Recently in Switzerland Category

The majority of the stuff from our house in the UK finally arrived yesterday. We'd been holding off on the actual move until we knew what was coming and what was staying, which meant that I started out here with a futon and a couple of chairs, adding a few more bits of furniture but not really having what could be described as a full set of stuff. Worse than that, most of my DVD collection was still in Britain.

It seems that life has been keeping me rather busy since January. My memory of the last few months is a blur of moving into apartments, going to work, trips back to Oxford to visit Tara, going to work, IKEA, move logistics, cat transportation, going to work some more, zipping off to New York (okay, I only zipped once), both Swiss and British bureaucracy, etc, etc. I'll try and cover at least a few highlights which probably deserve their own posts.

Whenever you move to a new country, you have to figure out some surprisingly basic things from scratch. One of the things which often causes a surprise is shopping. Shops are the same pretty much everywhere, right? Well, yes.. in many ways they are, but in a few important areas they can be very, very different.

Germany and Switzerland manage to be very, very different with their approach to shop opening hours. For starters, Sunday as a day of rest is taken extremely seriously here (probably most seriously of all by the shopworkers' unions). By law, shops in Zürich cannot open on Sundays unless they're catering to the needs of travellers, or are things like kiosks and restaurants. You can't go to the supermarket and buy a litre of milk and some teabags. Coming from the UK, where we've had Sunday opening for some time, this is something of a shock. It's an even bigger shock when you find that the shops you thought closed at 7 or 8 actually close at 5pm on Saturdays and you're therefore going to starve until Monday morning unless you go to the station and live entirely on bratwurst from the kiosks on the concourse.

Of course, even closing at 5pm on Saturdays is a fairly new thing. Until not so long ago, shops in Germany were required to close by 2pm on Saturdays, except for one Saturday a month which was known (in hushed, reverent tones) as Langer Samstag - Long Saturday - when they were allowed to open until 6.

The laws have largely eased over the last decade or so. It's worth pointing out that this reverence for the day of rest is unlikely to be religious in origin. Shops were open all hours 7 days a week until the latter part of the 19th century. It's pretty much down to the retail unions. I can't say I blame them entirely - if I was required to lose my Sunday in order to work in a shop every couple of weeks I'd want to stop that too.

So what's the situation now? Well, shops in Zürich close sometime between 6 and 8 on weekdays, and an hour or two earlier on Saturdays. On Sunday, they are closed, closed, closed, and woe betide you if you haven't planned ahead. Okay, they're allowed to open on four Sundays in the year, usually the ones leading up until Christmas (a similiar regime applies in many German länder - although in some they're required even then to be closed during the times when you're supposed to be at church) but, by and large, Sunday means all the shops are closed.

Or are they? There's a loophole in the law - shops catering for travellers' needs are allowed to be open late nights as well as on Sundays. Always recognising a good business opportunity, the Swiss have capitalised on this. Both Zürich's main railway station and Zürich airport contain vast shopping centres open seven days a week, with smaller centres at a number of other railway stations. This neatly solves the Sunday opening problem as travellers are likely to want to buy things at the station and at the airport, and as a court ruling in the past has decided that it's impossible to decide what a traveller might or might not want to buy, you can shop for anything from a ham sandwich to a 10,000-franc watch. One side-effect of this, though, is that everyone else in town will be jammed into the same shopping centre as you, and trying to negotiate your way through the already-cramped aisles of the small supermarket in the shopping centre under the Hauptbahnhof is not for the faint-hearted.

Of course, retailers may trip you up in their own special ways. Switzerland's largest and most famous supermarket chain is Migros. Migros is big in Switzerland. It doesn't just run supermarkets, it runs an entire empire including banking services, mobile phones, and even language schools. Migros sells everything.. except alcohol, due to the puritanical views of its founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler. You can't buy beer at your local Migros. In fact, you can't buy cigarettes or what Wikipedia starchily calls "racy magazines" either, but people who feel the need for the latter two on a Sunday will find everything they want and probably more (much more, given the volume of pornography that takes up the shelves of the average Swiss kiosk) at their local kiosk or petrol station. (To be fair to Migros, it has also historically been an extremely socially-conscious company, having been converted by Duttweiler into a customer-owned cooperative in 1941, and to this day spending 1% of its annual turnover on financing cultural activities. Having seen some of the extremes to which alcohol abuse has gone recently in the UK, I can also see some merit in the view that alcohol is not a socially beneficial thing to sell.)

So if the supermarket in your local railway station shopping centre's a Migros, you're out of luck as far as getting a bottle of wine to go with your dinner is concerned. However, shops selling booze have an interesting habit of popping up next door to every branch of Migros. Funny that, eh?

It has rapidly become clear to me that in Switzerland, punctuality is next only to cleanliness in the list of essential virtues. The rule is simple - if you make an appointment for 6pm, then you are there at 6pm unless the world has unexpectedly ended (and even that will probably only buy you an excuse for about 15 minutes delay). "7:30 for 8" is a largely unknown and suspiciously foreign concept. If you're inviting someone for dinner, "7:30 for 8" will just confuse - should they be there at 7:30, or at 8? Most people, I suspect (not that I've thrown any glittering dinner parties of my own as we won't have an apartment of our own until February 1st) will read that as "be there at 7:30", or simply decide that they aren't sure that they want to associate with such vague and unpunctual people anyway.

Of course, I'm dealing entirely with stereotype here. What I can definitely confirm, however, is that after a few weeks of dealing with public transport which either runs startlingly on time or (disaster scenarios excepted) at the most a couple of minutes late you begin to adjust to it. Take the commute to work from where I'm currently staying as an example. There's a short bus ride followed by a train journey. Knowing in advance that the bus will leave at xx minutes past the hour and the train it connects into will leave at yy, you know that you'll arrive at the other end at zz. From there, you now know, it's, say, 7 minutes walk to the office. So you leave to walk to the bus stop at, say, xx-4 minutes. It's pretty certain that the bus will be there on time, and that the connecting train will be on time, and you'll get to the office within a couple of minutes of the time the timetable tells you you will.

This is infectious. Before you know it you're planning all your trips with military precision - after all, you're living in a country where if a tram is 2 minutes late relative to the timetable posted at the stop people start shuffling their feet and looking at their watches and wondering if they should call VBZ to ask what the big problem is. The timetable tells you when you're going to arrive to within a few minutes and it's highly probable that things will be running to time, so why not say "I'll be there at about 19:23" rather than "Sometime before half past seven"?

Fortunately, I'm a detail-obsessed nerd, so this doesn't throw me that much - in fact, I find it slightly satisfying to arrive precisely on time. I've spent enough time living with First Great Western and their habit of waiting until you've been sitting on a non-moving train for 25 minutes to tell you that actually, they don't have a driver anyway so you might as well get off the train and get onto the next one, which is six platforms away, leaves in 45 seconds and is already packed that it's actually quite pleasant to use a transport network that's run with slightly frighteningly military precision.

I'm sure I'll get used to it.

In other news, an entertaining entry from the Zurich cantonal police's online log. It's currently burglary season here:

Gemeindepolizisten von Thalwil hatten am 15.10.2008 in Gattikon (Gemeinde Thalwil) einen verdächtigen Ausländer einer Personenkontrolle unterzogen. Da er sich nicht ausweisen konnte und in seinem Rucksack Einbruchswerkzeuge mitführte, wurde er arretiert und der Kantonspolizei Zürich zugeführt. In den Befragungen zeigte sich der 45-Jährige wenig kooperativ. Dennoch konnten ihm aufgrund von DNA-Hits und Schuhspuren sechs Einbruchdiebstähle in Ein- und Mehrfamilienhäuser nachgewiesen werden.

The executive of summary is that "Police in Thalwil noticed a suspicious foreigner. They stopped him, and as he couldn't produce ID and upon being searched had tools for breaking into properties he was arrested. Footprints and DNA evidence tied him to six burglaries."

I love this because it's so impressively Famous Five. The Five, as anyone who ever read Enid Blyton knows, would always be able to spot the bad guys because old Enid would drop in helpful descriptive notes like "swarthy" and "foreign". As soon as they spotted the suspicious foreigner, off to the police they'd go, and the police would come and arrest them for being, well, swarthy and foreign. In immediate post-war England suspicious foreigners, especially swarthy ones, were clearly criminals, and it seems that this policing technique is used in Switzerland to this day. I do hope that the arresting officers (and their dog) were treated to a slap-up tea with lashings of splendid ginger pop.

Those who know me may also know I'm something of a public transport nerd. This stems from a time when as a seven-year-old my family went to Hannover for six months and I was most impressed to discover it had a tram network, which was at the time in the process of becoming the Stadtbahn with progressively more sections being moved into tunnels in the city centre. I've been fascinated by trams, trains and transport networks in general ever since.

Heavens, an entire month since I posted here. I've been meaning to, I promise, I've just been busy with the usual new-country excitement plus work being kind of busy. Anyway, here I am now. Hello!

When you arrive somewhere new there are invariably a number of things you have to do. In Switzerland, there are things you have to do on a very short timescale or you're in trouble. Work were very concerned to make it clear that I absolutely had to register with the local authorities within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland or dire penalties would ensue. In the city of Zürich this is something you do at your local Kreisbüro (essentially, district office). This is not an optional step. If you don't register, you pretty much can't do anything else.

However, there is an advantage to this. Once you've registered (and have the temporary registration receipt that the Kreisbüro gives you), you just need to walk into the nearest bank, show your registration and an employment contract, and they'll most likely be happy to open a bank account for you on the spot. No need to dance around with gas bills and other half-assed forms of ID. You need to wait a couple more months until your official work permit / ID comes through in order to do things like get a credit card or a cellphone that's on contract rather than pre-pay, but that's still enormously better than the exciting adventure that is trying to get a bank account in the UK when you have no history in the country.

I've been, in general, very pleasantly surprised by my dealings so far with Swiss officialdom. People are helpful, knowledgeable and generally pleasant in their dealings with the public, the lady in the Kreisbüro being patient with my rusty German and the ticket seller at the Hauptbahnhof not only being swift and efficient but remarking on how pleased he was to see companies like mine choosing to send people to Zürich. I'd budgeted the morning to register at the Kreisbüro and open a bank account, but in the end I accomplished both of these things in 45 minutes flat.

So now I have an official piece of paper issued by the Stadt Zürich to say that I exist, a local travel pass and a half tax card (one of the best travel bargains out there, but that's a subject for another post), and the all-important Swiss bank account. All I need now is some Swiss francs to put in it and I'm good to go for the next few weeks - at the moment I'm spending money that came out of my UK account, and with the pound having plummeted from Fr2.40/£ not so long ago to about Fr1.80/£ today, that's a pretty painful thing to be doing.

Of course, soon the really scary part starts - house-hunting. I'll freely admit that from what I've heard about house-hunting in Switzerland I'm fairly terrified, but since Tara has ordered me to let her do most of it I'm happy to take a back seat. I think she's leery of my well-known tendency to hate house-hunting so much that I take the first place I see, which once found me living in a horrible, overpriced, dank basement flat in Surbiton that had slugs (really). Avoiding slugs would of course be good, although I suspect that slugs are illegal under Swiss law anyway or, at least, are subject to deportation if they've been found to be resident in the country without registering at the Kreisbüro.

"Arrival" is the name of the first episode of The Prisoner, where a grumpy Patrick McGoohan (who remains grumpy throughout pretty much the entire series) finds himself transplanted from the UK to a suspiciously clean, efficiently-run place. Being British, he clearly finds this highly bewildering. Having moved to Switzerland yesterday, I know how he feels.

An amazing thing happened at Heathrow. My flight was absolutely rammed full, but everyone showed up and was on board by quarter of an hour before the scheduled arrival time, the doors were closed and after a few minutes of waiting as we were so far ahead of our slot we pushed back 5 minutes early. Clearly Swiss people do not get distracted by shopping in the airport and fail to show up for their flights on time. Then, to make things worse, the flight landed and was on stand 20 minutes early. And this was only BA, not Swiss. The only bad part of the flight was a woman in the row behind me inexplicably taking such offence at being asked fairly reasonably to put her bag under the seat in front for takeoff that later in the flight that later in the flight she flagged down the stewardess concerned and Took Her Name in order to Make A Complaint. The stewardess did not seem to be quaking with fear at the prospect of being reported to management for doing her job properly, not only happily giving her full name but helping the complainant make sure she had the spelling right.

Anyone who's flown through it in the last couple of years will know that Zürich airport is a pleasure. Even as one of the last off the plane and with the wait for the transitty thing to the main terminal (although you get a smooch from an animated Heidi as a reward for waiting) I was in the baggage hall within 15 minutes. More impressively, so were my bags. Down to the railway station, bought a ticket, and was on the train to Zürich Hauptbahnhof barely half an hour after landing. Unheard of!

This is where things get a little interesting, or at least where I could have planned better. I figured that bringing my bike (well, one of my bikes) with me would give me a way to explore a little, so as well as 25kg of wheely duffel bag I also had a bike in a huge, unwieldy bike bag to wrestle. The bag has wheels, but they're small wheels on a big bag, and the bag itself isn't rigid. The wheels are also only at one end, and the other end has to be lifted up a long way for them to work properly. Add the carry-on backpack I was also wearing and you'll probably get an idea of the fun I'd let myself in for.

I successfully wrestled the dread combo o'bags through the Hauptbahnhof, overtaking a gaggle of soldiers returning for weekend leave and being grateful that they didn't remark on my astonishing abilty to schlep heavy loads and conscript me on the spot, and onto the train to the nearest station to the security office where I needed to collect the keys.

Okay, I won't describe my every move. Let's say, though, that I finally arrived at the apartment building after schlepping this dread combo (alternately wheeling the bike bag and carrying it over my shoulder) across an airport, a train, the undercroft of Zürich HB, another train, a not insubstantial walk to the security office, down to the nearest tram stop, onto a tram, off the tram again, and finally a short walk to the apartment block. I then discovered that my apartment is on the third floor and there's no lift. You can probably imagine the joy of lugging that lot up three floors sometime after 11pm on a Sunday when everyone is supposed to be asleep and if you make too much noise one of the neighbours will suddenly call the police.

I finally got in, located the most important bits in the apartment (DSL modem, place to plug in Airport Express, toilet - more or less in that order) and studied the sign in the bathroom ordering me to air the apartment regularly (ideally three times a day). Clearly Switzerland takes the menace of mildew seriously.

This morning, the workout the bike gave me last night (more comprehensive and varied than I'd have got for riding it for an hour) means I have bruising and red patches across both shoulders and the sort of aches and pains normally associated with, if not a day of wrestling, at least a hard day of DIY. I guess I need to practice my bike-schlepping harder in order to get into shape.

Anyway, here it is. I guess I'm now resident in Switzerland. Scary, huh?