Zurich

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.

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? ...