Thursday, February 11, 2010
Swiss Immersion
I think my boss sometimes forgets that he's speaking Swiss German when he's talking with me. As a result, my job has caused my understanding of Swiss German to skyrocket.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Munich and more Skiing Adventures
Over the weekend, I visited my friend Brian in Munich. I visited a few months ago in the fall, and decided to take advantage of the (slight) downtime that I have right now in the semester break.
Brian recently moved into a new apartment, so I helped him put together his IKEA closet. We had a little mishap, but we managed to narrowly escape disaster. It was a lot like playing grown-up LEGOs. We also found some curtains and put those up in his room. I forgot to take a picture of the final product, but I will admit that I'm somewhat jealous of his room. While we were wandering though the city, we happend upon a sort of protest (where there were probably two policemen for each protestor), which was due to the apparent meeting of all of the national security officers across the globe. The joke is that when Iran's defense minister showed up, who they weren't even expecting, they put him in the hotel room next to Israel's. None of us knew about this event and only really found out because of the protests. That night, we went out with a couple of Brian's work friends to a really good little place called Schwabinger Wassermann.
On Sunday, Brian, a bunch of his friends, and I, went to the Zugspitze in Garmisch-Partenkirchen to go skiing. Technically we weren't on Zugspitze itself, but on the mountain right next to it. We ended up getting a pretty good deal for the train+lift ticket, but it involved getting up at 5:45 AM. The weather was, unfortunately, horrible for skiing, as it was so foggy you could barely see anything, but the snow was amazingly fresh and the weather did clear up as the day went on. Over the course of the day, I (not really intentionally) made it down a black-diamond route, managed not to fall off of the tug-lifts, improved my control, and managed to fall with grace. I will admit that I fall a lot, especially when I get going a little bit too fast by accident, but I've been doing pretty well at taking some pretty hard falls (and then sometimes skidding 80 feet or so down the hill across the snow) without getting hurt. Of course this place, like the last one, had little huts on the side of the mountain where you could sit down and get a bite to eat, so we were able to take our lunchbreak on the peak of the mountain.
Here are some pictures that I managed to take:
Today, I started my new part time job doing some programming at a consulting company. It's a pretty small firm, now a 3-person operation plus a couple freelancers, and we share a floor with an architecture firm, so it's a pretty neat environment. Overall it looks like it should be a nice way to make some money on the side to pay rent (and pay for these skiing trips that I took!), and it's really close to my university and my apartment, which is really convenient, but then again, everything is pretty close together in St. Gallen. This job is also a great way for me to get intense exposure to Swiss German, since that's what people speak here in every single part of life.
Brian recently moved into a new apartment, so I helped him put together his IKEA closet. We had a little mishap, but we managed to narrowly escape disaster. It was a lot like playing grown-up LEGOs. We also found some curtains and put those up in his room. I forgot to take a picture of the final product, but I will admit that I'm somewhat jealous of his room. While we were wandering though the city, we happend upon a sort of protest (where there were probably two policemen for each protestor), which was due to the apparent meeting of all of the national security officers across the globe. The joke is that when Iran's defense minister showed up, who they weren't even expecting, they put him in the hotel room next to Israel's. None of us knew about this event and only really found out because of the protests. That night, we went out with a couple of Brian's work friends to a really good little place called Schwabinger Wassermann.
On Sunday, Brian, a bunch of his friends, and I, went to the Zugspitze in Garmisch-Partenkirchen to go skiing. Technically we weren't on Zugspitze itself, but on the mountain right next to it. We ended up getting a pretty good deal for the train+lift ticket, but it involved getting up at 5:45 AM. The weather was, unfortunately, horrible for skiing, as it was so foggy you could barely see anything, but the snow was amazingly fresh and the weather did clear up as the day went on. Over the course of the day, I (not really intentionally) made it down a black-diamond route, managed not to fall off of the tug-lifts, improved my control, and managed to fall with grace. I will admit that I fall a lot, especially when I get going a little bit too fast by accident, but I've been doing pretty well at taking some pretty hard falls (and then sometimes skidding 80 feet or so down the hill across the snow) without getting hurt. Of course this place, like the last one, had little huts on the side of the mountain where you could sit down and get a bite to eat, so we were able to take our lunchbreak on the peak of the mountain.
Here are some pictures that I managed to take:
Today, I started my new part time job doing some programming at a consulting company. It's a pretty small firm, now a 3-person operation plus a couple freelancers, and we share a floor with an architecture firm, so it's a pretty neat environment. Overall it looks like it should be a nice way to make some money on the side to pay rent (and pay for these skiing trips that I took!), and it's really close to my university and my apartment, which is really convenient, but then again, everything is pretty close together in St. Gallen. This job is also a great way for me to get intense exposure to Swiss German, since that's what people speak here in every single part of life.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Day in Zürich
Yesterday, I went to Zürich for the day, met up with a couple people, and did a bit of sightseeing. It was my first time in Zürich outside of the train station where I didn't have something else to do and actually had free time. I had been there once before for an interview, and once before to visit Credit Suisse with one of the clubs here on campus.
I met up with Gutschti, a fellow counselor from Waldsee a few years back, around noon for lunch. We went to an Italian place, spent some time catching up, and he gave me some tips for Switzerland and for things to do in Zürich. After lunch, he had to go back to work, so I followed his suggestion and took the Polybahn the hill to go to a big terrace at the ETH Zürich, which is sort of like the Swiss MIT. From the terrace, I got a decent view of the city. It was somewhat overcast, so my pictures didn't turn out to be spectacular, but here's a sample.
This is one of the ETHZ's buildings. I didn't explore the campus, or the campus of the neighboring University of Zürich, much, but did get a quick glance.
After wandering back down the hill, I walked along the Limmat River, and eventually made it to the Grossmünster, which is a super old church-type building that was initially built between 1100 and 1220, or so. I look around inside a bit, and then paid 2 franks to climb up tiny spiral staircase and go up in one of the towers. I took some pictures from up here, but again, the weather wasn't all that great for the pictures. While I was climbing up, the Swiss "national alarm system" was being tested, pretty much the same as our tornado / storm sirens, except that it sounded really weird. Gustchi gave me a call to give me a heads up, so I didn't get too worried.
After coming down, I, again following Guschti's suggestions, got all set up for a short boat-tour of Lake Zürich. At 4 franks for an hour and a half or so, it wasn't bad. Got some nice views of the area, and got some glimpses of the Alps when the clouds subsided. There was a Chinese tour group that made up most of the people on the boat (sidenote: it's awesome to hear a Chinese person speak decent German, and then Chinese a few seconds later), and I met a Korean couple vacationing. I got to practice a bit of my Korean, and they got to practice their English a bit.
After the boat ride, I wandered up the Bahnhofstrasse, which seemed to be one of the most expensive places I've ever seen. There were stores with suits marked down 50% to 4,000 CHF (~$3800) and 18,000 CHF (~$17,250) watches in their display windows. Once I got further down, prices seem to become a bit more reasonable, and I even saw the "biggest English language bookstore on the European continent", which was sort of neat. If I ever need a book in English and can't find it on amazon.co.uk, I guess this is my next best bet. I spent a few minutes in the Apple store to warm up and take advantage of their free internet, and then headed on my way.
I met up with my other friend, Christian, for dinner, and then headed back to St. Gallen. I was going to meet up with Christof, who my parents knew back 15 or 20 years ago, but he is apparently booked for another few weeks. I'll probably head back over to Zürich in the next couple weeks to meet up with him.
This upcoming weekend, I'm planning on going to Munich to visit Brian. Next week, I have my test-start-day for my part time job, and have my verbal German test (which is really just a presentation) next week. Here are a few stray pictures from my day in Zürich.
This is a bird drinking from a water fountain.
I met up with Gutschti, a fellow counselor from Waldsee a few years back, around noon for lunch. We went to an Italian place, spent some time catching up, and he gave me some tips for Switzerland and for things to do in Zürich. After lunch, he had to go back to work, so I followed his suggestion and took the Polybahn the hill to go to a big terrace at the ETH Zürich, which is sort of like the Swiss MIT. From the terrace, I got a decent view of the city. It was somewhat overcast, so my pictures didn't turn out to be spectacular, but here's a sample.
This is one of the ETHZ's buildings. I didn't explore the campus, or the campus of the neighboring University of Zürich, much, but did get a quick glance.
After wandering back down the hill, I walked along the Limmat River, and eventually made it to the Grossmünster, which is a super old church-type building that was initially built between 1100 and 1220, or so. I look around inside a bit, and then paid 2 franks to climb up tiny spiral staircase and go up in one of the towers. I took some pictures from up here, but again, the weather wasn't all that great for the pictures. While I was climbing up, the Swiss "national alarm system" was being tested, pretty much the same as our tornado / storm sirens, except that it sounded really weird. Gustchi gave me a call to give me a heads up, so I didn't get too worried.
After coming down, I, again following Guschti's suggestions, got all set up for a short boat-tour of Lake Zürich. At 4 franks for an hour and a half or so, it wasn't bad. Got some nice views of the area, and got some glimpses of the Alps when the clouds subsided. There was a Chinese tour group that made up most of the people on the boat (sidenote: it's awesome to hear a Chinese person speak decent German, and then Chinese a few seconds later), and I met a Korean couple vacationing. I got to practice a bit of my Korean, and they got to practice their English a bit.
After the boat ride, I wandered up the Bahnhofstrasse, which seemed to be one of the most expensive places I've ever seen. There were stores with suits marked down 50% to 4,000 CHF (~$3800) and 18,000 CHF (~$17,250) watches in their display windows. Once I got further down, prices seem to become a bit more reasonable, and I even saw the "biggest English language bookstore on the European continent", which was sort of neat. If I ever need a book in English and can't find it on amazon.co.uk, I guess this is my next best bet. I spent a few minutes in the Apple store to warm up and take advantage of their free internet, and then headed on my way.
I met up with my other friend, Christian, for dinner, and then headed back to St. Gallen. I was going to meet up with Christof, who my parents knew back 15 or 20 years ago, but he is apparently booked for another few weeks. I'll probably head back over to Zürich in the next couple weeks to meet up with him.
This upcoming weekend, I'm planning on going to Munich to visit Brian. Next week, I have my test-start-day for my part time job, and have my verbal German test (which is really just a presentation) next week. Here are a few stray pictures from my day in Zürich.
This is a bird drinking from a water fountain.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Life in Switzerland
Now that I've finished most of my exams (everything except my German presentation), I've been working on getting out to explore more things in the area. All of the pictures are on top of the respective captions; I don't really feel like going through and styling them so that they look "correct" at the moment.
On Saturday, I took a long walk / hike around St. Gallen. I found a nature preserve that has a lot of hiking trails, and will probably check that out again.
View of St. Gallen. Well, part of it at least.
These are the stairs I walked up at the very end of this "ascent", before hiking a bit further to get to the nature preserve, and then hiking down into the valley again, and walking in the direction of Lake Constance.
This is a view of the nature preserve after walking through it. There was a little farm with a restaurant and a barn where you could buy eggs or milk. I didn't buy any this time, but I'll remember that it's up there
This was a view from the farm, looking away from the nature preserve.
That night, I made some cheeseburgers. Not all that exciting, but I took pictures anyway.
Charring up.
This is what Swiss ground beef looks like. Weird, huh?
End result.
On Sunday, I pretty much just stayed around the apartment. Did laundry, watched the Obama-GOP deal, cleaned my room, etc. A friend of mine from Waldsee had been skiing in Austria, in the part right next to Switzerland, over the weekend, and asked if I wanted to come hit the slopes on Monday.
So, today I woke up early, and caught a train to Austria, and we ended up in a little town called Lech. You can see here that the area was quite mountainous. I hadn't been skiing since high school, so I had my fair share of wipeouts, etc. At the end of the day, my muscle were all sore, and I was definitely ready for a rest. I might go skiing again next weekend as well, when I go to visit Brian in Munich.
This is what Austria (and lots of Switzerland too) looks like. We didn't ski on this mountain, but I thought that it looked pretty good in the morning sun and with the river there. The river looked sort of surreal because there was steam billowing off of it.
After going up two ski lifts, this is what we saw. It's on the back side of the particular mountain, and I stuck to the less-advaned trails that (relatively) slowly descended the mountain.
This is more mountains, as seen from the top of the slope. We certainly didn't think about going to ski over there, but other people had definitely made their way over there to enjoy the fresh powder snow.
This was a little cabin that was in the middle of the slope. There were actually a few of these on different routes. Inside, there was a little bar / sitting area, and a restaurant area. We ended up getting a cup of hot chocolate here to warm up.
Looking out over the valley at the mountains on the other side. A lot of the area looked like this, it was pretty spectacular.
This was at the bottom of the first run that we did, and one that I kept on doing throughout the day. Keep in mind that this is still at least halfway up the mountain, as we had to take a chairlift to get this high in the first place.
Self portrait.
We ate lunch ate one of the places on the slope, and I probably had the largest Wienerschnitzel that I've ever seen in my life. It was pretty delicious, and definitely hit the spot after using up so much energy. After lunch, some clouds rolled in and visibility dropped (while my wipe outs increased... interesting relationship there), but it was still fun.
Over the next week or so, I'm going to be taking care of a lot of little things, and preparing my German presentation. It's a 15 minute presentation on pretty much any company or product that I want, and it counts as the verbal section of my German exam, so that I get credit as having German as my Level 2 foreign language. This upcoming weekend, I'm planning on heading over to Munich to visit Brian and then potentially go skiing again on Sunday. We'll see how I've recovered, and what their skill level is, but that's the plan for now. Next week, I have my "test first day" at a part time job that I landed doing some web programming for a consulting company here in St. Gallen. It pays well, the hourly wage is probably double what I would earn in the US doing this part time. We'll see how that turns out. In other news, I'm going to the post office to pick up my graphics tablet today (they tried to deliver it while I was gone, and no one was home), so I have some time to get used to it before the semester starts.
So! It's late, and I'm exhausted from skiing all day, and probably made a bunch of typos. Goodnight!
On Saturday, I took a long walk / hike around St. Gallen. I found a nature preserve that has a lot of hiking trails, and will probably check that out again.
View of St. Gallen. Well, part of it at least.
These are the stairs I walked up at the very end of this "ascent", before hiking a bit further to get to the nature preserve, and then hiking down into the valley again, and walking in the direction of Lake Constance.
This is a view of the nature preserve after walking through it. There was a little farm with a restaurant and a barn where you could buy eggs or milk. I didn't buy any this time, but I'll remember that it's up there
This was a view from the farm, looking away from the nature preserve.
That night, I made some cheeseburgers. Not all that exciting, but I took pictures anyway.
Charring up.
This is what Swiss ground beef looks like. Weird, huh?
End result.
On Sunday, I pretty much just stayed around the apartment. Did laundry, watched the Obama-GOP deal, cleaned my room, etc. A friend of mine from Waldsee had been skiing in Austria, in the part right next to Switzerland, over the weekend, and asked if I wanted to come hit the slopes on Monday.
So, today I woke up early, and caught a train to Austria, and we ended up in a little town called Lech. You can see here that the area was quite mountainous. I hadn't been skiing since high school, so I had my fair share of wipeouts, etc. At the end of the day, my muscle were all sore, and I was definitely ready for a rest. I might go skiing again next weekend as well, when I go to visit Brian in Munich.
This is what Austria (and lots of Switzerland too) looks like. We didn't ski on this mountain, but I thought that it looked pretty good in the morning sun and with the river there. The river looked sort of surreal because there was steam billowing off of it.
After going up two ski lifts, this is what we saw. It's on the back side of the particular mountain, and I stuck to the less-advaned trails that (relatively) slowly descended the mountain.
This is more mountains, as seen from the top of the slope. We certainly didn't think about going to ski over there, but other people had definitely made their way over there to enjoy the fresh powder snow.
This was a little cabin that was in the middle of the slope. There were actually a few of these on different routes. Inside, there was a little bar / sitting area, and a restaurant area. We ended up getting a cup of hot chocolate here to warm up.
Looking out over the valley at the mountains on the other side. A lot of the area looked like this, it was pretty spectacular.
This was at the bottom of the first run that we did, and one that I kept on doing throughout the day. Keep in mind that this is still at least halfway up the mountain, as we had to take a chairlift to get this high in the first place.
Self portrait.
We ate lunch ate one of the places on the slope, and I probably had the largest Wienerschnitzel that I've ever seen in my life. It was pretty delicious, and definitely hit the spot after using up so much energy. After lunch, some clouds rolled in and visibility dropped (while my wipe outs increased... interesting relationship there), but it was still fun.
Over the next week or so, I'm going to be taking care of a lot of little things, and preparing my German presentation. It's a 15 minute presentation on pretty much any company or product that I want, and it counts as the verbal section of my German exam, so that I get credit as having German as my Level 2 foreign language. This upcoming weekend, I'm planning on heading over to Munich to visit Brian and then potentially go skiing again on Sunday. We'll see how I've recovered, and what their skill level is, but that's the plan for now. Next week, I have my "test first day" at a part time job that I landed doing some web programming for a consulting company here in St. Gallen. It pays well, the hourly wage is probably double what I would earn in the US doing this part time. We'll see how that turns out. In other news, I'm going to the post office to pick up my graphics tablet today (they tried to deliver it while I was gone, and no one was home), so I have some time to get used to it before the semester starts.
So! It's late, and I'm exhausted from skiing all day, and probably made a bunch of typos. Goodnight!
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