Amster-damn! 20-21st June

** Read Brussels post first! **
The bus was at 9 am and would get us to Amsterdam at 1 pm. That meant 4 golden hours of great sleep! When I had the strength, I would pull the curtains on the window aside and take a quick picture. There were no Swiss Alps but Dutch countryside is no less in comparison. Large farms dotted with windmills (both old and modern) and pretty flowers lining the roads were enough of a motivation to wake me up an hour before we got to Amsterdam. Coming into Amsterdam I felt very excited: this would be a trip I would never forget!

Dikshant (a friend who lives in Amsterdam, wow) was there to pick us up at the bus station. We head to his place and shower/change. Now a rational person would go right to sleep (remember we hadn't slept the night before and the night before that I had left for the train at 3:30 am), but we weren't rational people and we weren't in a rational place. We head straight out. Central Amsterdam is a very pretty place (I think I say this about all European cities). We walk around taking pictures. We eat a Dutch specialty: french fries with mayonnaise on top! We take a canal tour: a 1 hour ride on a boat through Amsterdam's maze of canals (made hilarious by a bunch of drunk out of their minds Brits shouting comments on everything the tour guide said).

Finally it is nighttime and there is only one thing you can do when it's nighttime in Amsterdam: The red light district. The place everyone visiting Amsterdam 'visits'. Let me attempt to describe it in a PG-13 manner.

The red light district has been confined by law to a roughly rectangular area. Through the middle, along the longer side of the rectangle, runs a canal, either sides of which contain "Rooms" (explained later). The streets intersecting either sides of the canal (i.e. the streets parallel to the shorter side of the rectangle) are very narrow and also contain "Rooms" on both sides. When you walk along the streets, to either side are glass doors with 'ladies of the night' inside. Behind these 'ladies' are curtains leading to another room with a bed. These are the "Rooms". Most of these 'ladies' wear enticing clothes and make seductive gestures to beguile you into coming in. The 'transactions' are done in a very businesslike manner, with a flat rate and a 'heavy bouncer' for people that attempt to cheat. Photography of the "Rooms" is not allowed and thus you are left with only this.

We walk around till midnight and then call it a day. It is the most culturally astonishing place I have visited so far. If you're a little tipsy and your friends give you a push, you might end up in one of those rooms. Doesn't look like a big deal at all when you are there. And the 'ladies' will be sure to smile and shake your hand as you say goodbye. Our heads dropping with fatigue, we sleep on the last tram out to Dikshant's place.

Slept long till the next day and since we'd seen most of Amsterdam, decided to head out to another city nearby : Hague (Den Haag). Hague is famous for its beach and what better way to relax off out fatigue than a day at the beach? Hague is also a pretty town, not busy and crowded like Amsterdam, but a quiet, homely city. Evening time we head back to Amsterdam, have dinner there, and go back to the alluring red lights. Some of the bouncers there spoke a bit of Hindi and we had a few laughs when one of them yelled out "Mr. Singh, Mr. Gupta, Mr. Patel, Jaldi, jaldi! Jaldi ayo"

Well that was it. We came back late again and had to catch an early morning train back to Zurich. Had a 3 hour stopover at Brussels where one of the friends departed for Spain and the remaining two of us took a train back to Zurich. I slept the whole train ride back (again!), had frozen pizza for dinner, and went to bed. Next morning I woke up feeling like the weekend was just one long dream.

Stay tuned for more of my Euro-Adventures. Next stop (hopefully): France!

p.s. For lots more pictures (of Amsterdam, Brussels and other places), be sure to check out http://picasaweb.google.co.in/sahni.h

Brussels, 19-20th June

First destination on my tour of Europe was Brussels, Belgium. Travel is pretty expensive in Europe but there are offers and loopholes for broke college students like me to travel a bit cheaper. I have a "Eurail pass" for four countries and 10 days, which basically means I can travel around in four countries of my choice (France, Switzerland, Spain, and Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg count as one country)) for 10 days (not necessarily consecutive) within 2 months. But even with that there is problems of seat reservation and train routes, couple that with the fact that night transport in Zurich sucks and you can see me walking to the train station at 3:30 am to catch the first train out.

We (a friend and I) travel to Basel, in Switzerland, and from there take a French train all the way to Brussels. I remember very little of that as I was asleep most of the way. Occasionally drifting out of sleep I could hear partially recognizable french around me, which was strangely comforting after the completely unintelligible German I hear all day in Zurich.
We finally arrive in Brussels at 1:45 pm, after traveling through all of France and Luxembourg. Belgians, in all their wisdom, did not build a tourist information counter in the railway station and we didn't have a map. So we ask around for the most famous spot in Brussels and find "Grand Place"

Grand Place is a huge plaza surrounded with medieval buildings with 'mind-blasting' architecture! There we spot a tourist info counter and get ourselves a map.
Conflict of interests and time constraint in meeting my other friend meant we didn't get to do much till 6 in the evening except book tickets out of there for the next morning. I meet my other friend near a famous statue called Manneken Pis (basically a kid peeing, I don't see anything special in that) We eat Belgian waffles (awesome) and walk around town taking pictures. By nighttime we were pretty tired and hungry but we had decided not to book a hotel/hostel but spend the night - homeless!


After surviving a crazy underground concert that looked like it was taken right out of a Blade movie (with the vampires drinking blood all around) we walk around Brussels in the dead of the night, looking for a bar to spend the rest of the night. The night wasn't so dead actually. Great thing about Europe is that you can drink just about anywhere. So at 1 am we see people at public places with 12 packs and wine bottles getting smashed. But we had no intention of freezing outside and after a lot of looking around we find a bar that was still open (disappointingly, bars in Brussels usually close very early). We order a couple of Belgian beers (not good, too watery) and go to sleep!
About 4 am the bar closes and we venture out to find a new bed. Luckily enough, McDonald's is always around the corner.
But even McDonald's closes at 5 am there and we are kicked out yet again. The sun rises on us walking around like zombies exhausted from the day's travel and the night's partying! We decide to head to the railway station and thankfully found a few benches there. Soon it was time for our bus out of there. On to Amsterdam!

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!

Arrival

Hey people,

For those of you that don't know, I have been lucky enough to get a summer internship position at the ETH (pronounced ay-tay-haa) university in Zurich for 8 weeks. I arrived in Zurich on the 1st of June (almost two weeks ago) and have been contemplating this blog ever since, only to give into constant pressure now!

My flight landed in Frankfurt and the onslaught of unintelligible languages and freakishly costly commodities began immediately. Navigating through the airport to the inbuilt international railway station (so convenient) was not too bad, but digesting 2 euros for 1/2 L water was hard. The railway system is pretty good (fast and easy to find trains, good seats with great views!). So much so that the half of me wishing to miss my train and end up lost somewhere in eastern Europe with nothing but my backpack (packed with namkeen and laddo from home of course) was really let down.



I took a train from the Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof (translation: train station) to somewhere in Germany and then a connecting train to Zurich. You could really see the difference when the train crossed the Swiss border and the scenery turned from flat (boring) farms of Germany to the rolling hillside of the Swiss alps. The Swiss countryside was amazing and I could not close my eyes for the two or so hours even though I'd had only about 4 hours of sleep in the past 2 days.

Tugging and occasionally falling with my luggage I finally arrived in Zurich. To my dismay, Google maps had failed me for the first time. My handwritten directions (and a hastily sketched map) was a useless piece of paper (plus I could not keep my eyes off all the Swiss women around me!) So I loitered around what looked like a ticketing machine and tried to read map/directions. But German gleaned from WWII movies (Schnell!) is not helpful in such situations. So I decided to ask a pair of beautiful ladies (and immediately thought of second checking the directions they will give with a sensible looking local guy.) They turned out to be Americans only visiting Zurich, but after going in a few circles, they were able to show me where to go.

**The public transportation system in Zurich is amazing. The whole city is wired up with cables that run overhead and that trams and buses 'connect' to for power. Trams and buses usually have right of way. Apart from these, there are commuter trains that connect suburbs/far off places in zurich, to the main city. First place I have seen where public transport is given preference over cars. The only drawback, despite the infamous nightlife of zurich, is the lack of convenient night public transport. But zurich is a rich city and if you can afford to party late in zurich, you can afford the cab ride home!**

Exhausted from two days of travel, I manage to drudge my bags half a kilometer the wrong way, then the half a kilometer back, and then half a kilometer in the right direction to arrive at the International Student House where I will be spending the rest of my summer. There was no one at the office, but I manage to acquire my room, heat some of mummy's great paranthas, take a shower and find the bed. Sleeping at 9pm (while it was full day outside) had never felt better!



(The student house)