Some Kind of Groove, Pt. 2

Hmm, similar to an actual work day, I forgot where I was in recounting my new weekly routine (cut me some slack, I'm out of practice). Ah yes, I remember now, I remember everything...

Carless in the evenings, I walk 5-10 minutes from the hotel through the main train station to catch a bus, destination: health club (sister club to our Zürich membership) at least two nights a week. After a year in Zürich, a bus still feels more natural than a car; it's hard to re-teach an old dog older tricks. I also want to check out the main Lausanne public swimming pool (Swiss public pools rock!) but haven't attempted it yet. Last week, as is typical for a traveler with too much on his/her mind, I nearly disastrously forgot to pack my workout shorts, but luckily (aha!) had brought my swimming attire. It was anything but pretty, but my spandexy black swim-training suit over my spandexy undershorts got the job done (you know it still wasn't as ridiculous as some peoples’ attire).

After working out, I usually grab a portable dinner at the train station to eat back in the hotel room, typically a sandwich (always on French bread, never the pretzel bread ubiquitous in Zürich) and a mini (1/2 to 1/3) bottle of wine. My big meal is cafeteria lunch (rabbit or trout or something) so a light dinner is fine; a bit lonely and boring, but whatever. Last week I mixed it up by venturing to the Old Town neighborhood near the health club to satisfy my craving for an always-delicious Turkish Döner kebab, my first on the French side. Evenings not spent at the club, I hit a local low-key restaurant in the hotel/train station neighborhood, of which there are plenty to choose from. The average Lausanne mom-and-pop restaurant & café offerings are still somewhat constrained by Swiss respect for the norm, but supremely better than Zürich’s; no cheaper but at least varied, original and interesting (and French). My language limitations also admittedly temper the dining experience: it's funny how mastering the physics of wave-particle duality during the day yet not being able to order a side salad at night gives a net bedtime result of feeling like an utter idiot. You'd expect a better mental balance but no such luck.

As the curtain closes on the workweek, I exit the office late Friday afternoon to catch a 4:30pm train home. Unlike the outbound trip, I wouldn’t dream of mixing with Friday evening’s 2nd class carloads of obnoxious teenagers drinking 1.70 Franc cans of lousy Feldschlösschen beer (Switzerland’s Budweiser or worse). Goodness no, I pay the 22 Franc upgrade for an adult 1st class seat where we drink 1664-brand beer from France (the haute tradition bière) for a respectable 2.00 Francs per can. I reach my doorstep more or less around 7pm. Let the weekend begin!

Starting mid-January however, compress that same schedule from five full days to only Mon-Wed or even Mon-Tue, with the other 2 or 3 days working from home and that’s my new routine. Half French, half German, all Swiss--hopefully my brain doesn’t explode (or as the Germans say, my head doesn’t smoke, mein Kopf raucht nicht). Hey, it’s a living.

Some Kind of Groove, Pt. 1

Self congratu- lations are decidedly in order, as I just completed my second work week. Consistent with animal nature (humans are also animals), establishing a routine generates feelings of increased comfort and security and after only my second week of commuting I’ve more or less established mine (ten weeks of forethought waiting for my work permit helped immensely).

I pack for the week on Sunday night, taking great pains to conceal the process and obscure the readied suitcase from Hobbes, who despises readied suitcases and sulks incessantly in their presence. I rise Monday slightly before 6am (ugh) to catch the train departing slightly after 7am from Zürich direct to Lausanne. I forsake a train station espresso to maximize my sleep time, riding 2nd (cattle) class with earplugs and snoozing more or less the entire 2 hour 10 minute journey to the Röstigraben and beyond. I half-open my eyes every 30 minutes to spy several curmudgeony co-passengers eyeballing me, shocked by the potential scandal of oversleeping my destination. Their fear isn’t misplaced, but I’m lucky that my only stop is the final one. I go to sleep hearing Swiss-German dialect and wake up hearing French (I understand neither).

Although I hopped a cab this week, normally I’ll hop in a pre-reserved Mobility vehicle at the Lausanne gare (that’s French for Hauptbahnhof, oops, I mean train station) after buying a croissant to replace the calories burned while sleeping. The office lies about 20-25 minutes distant, I arrive about 10am. For now, until the apartment is ready, I commute Mobility-style between the gare and office using a different car every day--sometimes station wagon or economy or comfort class, sometimes manual or automatic, sometimes keyless or with keys, but always bright red--keeping it from morning to evening but returning it overnight.

The work atmosphere is French/international, light manufacturing, high-tech analytical instrument assembly, like Swiss watches on steroids. My coworkers are analytical chemists and physicists and PhD’s, often with a long company history (20+ years is not uncommon). So far I’m mostly learning about the instruments--like a rapid recall of high school elemental chemistry and physics (!)--and acquainting myself with applications in petrochem industries. Who knew that argon’s ionization potential makes it the noble gas of choice for characterizing x-ray dispersion spectrums? Sheesh.

I limit myself to two double espressos per day, one AM and one PM, excellent for the rock-bottom price of 0.70 per shot (2.80 total, tea is free). Lunch is always in the cafeteria, there’s virtually no other option (I’m not set up to brown-bag it), and I’ve decided that the cafeteria rocks. Two new menu choices every day, you name it: trout, salmon, lamb, rabbit, braised leeks among other more pedestrian choices like penne alla’arrabiata and pork cutlet. It’s not haute cuisine but pretty good considering they feed nearly 300 people daily.

OK, we're only halfway through the day, gotta break here and continue later. By the way, I snapped the above picture one evening carousing around Lausanne (ha! yeah, right), some big public building floodlighted for Christmas...

Excuse My Carbon Footprint

As briefly mentioned in my one-year Swiss anniversary recap, we drove a car not even once our first year in Switzerland. Zürich features one of the densest public transportation networks in the world (second perhaps to only Tokyo), so driving for us was never absolutely necessary (although potentially infinitesimally more comfortable in several cases, usually concerning IKEA). We successfully navigated the paperwork and independent eye test (you arrange an appointment with an optometrist who certifies your eyeballs and stamps his/her approval--always a stamp involved) to receive our Swiss drivers licenses in October, just under the 12-month Swiss limit for extending a foreign license; thus we avoided attending (God forbid) driving school.

Possessing a Swiss license enabled us to join the quite-excellent Mobility car-sharing service, a rent-by-the-hour setup with 2,000 cars all over the country. We have three Mobility locations with 7 total available cars within a 5 minute walk from home, and that doesn’t even include our local commuter train station. Jump in, drive around, return it, walk away. No attendants or lines or any of that crap. You don’t even refill the gas in most cases. The fees are not so hot for long travel distances or travel times but for bulky errands it can’t be beat. Even so, I introduced myself to Mobility only because of the perceived necessity with Lausanne being my new home away from home.

Lausanne is less than half Zürich’s size and its public transportation is nowhere near as comprehensive. My office lies out in the industrial boonies (yes, unbelievably, it is indeed possible to find a small spot of ugly near gorgeous Lake Geneva), a minimum twenty minute drive from the city center, and is serviced by only one peripheral train and bus line that quits service at 7:30pm. Eventually I’ll stay in a corporate apartment near the office (I’m currently lodged in a city-center hotel during apartment remodeling), so I needed a longer-term viable transportation option. Enter Mobility.

Steph kindly burned a vacation day the Wednesday before I started work and we practiced my commute: 2 hour 10 minute direct train from Zürich to Lausanne, Mobility car reservation and rental at the station (first time we’d tried it), driving out of the city to the office and otherwise exploring the region. Needless to say, nothing is as easy as it appears on Google maps.

Our ridiculous red station wagon featured a loose manual transmission and tight brakes (I reserved late and got the bottom of the barrel), an especially bad combo for a very hilly city; every other block presents a roundabout intersection with five mysterious choices; streets are alley-width and mostly one-way; street name postings are infrequent, tiny and French; stoplights are oriented slightly differently; street signs are all unusual; heavy construction is ubiquitous; constant vigilance is required to avoid both aggressive pedestrians jumping out in front (cars must stop for all pedestrians or risk a steep fine) as well as automatic traffic cameras that automatically mail tickets (also steep fines) for speeding; speed limits are posted in kilometers not miles/hour; last but not least, not shifting gears before 2,500 rpm is more damaging to the environment. And although I try to refrain from sweeping cultural generalizations (and profanity), I must say the Swiss drive like bats out of hell. Smart move to practice first with two people!

Lausanne in general is much prettier than Zürich, with several spectacular churches and Old Town overlooks of Lake Geneva, with the whole city built on a hill sloping downwards towards the lake. We stopped at the Christmas market for the usual warmed wine (now vin chaud instead of Glühwein) and examined the Globus gourmet grocery store. And I happily used Mobility again the very next day to pick up a bulky, heavy load of new ski equipment :-) from a far-flung Zürich suburb.

Last week--my first week on the job--I lucked out. The office training center had arranged a shuttle taxi from the office and hotel each day for several visiting customers. We caught the taxi at 8:30am, arrived to the office by 9am and departed at 4pm. Now those are my kind of work hours. This week however (so close to Christmas), no visiting customers means no shuttle. Monday’s travel included a 35 CHF one-way taxi trip (for less than five miles, ouch!) to the office, followed by the newly-acquainted, typically flustered administrative assistant (who doesn’t know me from Adam, only that I don’t speak French) forgetting to book my taxi home, thus requiring my waiting until 7pm for an impromptu ride from a coworker. A logistical comeuppance from the prior week, no doubt. Tuesday and Wednesday I jumped back on the Mobility bandwagon (actually thankfully not a wagon this time) for some Fahrvergnügen, albeit navigating alone in snowy, slushy, dark conditions. But I’ve managed successfully now four times. Too funny, can you believe I hadn’t driven to work in over 7 years?? Craziness.

So far so good at the job, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the next two weeks off including a Christmas visit to the U.S. of A. My timing is pretty good.

The Other Melting Pot

While the United States undoubtedly reigns supreme as the world’s melting pot, employment with a European-based international corporation provides another funny slant on mixed cultural experiences. I survived my first workweek in the Swiss-French canton of Vaud near the shores of Lake Geneva despite bombardment by spoken and written French, of which I know nearly nothing. Of course, virtually everyone in the office speaks excellent English as a backup but--in a decidedly different twist vs. Zürich--the region overall is significantly less English-friendly.

For example, I found the wait staff in restaurants speak hardly a word of English (or German), a poor combo with my reciprocally weak French. Thank goodness for our year of adjustment in Zurich’s easier environs; I’m long-since inured to taking the brush-offs personally. For now, oui, I’m content as long as I receive my glass(es) of wine.

Last week, my ears were habitually attuned instead to the occasional German utterance in the office. Luckily some visitors from Austria provided a needed fix. And I actually spoke a bit of German as well, during lunch with another friendly visiting customer from (where else?) Cairo, Egypt. Do all Egyptians speak German? The office hosts a training center, so customers and prospects routinely visit from all over the globe; I rode to the hotel each day with a Greek contingent and Thai guy. The trend continued this week as I enjoyed for yesterday's lunch an excellent preparation of lapin (rabbit, from the cafeteria’s cooks French influence) with a delegation of Russian professors from Moscow and Siberia (on a separate culinary note, I'm already best friends with the office espresso machine as captured above via my new work camera-phone).

Keeping with this theme, I left work last Friday directly for destination Basel (not Zürich) to accompany Steph at Hyatt’s Christmas company outing, where we dined at a table with several Germans, a Scot and Ukrainian, and later attended Saturday brunch with her coworkers from Germany, Norway, Ireland and Australia (strangely enough, Friday night’s corporate event was the Blue Man Group, a show Steph and I had never witnessed despite it being performed less than a mile from home in Chicago for the past 11 years--we needed to come to Basel, Switzerland to see it).

To complete the international flow thus far and cap my seventh day of work yesterday evening, an extremely nice Libyan coworker dropped me at the hotel so that my Indian boss or Dutch HR manager didn’t have to. And as need has dictated, I’m now preparing to start studying French (without giving up German just yet), so that I can someday soon be equally terrible at three foreign languages (don’t forget I brushed the border of functionality with Spanish two years ago, but stopped tantalizingly short of adequacy). Did I mention I'm learning German via Skype from a Russian national currently living in North Carolina? On that note, à demain / bis morgen / hasta mañana… until tomorrow.

Lausanne & Laax

Okey doke, here we go with the rest of the story (Paul Harvey, anyone?). So despite the commute from Zürich to Lausanne not being ideal, my new company and I shared a good vibe with each other during the interview and reached a workable compromise. I'll work 2-3 days a week at the office (actually outside of Lausanne in an industrial area of a neaby town) and 2-3 days at home, when I'm not otherwise globetrotting.

I'm wary of naming names (especially of the corporate variety) on Blogspot because it seems tightly intertwined with Google's spiders; I've been burned not once but twice with blog-named-company employees jumping on me the morning after a post, as some desktop Google alert of theirs goes off. So we'll simply call my new employer TSF Corp., a $9 billion U.S. corporation headquartered in Massachusetts with offices all over the world for the manufacture, distribution and sales of various chemical laboratory equipment and analytical instruments; if you work anywhere near chemistry, you'd probably recognize their name (but not as I've given it...ha!).

The French-Swiss site hired me to develop the petrochemical market for their certain type of elemental analytical instrument. In other words, for example, I have to figure out how to convince oil refineries to spend $100K-250K for TSF machines that measure the amount of sulfur or other things in oil. They currently have a 5% market share and of course would rather have 50% and need someone to devise and execute the plan. The territory is basically the world everywhere oil is produced, except for the U.S. Think glamorous locations like the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia. Who knows, we'll see. It was quite a stretch for both of us, seeing as I have no deep petrochemical or analytical instrument experience, and they're three hours from home and I don't speak the office language. But a good vibe and some flexibility overcame those hurdles, I guess.

So for the first four weeks, I'm spending all week in Lausanne to meet people and understand the products, how to operate the analytical instruments as well as the cafeteria espresso machine, etc. I'm living in a hotel until they remodel the corporate apartment near the office. A lot of the long-term logistical details have yet to be worked out, but I'm keeping the faith. Surprisingly (or not), work itself after a 13-month break isn't really so bad. Everyone has been very nice--despite not understanding why I don't speak a word of French when I live in the GERMAN region--and the cafeteria food isn't half bad.

I have to wind it up because I only bought a 2-hour Internet card, but those are the salient details. Steph and I also went Swiss skiing for the first time last weekend at an area in the Alps east of Zurich called Flims-Laax-Falera. The snow was unbelievably perfect...Switzerland isn't Europe's ski capital for no reason. Our group was 22 people strong (!), as our friend-of-friend network keeps growing. Maybe I'll elaborate more on that trip because of course there are a zillion crazy details, but in the meantime here are some pictures from Steph's and my scouting trip to Lausanne the week before I started work, and skiing pics:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=2hd8fyj.2lwxh0yj&x=0&y=qhfjdf&localeid=en_US

Hi from Mars

I think I've figured out why my blog production has been so dismal lately...I believe it's because I started running out of things get off my chest. Somehow Zürich started to become comfortable without us really noticing exactly how or when. And so that drive to exorcise frustration through writing dimmed. Good to know then that I've recently reloaded with fresh ammo. Starting a job will do that.

To fill in history dating back from the mid-summer and early fall, the Swiss job market for unemployed foreign chemical engineering business managers turned out not so easy to crack...big surprise, eh? For all the online job sites scoured and headhunting agencies applied to and CV's emailed, I received only one interview and it happened to be on the other side of Switzerland, not so far from Geneva. As ridiculous as it seemed, I went ahead and interviewed to dust off the ol' cerebral cobwebs. And wouldn't you know--after a ludicrous 10 week wait for a rubber stamp on my residence permit that extended my streak to ultimately 409 consecutive nonworking days--here I sit in Lausanne, a three hour train ride from Zürich, after starting work on Monday.

Talk about déjà vu (ha, ha, no pun intended)...after a year of German environs and study and (I'm finally admitting) attaining marginal proficiency, here I go starting from scratch again. This time with French, of which I know nothing. And although most everyone in the office speaks English, the preferred language appears to be French, about 30/70. In other words, if I'm not being spoken to directly, they speak French. And I've also unfortunately found the restaurant and other service-type staff speak a lot less English than in the "big city" of Zürich...as in mostly not a word. Just another fascinating cultural paradox to add to Switzerland's list. But here's something else I've learned...after your first ex-pat shake up, the second one isn't as bad. You learn to just chuckle and roll with it, I suppose. More details later, I'm exhausted and it's bed time!


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Meleagris gallopavo Weekend

Here's hoping everyone in the USA had a happy Meleagris gallopavo weekend (that's the biological classification for turkey)..! I never knew that our Swiss Family H was so sentimental about Thanksgiving until we started spending it on a continent that doesn't celebrate. All the Europeans here with American acquaintances more or less acknowledge Thanksgiving (which is commendable), as in, "Hey, isn't this weekend your Thanksgiving holiday?" But of course, businesses and employers don't care one iota, so the fourth Thursday (and Friday) in November is usually just another cold, gray, dark November workday. Blah. It wouldn't be so terrible without the knowledge of everyone stateside cutting work early on Wednesday afternoon and subsequently preparing for a long weekend of the big F's: food, family, friends and football.

Of course, given the more than sizeable American ex-pat population in Zürich, it's not a question of IF one will attend a Thanksgiving dinner celebration, only a question of WHOSE dinner and which dish we'll be responsible for, and then primarily a grand annoyance that the whole caboodle is delayed until Saturday. Actually, now that our friend base has grown over the summer and fall, we were somewhat surprised by how many American acquaintances returned home for a quick but looong trip. Unexpectedly, we're now strongly considering it ourselves for 2009; the weekend somehow seems to hold more sentimental gravity than even Christmas. But that's the real difference, I suppose--the Europeans celebrate Christmas in spades, so it feels like less to miss.

This year, not dissimilar to last year, we stuck close with the Hyatt clan. Along with last year's hosts--Hyatt-Chicago Dave and Heather and their (relatively) new baby AND a visiting sister--we descended on the household of Stephanie's boss's boss, originally a Pennsylvanian but calling Hawaii home most recently before moving to Switzerland a few months after Steph & me. Their family--including two really nice kids aged 9 & 13 AND their pug (Hobbes's sometimes crime partner) AND also visiting grandparents--lives in Winterthur, the next sizeable town over from Zürich (where we ran the entirely uphill half-marathon last spring). The same family is planning to watch Hobbes over Christmas, so he was also invited to Thanksgiving dinner to acclimate to the environs.

Well, we enjoyed a splendid time. Saturday morning was cold, clear and gorgeously sunny (a rarity in the past month) and we spent all morning preparing Steph's grandma's recipe for mashed potatoes (should be called "mashed cream & butter accompanied by potatoes") and stuffing; only a slight stretch of imagination was required to pretend it was a Thursday. Not at all unexpectedly, the hosts and crowd were warm and ingratiating and the Thanksgiving spread was really top notch, as was the accompanying wine (as were the not-so-traditional pre-dinner martinis). Hobbes ran himself completely ragged and remains hung over now well into Monday evening due to the overwhelming combination of missing his Saturday afternoon nap + long train ride + kids + babies + dog-loving grandparents + snow + food + food + more food. We no longer worry that his spoilage factor will be (heaven forbid!) dialed down even a half-notch during our brief late December absence.



Thus notch our second successful Swiss Thanksgiving. Despite the great evening, we're still considering swinging back across the Atlantic for a quick-turnaround trip next November. You see, a lack of football while scarfing turkey really negatively affects one's digestion. Funny how I never realized that before. At least I'm fairly certain it was the football and not the martinis...