Impressions

I couldn't call this post first impressions as it has already been >2 weeks since I have arrived, but these are my impressions of the city.

Before anything, I would like to say that Zurich is a beautiful place. Not only is the architecture impressive, the surrounding landscape and mountains are stunning. Being in a small city by the lake, with green, rolling hills surrounding you, roaming through streets lined with beautiful houses and churches (no tall 'unsightly' modern buildings) gives you a feel that you are constantly on vacation. Even glancing outside my window at work right now, I can see tall, colorful spires with giant clock-faces (telling me it's time for lunch) rising through the maze of orange roofs surrounding the river that runs from the blue of the Zurich lake. Don't get me wrong, there is downtown with all the big shopping stores and glitzy cars, but with the trams running through public plazas and Italian restaurants dotted with tables outside in the sun, this is no New York!

People here, at least everyone I have met, are extremely nice and helpful. I have heard stories and incidences from friends of the occasional drunk, crazy, racist European yelling curses at immigrants in the middle of the street, but the overwhelming nice-ness of everyone else just drowns that out for me. Zurich is a European melting pot of sorts. I have met more Germans and Italians than Swiss during the past two weeks.

But that may also be because I am staying in student housing filled with international students (mainly PHDs). I am fascinated by traveling and meeting all kinds of people from different backgrounds and this is a chance like never before. A visit to the common room in the evening can reward you with the chance to taste (excellent) Swiss and other food. Dinner is incomplete without a bottle of wine and listening to interesting conversations in various languages is how my day usually ends.

Now to my favorite thing: Food. Food is good. Especially if its cooked good. Unfortunately, I am not a good cook and usually end up eating pasta or frozen pizzas when I am cooking. Food I have been able to taste from others though is just amazing. Good thing about living in an international student house is that people cook all kinds of food, and you get to eat some! Apart from that, Zurich is an expensive city in all aspects and half of my grocery time is spent finding the discount items. Swiss chocolate is out of this world (I buy huge bars that I finish in 2-3 days, wrong person at the wrong place!) and Swiss cheese (there is soo much of it!) tastes good too (can't say that about the smell, you can smell Swiss cheese from a mile away, and you want to stop breathing right about then). The wine is great, not a wine connoisseur, but it tastes good.

Work: Work is all about programming. The professor I am working under is actually American and has a very friendly/joking personality. My internship is in the Institute of Mineralogy and Petrography in the Geochemistry department of the ETH. I am charged with the task of mapping a sphere in a 3-D cube in FORTRAN 77 (basically writing a code to 'draw' the surface of a sphere of radius 1). FORTRAN 77 is old (developed in 1977), but is still very prevalent in number-crunching intensive engineering applications. Since it is widely used, it is very portable and engineers are kind of 'stuck' with this language now. I have a desk at the post-doc office, with all the post-docs jealous of my easy life because they have to work so hard! (joke)

Hope this provides you with an insight to my life here in Zurich, stay tuned for my adventures in Brussels and Amsterdam this weekend!