I do want to live: small and kind of close to the lake, small and expensive and close to the lake, tiny and expensive but renovated yesterday and with an incredible view of the lake and the city (there's a lake theme here isn't there?) I are gone usually before I have a chance to see or apply for them. And that's basically the problem. The open market here is a sucker's game. The only apartments that actually have to be advertised are pretty much those which by definition have something wrong with them, be it price, or location, or the giant pile of used cans of heating oil out front. 

And so, I wait for Luck.

You're Doing It Wrong

Too much going on here to write about any of it. I'm still collecting my notes for The Post On The Apartment Search, which if it goes on much longer might make a reasonably good Russian novella.

It's overcast, again, today, and threatening to rain, as it has been every day I have been here in Zürich except yesterday. My original plan if it was raining today was to take advantage of the insanely great train system here to go to Ticino, across the Alps, where the weather is usually better. But it turns out that not only is it raining in Ticino, it's raining in Switzerland in general; Zürich, at least, seems to be the least rainy place in the whole country. So. Think I'll wander about for a while and try not imagine not being able to afford living in each building I pass by.

But I did want to share this one little story in the meantime.

Now, I've been continually amazed at fairly regular appearance of Confederate battle flags on pickup trucks bearing West Virginia plates. Okay, maybe I'm not amazed, but I do wryly appreciate the irony. However, wandering around in Unterstrass (or was it Fluntern? it's all starting to run together) the other day looking at apartments (what else, really?), I happened to see a little battle flag sticker right above the Kanton Zürich plates on an otherwise unadorned black Toyota Corolla. Er, what? Apologies to all for not having a camera on me.

das fünfte NHL-Playoff-Finalspiel

Found in Blick am Abend, on the seat next to me on the tram ride home yesterday:

As for Game Six, Let's Go Pens!!

Everything Old is New Again

I arrived in Zürich at ten on Sunday morning, having spent eight hours on a plane from Newark, two hours on the runway at Newark waiting for the storm to clear out of the way of the transatlantic routes from New York, four hours in the Continental first class lounge (advantage: first class) waiting out my layover, two hours flying from Atlanta with a crowing rooster in the cargo hold right below me (me: "Is that a...", guy beside me: "Yeah."), two hours at the Houlihan's in the atrium of Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson having breakfast with my cousin on my last way through Atlanta for a while, an hour on a plane from Memphis, two days repacking and reviewing what I'm having shipped to myself while finalizing a customs manifest the customs guys here declined to even bother looking at after they saw how detailed it was, and two days on a truck driving what was left of my stuff from Pittsburgh, country music blaring. Yes, I know I don't like country music, but what could be more appropriate for driving the stuff you just cleaned out of your house across Kentucky in a rented truck on your way out of the country after a divorce in which your ex-wife ended up with your car and your cat? Replace the cat with a dog, the car with a truck, and Switzerland with, er, Texas or Alabama or something, and you've got a country song right there! Even so the pleasantly efficient and helpful Swiss woman behind the counter at Kreisbüro 7 who registered me as a resident of Zürich yesterday said "Ah, Elvis!" when seeing I was born in Memphis, so who am I to say what's country and what's not?

I arrived in Zürich to find a great little apartment right off the 11 tram line which I have to myself until my flatmate gets back from New York in two and a half weeks, on all of which more later (indeed, it may be a bit before blogtime catches up to realtime here), although my room does lack a bit for non-floor horizontal space. A friend of mine, over for lunch Sunday, noticed this and offered me an old table she wasn't using, which given that I'd noticed the same and had even gone so far as set up two bookends on the floor, I accepted sight unseen.

So. Those of you who have been to my house in Pittsburgh, you remember the little Ikea coffee table in the living room, with all the magazines and stuff on the shelf below? Yeah. Well, it's that table. Exactly. Down to the birch finish. Apparently, I'm still meant to have one of those for a while yet.

A Farewell to Pittsburgh

Eight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green '95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square foot third-floor walk-up with central air one block off Walnut in Shadyside with my fiancée.

Most of the contents of that truck are gone now, and the Civic was totaled in a relatively minor accident last spring. My fiancée became my wife became my ex. And I'm back in Shadyside, staying at a hotel built where a car dealership's stock overflow lot stood on my arrival.

Tomorrow, I drive back to Memphis, in a fifteen-foot cargo truck carrying somewhat less, by volume, than what I came in with. There I'll store the stuff I couldn't bring myself to sell, or throw away, before flying off to Zürich via Atlanta and, er, Newark. From a purely material point of view, these eight years have netted me as near to zero as is measurable, until you count the outstanding house debt, that is.

From a material point of view, it's weird the things I'm taking away from here. It's especially weird when I see it all listed out nice and neat, which it turns out I have to do if I want to enter Switzerland with my stuff without paying 7.6% MwSt as import duty. From the manifest of box A101: "...1 box Staedtler colored pencils. 1 HP 48G calculator. 1 glass coin dish. 1 bicycle tire inner tube..." This is as much an organized projection of my inner lack of organization as it is anything else.

But it's not the material point of view that's the important one. Pittsburgh's taught me a lot of things, some of which I even bothered to learn. It's introduced me to people I'm glad to know, or to have known. Thank you, to those of you who made my time here more interesting. And thank you especially to those of you who, over the past few weeks, have helped me to leave.

In A Moving State Of Mind

I think it's safe to say it's crunch time now. I've got a little more than a hundred hours left here in Pittsburgh, the final details of my arrival in Zürich are very nearly sorted out, and now it's down to the disposition of individual boxes and the things in them.

Things. It strikes me that if I only owned the things I actually used, the whole act of moving across the ocean would be, aside from the unavoidable bureaucracy, not all that difficult. There's the cliché, of course, that you don't own your things, your things own you, but I'd always sort of taken that as a warning about your more advanced stages of materialism, that if you find yourself rubbing down your Murciélago with a diaper each Sunday morning, you've taken things too far. One of the many things the move to Zürich has taught me so far before it's even happened is that this is not the case. Indeed, your things begin to own you as soon as you assign value to them, regardless of the value they actually hold.

I shall pledge now (and hope not to break said pledge immediately) that I'll remember this feeling every time I'm about to acquire yet more stuff.

And yet... there's still the little whining voice in the back of my head pointing out all the additional photographs I could take more easily by shifting a few hundred dollars of the money I've made selling all my stuff into bringing yet a third camera with me.

Flexibility, I've Heard of It

Every so often, I run a 5k. By "every so often," I mean "about once a year." This one 5k is pretty much all the running I do, outside, of course, of the occasional Four Concourse Dash at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International. The rest of my exercise has been decidedly lower impact -walking, cycling, kayaking, wall-climbing, and the ever-so-important Biannual Headboard Toss (see below). So pretty much every time I do run, I'm a stiff, aching mess for quite some time afterward.

I ran in the Race for the Cure in Schenley Park on Sunday morning. My gun time was a respectable thirty-six minutes even, which worked out to 32:40 line to line. I did have to slow down to a walk to rest a bit after the second mile, which is better than usual; I tend to sprint off the line and gasp my way through the middle of the race; in last year's Great Race I ran a 7:45 first mile on the way to a 31:09 finish.

(In other words, a winter of indulging the Inner Fat Kid that started with quite excellent New Mexican food in Albuquerque last October and has not really let up since has added a minute thirty-one to my 5k time.)

And am I paying for it today. My hamstrings and calves have tightened up to the point I'm lucky I can touch my knees, much less my toes, and if my quads could talk, they'd be saying "take the elevator."

On Tourists

Another day, another set of tourists through the house. This group stayed two full minutes, which is I think a new record. I can barely get from the basement to the top floor via each room in two minutes, and I live here.

Of course, I didn't actually get to see this batch of tourists, because I was up on the roof of my front porch at the time, working with Phil to throw my headboard over the edge. Gently, but still.

Hm. Maybe that had something to do with it.

(Many thanks to Phil, John, Tony, and Paul for helping me move all the heavy crap down to the first floor, where it will be carted away by its respective new owner(s) next weekend.)

Twenty-one Fourteen Forty-two and Counting

Time, it feels, is running out.

My standard policy with respect to moving is basically not to move, which given that I've moved once every two years or so pretty reliably since 1995, is probably not a good standard policy. What this means is that I generally leave the actual mechanics of moving off to the last minute, madly throwing things into boxes when the truck pulls up downstairs, and utterly failing to sort out the mess after the fact. (This should perhaps be an indication that I have no real use for most of my stuff, but that's another issue entirely.)

So it is this time. Twenty-one days is not at all last-minute given my history, but given the somewhat different logistics of crossing the ocean, feels it. I've tried tricking myself into moving by pulling the art off the walls (always the last to go in the past) and I think it seems to be working. Indeed, I probably would have gotten some packing done last night had it not been for Game 1 of the Yuengling Conference Finals, absolutely worth it in every way, especially considering the result.

(Speaking of, Malkin's shortie last night, I must say, was not only poetic payback for the mugging he took on his short-handed attempt of a few seconds before, but also made up nicely for his penalty "shot" against the Rangers last series, and beyond that, was one of the prettiest goals I've seen this year in its simplicity. But reviewing individual goals in pretentious art-critic style isn't getting any furniture down my stairs, so I digress...)

Another Sunday morning at the Six One Charlie

At the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh. This is largely because, invariably, someone wants to come by at some insane hour of the morning to see the house. I've actually been woken up one Sunday morning by the sound of people in my living room due to a terrible misunderstanding between the realtors involved. And if I have to hide away from my house for half an hour on a Sunday morning, there might as well be some damn good coffee involved.

I suppose I should be happy that my house is still showing at such a healthy clip eight months in, especially in a market we're all told is bad, bad, bad, but I'd be much happier if some of the people stopping by had giant piles of cash (francs preferred, dollars accepted... for now); instead, I have the distinct impression that I'm running a relatively low-volume, somewhat disappointing tourist attraction free of charge.

A Damn Small Town

On my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front of) to the airport (which it stops right in front of), it's certainly not worth waiting for at midnight for the privilege of spending an hour on the bus and forty minutes walking home.

(I shall do my best to ensure this doesn't become an "I Hate The Port Authority" blog, because that sounds way more boring even than "An American in Switzerland." Maybe once my bike's out of the shop.)

Now, I've had some interesting taxi rides before. I once caught a ride from the airport to my old apartment in the Northside from the taxi driver who lived on my street. This time, I rode in with a former geek from one of Pittsburgh's myriad boom-era-gone-bust IT startups. He'd run in exactly the same circles I had; I'd been vaguely aware of his company, he'd been aware of one or two of mine. He looked a little familiar, and said I did too. He even claimed to have heard of Leapfrog Research and Development, though given how tiny we were and our absolutely nonexistent marketing budget, I do suspect a bit that he was angling for a tip. On second thought, given how tiny Pittsburgh's geek-entrepreneurs-who-didn't-move-to-Boston-or-the-Valley community is, maybe not.

Near as I could figure out, the bust led to a divorce that went nasty (a number was mentioned with respect to his ex-wife's lawyer's bill that I would take in a minute as an offer on my house) led for unclear but probably easily guessed reasons to midnight runs to the airport in a Yellow Cab. Given "the two guns [he's] had pulled on [him] and the one junkie who nearly plunged a heroin needle into [his] neck," though, he's about done with the cabbie's life, and is hard at work in his copious free time on the next big thing for the next big mobile platform.

So that's one thing I'll both miss and not miss about Pittsburgh: how unbelievably small it is.

Bus Error

It's a good thing that Pittsburgh's hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I'd be in a mood.

Things I won't miss about the Port Authority:

• Bus trunking. I don't know if this is what this is actually called, but if you have, say, three different routes to the suburbs that share the same route through the city, each with a thirty-minute frequency, you can schedule them in a couple of different ways. The smart way would be to stagger arrivals, thereby providing a ten-minute service frequency through the common routing area (i.e., the city, which is the bit of the route that actually has the density required to support public transit). The not-smart way would be to have three buses come along one minute after each other (or, better yet, following each other), thereby providing a thirty-minute service. Ten-minute service is almost frequent enough to be dependable even without precise timing. Thirty-minute service is not. Guess which one the Port Authority uses?
• Bus packing. Yeah, thirty minute service. I suspect they do this because, at least on the 61 routes through the southern bit of the East End, they don't have enough space on the buses for all the people (largely students and staff at the Oakland universities; people like me) who want to ride them, so frequently a full bus will pass you. Then another full bus will pass you. Hopefully a third full bus won't pass you, because then you're waiting thirty minutes for another full bus. You are, anyway. I'm not. I'm walking.
• That one driver on the 67H who doesn't know where the Schenley Pool stop is and for some reason wants to fight me about it. I should not have a blogworthy feud with a bus driver. And yet I do.
  

Anyway, a lot of this is not really the Port Authority's fault. They don't have any money, because they are an American public transit authority, and we pretty much decided public transit was for other people half a century ago. Mind you, this not having any money doesn't keep them from digging a half-billion dollar tunnel under the Allegheny River to carry the seventeenth-largest light rail system in the United States the distance of a fifteen minute walk. But it does serve Heinz Field, and this town loses its senses when it comes to da Stillers, so this is two rants for a later date, and one argument I'll lose by fiat. Moving on.

Once More Onto the Blog

All right. Let's try this a fourth time then, shall we?

I've had a long and incredibly sparse career as a blogger. I was a bit late to the game, starting my first one, Elmer and Bellefonte, on the twenty-third of August, two thousand one, largely for the purpose of hearing myself rant about various topics of high geekdom. It's no longer online, which is no great loss as the only real post of any note on it was a long one, entitled Ramblings on the American Response, dated the twentieth of September of that year, in which among other things I expressed concern that "[a]s the shock of seeing New York burn wears off, authoritarian interests within our nation are scrambling to make things safer for us (because, of course, they know better) at the expense of civil liberties," and vowing without any real conviction that "[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe."

Well. A little under seven years later, through a much more, well, ridiculously circuitous course of events in which angst about eroding civil liberties does, I must admit, play a minor supporting role, I'll have a new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe soon enough. In forty six days, five hours, my one-way flight to Zurich lands.

(As an aside for the record, there was a second blog, completely lost to the sands of time; and a third, Tales from the Centerline, which was largely concerned with the summer-long renovation of my Depression-era house atop Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill in 2005. You're not missing anything by my never mentioning either of these again.)

So, welcome to my fourth blog. I'm starting this one to keep in touch with the people I'm leaving behind here, and to have a public record of what it was like to pick up at thirty and start over (not quite from scratch, mind you) an ocean and a few mountains away. I promise I'll try to keep it from going all "an American in Switzerland" on you.