Spring is coming

News

I know the picture posts are the most fun, but we haven’t done a news update in a while and there have been a few little developments. The first bit of minor news is that we finally got our permanent car. It’s a new black VW Golf and it’s pretty nifty. Although, we are seriously considering giving the car back and see if we can just have the company put that money towards our public transportation costs. We never drive around here and it is just a waste to pay to lease and park a new car that is never driven. Tram money would be thousand times more useful.

We had a nice long four day Easter weekend here. Chizzy has been working crazy hours and she really deserved it. We just used the time to explore the city some more and relax. Our options were pretty limited anyway since a holiday here is taken pretty seriously and finding stores that are open is very difficult. We did that Lucern trip on a Sunday on the coldest day we’ve had and we just had to walk around the streets looking in windows because nothing was going on. We took advantage of Saturday and went to the Zurich Zoo. Zoos are always a fun time. We probably should do a picture post about that one. The sloth was a big highlight because it reminded us of Steve. Actually, they had a ton of cool animals there and I’ve never seen so many monkeys. We lucked out and got to see feeding times for the orangutans, gorillas, and the lion. We picked the right day to make that trip because the next day was raining. But that was OK too because another bit of news is that all of our boxes have been shipped and we now have all of our stuff. We unpacked a couple board games and had some fun with those until I lost like 7 straight games and the fun stopped.

This also means my new PC and XBOX are here. It took all of two minutes for me to plug in the XBOX, completely fry it, and take out half the power to the apartment with it. I did put a voltage converter on there so I don’t know what happen. Anyway, I don’t feel too bad about it. It wouldn’t have looked right on the PAL standard TVs here and I would have had to have US games shipped to me. I think the real consolation though is that my new PC is Half Life 2 capable and I’ve been playing that. I think I can revert back to PC gaming for a couple years. Maybe XBOX 2 will be out when we get back.

The biggest news is that we have moved again...

When we knew the apartment search was going slowly, we asked to extend on the current place. It had already been rented though so he gave us a couple other options. Two were more expensive and were across town. The third option was to move upstairs to the smaller attic apartment. That seemed like a really good idea since it hopefully was just for another month and it didn’t require a new contract and it was just a few flights of stairs. In our excitement about the convenience of it all, we made the unthinkable mistake of never even asking to see the place. Oops. We went up there yesterday to see it for the first time and we just deflated. Oh, the place is very nice and clean as we expected but it is so tiny and has no kitchen. Oops. The floor space might technically be half of the place downstairs, but you can’t use most of it because our walls are also the angled roof so you can really only stand in about a four foot span down the middle of the place. Other highlights include the camping stove, no kitchen sink, no shower (tub only), and no closets. Back to suitcase living for a while, I guess. By the way, I still haven’t gotten over sticker shock in general so I still have fun pointing out this tiny little attic alcove is 2300 francs a month (about $2000 USD).

Oh well, this should motivate us to find a place. I wish I would have never read a single book about Zurich life before I left. They are really written to scare you silly. Permits, rules, xenophobia, paperwork, difficulty finding apartments… the books go on and on. Some of it is true. You do need to throw garbage out in expensive bags called Zurich Sacks (basically a garbage tax). And you do need to have proof of residence to even rent a video. Then I ask a general question on an ex-pat site we signed up for about finding an apartment. Again, more scare tactics about how hard it is and how you basically just have to sit on the apartment web site and hit refresh until a new place shows up and then you have to be one of the first 10 people to call and then you’d better be Swiss and have glowing references and on and on.