Zurich

Zürich scares winter off by packing a snowman with explosives, lighting it on fire, and measuring the time until its head blows off. I am not making this up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.