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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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.

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!!

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? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...