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."