my ridiculously circuitous plan is five-fifths complete

A year and a half of inactivity means it's time to officially declare my ridiculously circuitous plan old and busted. Head over to trammell.ch for the new hotness.

Misaligned

The tenor of the health-care slapfight (I'll not dignify it with the word debate) in the United States of late is... well, frankly, embarrassing. Y'all are really making yourselves look bad. Death panels? Really? When a walking vapidity whose prime qualification for the job is that she can see Russia from her house gets up on the tee-vee and starts improvising science fiction so terrible that even L. Ron Hubbard wouldn't stick his name on it, you do what the rest of us do, and you ignore it.

People who have a bigger audience than I do (but who, alas, don't know that the Swiss don't wear lederhosen, or that most of the cheese here is relatively hole-poor) have already drawn the parallel between the American system and the Swiss one, and wondered why you can't reap the benefits of moving to a more Swiss-style system. Well, let's have a look. The main differences I've noticed between the Swiss health-care system and the American trainwreck are:

• Health insurance is mandatory; when you register your residence (which you must do within 8 days of moving to a new city or district), they give you 45 days to select a carrier, sign up, and send proof of insurance to the district. If you can't pay, the government subsidizes you. Consequently, you can buy insurance retroactively. I purchased coverage from 1 June 2008 on about 20 June; had I had any claims during that time, they would have been paid.
• Health insurance carriers must accept any patient, cannot deny coverage for "pre-existing conditions", and have a relatively limited set of variables on which they can set rates.
• Health insurance is paid directly by the patient, who pays 100% of the premium. The company doesn't have anything to do with it. For me, here, this works out that I pay about twice as much out of pocket every month, but that the total cost is about half what it was, compared to UPMC in Pittsburgh. The particulars of my coverage here are about equivalent.
• Health insurance covers those things insurance generally does, not purely elective (e.g. cosmetic surgery) or routine (e.g. dental cleaning) things.
• I'm told health insurance usually operates on a reimbursement basis: you pay the doctor, the insurance pays you. However, all my experience with my carrier so far has the doctor or hospital billing the insurance company, and the insurance company billing me for anything under the deductible. In any case, I see the bills, and the bills are the same regardless of who you have coverage through.
• Medical expenses incurred as a result of an accident are handled by a separate accident insurance system, paid by the employer. This accident insurance covers you whether or not you were at work or doing something work-related at the time. Accident insurance premiums are "pre-tax", and are shown on your pay stub. I'm not sure who covers accident insurance for the unemployed; I'm guessing it's the city's or district's responsibility.
• Testing and treatment seem to work differently. At least in my experience, they're much slower than American doctors to prescribe antibiotics or advanced diagnostics, and somewhat more willing to let you heal, under supervision. I attribute this to relatively less angst over malpractice lawsuits, which comes from a less litigious culture in general.
• Billing and care are handled completely separately; this allows the medical people to focus on caring for the patient, not shaking them upside down waiting for a wallet to fall out. I walked out of the emergency room after a bicycle accident in July (resulting in a thankfully not-broken-but-badly-sprained left hand), without having to convince anyone I would pay them. It felt odd.

I'm not sure you could run this system with American patients.

First, Americans like suing their doctors when things go wrong much more than Swiss do. It's not clear whether this makes things significantly more costly in the first order; most of the effects (diagnostic and ultimately-unnecessary treatment costs) are second order, and these are probably much more significant. Of course, one of the reasons Americans like suing their doctors is that when something goes wrong, it usually goes wrong in some expensive way, and the insurance company sure as hell won't help you out; the Swiss are more calm in part because they know the system will do a reasonable job of taking care of them if something does happen. But litigation is a part of American culture in a way that it isn't part of Swiss culture.

Second, Americans and Swiss have rather different ideas on end-of-life care. Contrast Terri Schaivo, who was basically kept alive by executive order, with Dignitas, where people from all over Europe who might die painfully someday in the future fly for legally assisted suicide. (Okay, it's more complicated than that; I've not talked to an actual Swiss person who's completely comfortable with what Dignitas does, but they do what they do without the Federal Council sending the Swiss Army to force feeding tubes into people, which is my point.) A Swiss person who is likely to live out the last few days of a terminal illness in a morphine haze would be kept alive for a few expensive and excruciatingly painful weeks in an American hospital.

Third, Swiss are healthier. They eat somewhat less (but not necessarily healthier — this place is serious about its sausage and ice cream, though, ah, not at the same time) and exercise a lot more, both in the order of the day and for fun. Zürich, at least, can be crossed on foot in a little over an hour, is excellent for bicycling as long as you pay proper attention to the tram tracks, has ridiculously usable public transit, and is absolute murder to drive in. Transport alone knocks five kilos off the average. And there are lots of lakes to swim in and mountains to climb and ski down. Additional costs in airlifts and broken bones (which you see a lot of; the trams are packed with crutches in April and May) are more than offset by the savings of an entire generation not sitting out the three-month heart-disease endgame in a hospital.

The real problem, of course, is that the United States is saddled with a giant health-finance industry that eats kittens, shits evil, owns your senator, and employs your neighbors. Monoliths with money, power, no sense of ethics, and a bunch of normal people who you kind of like on the payroll are tedious to get rid of. But let's sidestep that for a moment, and pretend we can fix things, shall we?

Now, those of you who know me know I'm not a free market fundamentalist by any means. But I have to say that from the ground here, it appears that the core advantage of the Swiss system is alignment, in the form of choice. This element is missing from the American public health insurance system (i.e., Medicare), the American private health-finance industry (i.e., the aforementioned evil-shitting kitten-eaters), and everything I've read about what's going to come out of this particular partisan health care reform sausage-factory.

In Switzerland, I pay for my insurance. I am free to change my insurance carrier if my insurance carrier does not please me, without changing doctors (or worse, jobs); consequently, they're actually quite pleasant to deal with. I pay my doctor, and am free to change my doctor as well, without changing insurance carriers. So doctors' offices are pretty pleasant to deal with, too (of course, this may have something to do with the fact that the front office's main job isn't yelling at insurance-company back-office people all day).

In Switzerland, the patient (me) and the payer (me) have aligned interests (at least, assuming I don't have multiple personality disorder): in this case, getting well without getting broke. Add in good access to information to make informed decisions (I see the bills) and this is one of those depressingly rare situations in which the free market actually does what it says on the tin.

In the dystopian death-panel future that has the American right whipping its minions into showing up at health care rallies packing heat, of course, interests are misaligned: you (the patient) want to get well, and some GS-3 in a giant nameless government agency (the payer) just wants to go home. (Actually, in the dystopian death-panel future, that GS-3 is actively trying to kill you, because you're the only person who realizes the truth, that the President is a Kenyan-built, Indonesian-programmed cyborg sent from an even more dystopian future to enslave the American people in Teh Soshalizum, but in the dystopian death-panel future, you need to adjust your tinfoil hat.)

This misalignment is the core of the problem with the current system, too: the patient, who wants to get well without getting broke, has no information and no mechanism by which to use that information to make an informed choice. The payers all have different interests. Medicare: GS-3 indifference, your employer: cost control, your insurance company: making enough sweet, sweet cash to fuel the private jet for a weekend of kitten-eating in the Caymans.

Sadly, though, it's all about a bunch of Reaganists who believe Government Is Evil using the noise machine to win the slapfight versus the indignance of what's left of the Left at the injustice of leaving ten percent of people uninsured and more liable to fall into medical bankruptcy. Alignment isn't even part of the discussion, probably because it's too simple and not profitable enough. Without proper alignment, reform won't work. Personally, I've given up hope for this time around; maybe when it hits the agenda again in 2025, you'll have figured this out.

Unicode jokes

U+1DE7 COMBINING STACK OF DIAERESIS FALLING RIGHT, used primarily for native English speakers trying to pronounce Swiss German.

(Yes, I know it's been forever. Stand by.)

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.

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.