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.