Stuff is expensive. After the glorious US soccer game yesterday (about which more later), DF treated himself to a single specialty beer at Paddy Reilly’s pub, and was charged about ten Swiss Francs. This is about USD$9, which is fairly outrageous for a mere beer (though I’m told wine tends to be less expensive than beer). It was worse yesterday, though, when I was still laboring under the misapprehension that SFr are worth more than dollars, and believed that the cost of this beer was roughly USD$15. Additional example: I went into a small coffee shop today after lunch (pasta and salad, btw—USD$18!), and sought to buy a wafer-thin bitlet of fancy chocolate. The adorable shopgirl said, “Zwei, bitte.” As in 2SFr for an infinitesimally small bitlet of schokolade. I looked her dead in the eye and said, “This better be the geschmackenest schokolade in the world.” Actually, it was. That shopgirl got lucky.
What you may have heard about Swiss reserve (in terms of personality, that is, not in terms of some massive store of gold bullion) seems more or less true. Folks I’ve spoken to here so far lack the volubility that I’ve come to realize tends to be characteristic of Americans. (E.g., and paraphrasing a local on why DF seems “very American”: “You smile, you talk a lot, and when you talk, your voice is loud.”) This often makes me think the locals dislike me (which, to be fair, they well may) because I find myself talking much, much more (and much, much louder) than the folks I’ve been around. I’ve had to ask trusted locals to let me know if I’m acting so overly American that I’m alienating folks (verdict: nein, at least not yet).
Did you know? In Switzerland, they speak a different version of German than is spoken in Germany itself. Swiss-German speakers tend to be able to understand standard German speakers, but the reverse is often not the case. I suspect this may explain the puzzling “Hopp Schwiitz” scarves I’ve seen around town, and which I plan to buy tomorrow. The puzzle, briefly, is that the scarves say “Schwiitz” rather than “Schweiz”, and I think this must be due to the difference between Swiss-German and standard German (the former is, fwiw, only a spoken language not a written one, so the differences are all in terms of pronunciation).
The tenor of life in Zuerich, to the extent such generalizations make any sense, is calmer and less polar than American cities (or even some larger Euro cities, like Madrid or even Berlin). I haven’t seen/heard much in the way of traffic, or yelly public altercations, or horn-honking, or enthusiastic greetings, or much of anything out of kilter. I could of course be engaging in horrible, horrible selection bias, but as yet, the entire place seems pervaded by a relative calm that seems uncharacteristic of most urban areas.
I’ll try to post pix to illustrate the following, but the city, like Opus the penguin said of himself in Bloom County, is almost startlingly good-looking. Not the people so much (though I suppose they’re a well-groomed lot) but more the physical environs. Zuerich at the head of the Limmat river, where it flows into the Zuerichsee, which is a big (by Euro standards) freshwater lake. I’m fortunate to have great views of the city from my temporary office, and often from the decks that surround the ETH itself, which afford vistas of the entire city below, dotted with domes and church-spires. The weather has been gorgeous so far, which is almost a problematic distraction since I’ve got so much work to do.
The Swiss are said to be organized, and nothing I’ve seen disproves this (though given what I’m reading these days, it would be more rigorous to assume a null hypothesis, e.g., “the swiss are not unusually organized,” and then require substantial evidence to disprove it. The public transport is clean and—personal fave—provides to-the-minute estimates of when a given tram is going to arrive at a particular station. The houses I’ve observed on my way home are architecturally impressive and strikingly well-kept, many of which even feature obsessively manicured rose gardens, with fragrant flora poking out at passersby (this could also be selection bias, of course—I’m fortunate to be staying in a fancified area and have not seen the entire city—I’m sure there are Zuercher slums, but if so I haven’t seen them). The city is also clean, clean, clean—no Berliner dog-poop or LA-style pollution, at least not that I’ve seen. Even the graffiti I’ve noticed is pretty tame, touting local football teams or arty, visages, often of smiling faces (the latter could, for all I know, be the symbol of some bloodthirsty gang—the “Happy Eviscerators” or some such—but it seems pretty unlikely). I’m sure this is due to some kind of reverse-broken-windows effect; when the entire city looks this pristine, no one wants to be the first ass to litter and muck it all up.
*I’ve come to spell the name of the city this way because while I am no hand at the German language, I know where an umlaut should be, at least in major words, and the common umlaut-free English spelling of this city’s name has come to look weird to me. I realize one could counter-argue that this entire blog is in English, as it must be, so I should use standard English spellings of place names, but this is really something instinctive, so get used to the umlauts (or, more accurately, “e”s after umlaut-having letters, which is basically the equivalent on this keyboard), dear readers.
Image: view of the Limmat River from the Quai Bruecke. The water is choppy because it's about to flow into the Zurichsee (or vice versa--I really have no idea about the hydrology of all this).
