First days in Zurich

I finally got on my connecting flight to Zurich. Once here, I was not immediately in love as I thought I would be. The baggage carts have this weird strap across the top which I guess is supposed to keep people from overloading their carts, but also prevents loading even one bike box onto it. So, where I thought I would be mildly amusing, I was genuinely comical, pushing the cart while dragging the bike box in a weird leap frog fashion. If I understood german, I can only guess I would have been incredibly offended because everyone was commenting as I passed. Fortunately, the taxis are minivans so getting stuff into the car was no problem and the taxi driver was pleasant. At one point he told me that he enjoyed driving in NYC better than Zurich because the one-way streets made driving around easier (!).

Now in my temporary housing, a “women’s pension” I was quite happy. My room is small but bright and faces a small street with lots of trees:



Across the street is an old church (the outside says 1512 which isn’t that old because the church in “old Zurich” is 13 something). I thought it was charming until it started chiming on the hour and half-hour all the way through the night. I can see old Zurich and some of the alps from the roof of my new home which is also a garden terrace.



At this point I slept for about 20 hours waking up only for this



and then went into work for the first time. Everyone in Berkeley will enjoy this:



Are you noticing the large crane? That’s what they are using to construct the new building next to my building. Now I won’t get homesick….

I managed to stay at work for a little while, but I was still feeling kind of ill. My throat was sore and I thought it was because the flu medicine wasn’t working very well and I just needed more sleep. At this point I also hadn’t eaten in about 48 hours because I’m never hungry when I’m sick and my throat just hurt, so I continued along this dangerous path….Next morning I woke up feeling pretty good, checked my email and saw that Karrie was giving me a hard time because I hadn’t posted yet! I wrote back and said I would post right after breakfast.

Skip this part if you have a weak stomach. The Pension provides breakfast foods, so I got myself some cereal and yogurt, coffee and orange juice. Start chewing, I am really hungry, so take another bite, realize that I can’t swallow. At all. Nothing is getting past my tonsils. So now I have two giant bites of food and nowhere to send it. I think, “maybe it just needs to be chewed some more with liquids”, so I add a sip of orange juice and chew. Some liquid manages to seep down my throat but nothing solid. After about 5 minutes of this I give up and go to the bathroom where food that should be in my stomach goes into the toilet.

Second day in Zurich and I am seeing a doctor. For future reference, there is a fully staffed office on the first floor of the main train station. Right next to the pharmacy. Efficient. They don’t take appointments, but you take a number and wait, it took about 1 ½ hours. The doctor did a strep test and had the (positive) results back in less than 15 minutes. Efficient. I got yelled at (politely) because if I waited much longer to go in I could have permanently lost parts of my voice box. Lovely. Anyway, now I am on a large dose of antibiotics, pain-killers, and prescription lozenges.

Oh and Germany and Italy won their world cup games today, so the Swiss are going crazy with the car-honking and flag-waving (?!?).