Thomas Van Doren's Blog

I arrived in Zurich 21 hours after leaving Seattle. I took the train from the airport which provided some pretty exciting views of Zurich.

I love the feeling in Zurich. The buildings are mostly old. The windows all have shutters. There are lots of cobbled streets and narrow walkways.

I stayed just south of downtown in a pretty touristy area. There is at least a dozen night clubs/bars in the same block as my hostel. The stores in the area are also fairly nice. It is hard to just window shop with so many appealing products in the window…

Across the lake was a pretty ritzy part of town. From there, I walked down the west side of the lake on a rainy morning and found lots of elegant apartment buildings. It must cost a fortune to live there. It cost me quite a bit just to eat in Zurich. A latte and croissant was 11 francs, which is about $12!

The attitude of the people reminds me of Seattle. They are a bit cold and unwilling to engage. The other travelers that I met were very interesting and engaging, though. I met people from Mexico, Lausanne Switzerland, London, Brazil, and Russia. Saturday evening I went to one of the local dance clubs with four guys from Laussanne. I left at 4:30 after dancing all night… I was not even close to the last person to leave!

I found an Apple reseller (essentially an Apple Store) when I was wandering around. The keyboards were surprising. They are QWERTZ keyboards! The Z and the Y are switched. They have a different layout for special characters.The surprising aspect is that these keyboards are not very useful for programming. Clearly they are not meant for use with the bash shell as the vertical bar, hash sign, curly braces, and square brackets are missing! I suppose a programmer would use two keyboards…

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Zurich. I will get another afternoon/evening there at the end of my trip. It is a beautiful place. Though, I don’t think I could visit more than a couple days without a very large budget.