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.