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!

Back in the land of chocolate, watches, and the alps

I made it back to Switzerland! I had a really good time back in the US, and am now back here and ready to study.

The past few days have been quite hectic. I left Plymouth at 9 AM on Tuesday, and the plane departed around 11:30, I think. It's all sort of blurred together. The layover in Atlanta went by quickly, but I was somewhat annoyed that the free internet wasn't working. I was planning on sending Mom an email update that I was in Atlanta and everything was going just fine, but was unable to. Oh well. I arrived in Zürich at about 8 AM on Wednesday morning, and zipped back to St. Gallen with the train. Two trains every hour, and just about an hour long train ride from the airport to St. Gallen makes for pretty flexible transportation options.

Once back home, I managed to unpack and tidy up my room a bit, and then headed back to the airport to catch my 3:55 PM flight to London. SwissAir is a great airline, especially if a company is paying for your flight. London City Airport is also highly recommended, provided, as I discovered, there's no threat of any weather. There was one other guy flying up to London from St. Gallen, Nick from Bulgaria. It was nice having someone else around who I sort of knew.

After arriving in London, we made our way to Canary Wharf with the DLR (light rail), and eventually found our way to our hotel. After checking in, Nick went out to meet a friend of his, and I got dinner and proceeded to fall asleep in my room. It was fairly dark out in London, even at 5 PM, so I didn't think too much about wandering around and snapping pictures.

The next day, all 32 of the interview candidates met up downstairs in the hotel. A few of the candidates were British, but a lot of us were international. I was the only American, but there was a Canadian who was flown over, as well as a Canadian buddy of mine who's also studying in St. Gallen. Other than that, there were a few continental Europeans. We started out with a nice little breakfast, and then got to work on a case study. After the case study, we had individual interviews. I had 3 interviews with different groups. Some of the people who go to Oxford or Cambridge or the London School of Economics had up to 7 interviews.

This whole phenomenon about schools on your resume has gotten me thinking more about where I might want to do an exchange in the next year or two. Oxford and Cambridge were described to me as the Yale and Harvard of England (and Europe, maybe). St. Gallen has some decent exchange programs (with places like Columbia, Cornell, University of Chicago, NYU, even the U of M in the US, and a load of other schools throughout the world), and you can also arrange your own semester abroad. I've been thinking a bit about where I'd perhaps like to go, and how to even go about arranging my own exchange program. Here, there's sort of a toss up of whether or not to try to do an exchange semester at a prestigious US university, a UK / European one, or an Asian one. Lots to think about.

Anyway! Back to the interviews.

I met a bunch of interesting people, Michael from the Netherlands, Antonio from Portugal (but studying in the Netherlands), Tobias from Germany (but studying at Oxford), and some others. It'll be neat to see if I run in to any of them this summer.

So at the end of the day, after our interviews had wrapped up, a few of us were planning on going out to get a bite to eat (as it was dinner time) when Nick got a text message telling him that our flight had been cancelled. Antonio's flight was also cancelled, and there was a lot of confusion in the next 10 - 15 minutes as everyone started making phone calls, and I borrowed a Brit's iPhone to check out flight schedules online. After getting our bearings on the situation, we headed over to the London City Airport.

Upon arrival, we found out that all flights to Switzerland had been cancelled, and we'd have to wait until morning. We never were told the precise reason why the flights were cancelled, but I assume that it had to do with the fact that there could have been bad weather. Since flights arriving at London City Airport were cancelled, the first few flights the next morning were cancelled as well. They found flights from Heathrow at 6 AM and 8:15 AM, and we opted for the 6 AM one.

SwissAir put us up and got us a dinner buffet at a (not so great, but good enough) hotel for the night. Early Friday morning, we got on the bus for a 15 minute ride to Heathrow airport. It was probably my best experience ever at Heathrow, but I'm sure that's due to the fact that it was 5 AM and not much was really going on.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. SwissAir has nice seats on their planes, and everything was pretty hospitable. We even got some Swiss chocolate. I think the high-point of the flight was when they started playing 1946 Tom&Jerry cartoons.

I ended up getting an offer from Barclays in the "Loan Capital Markets" division - basically, they figure out ways to give companies loans of billions of euros. Since just one bank apparently can't afford to do that, they have to band together. I was somewhat worried that I wouldn't get an offer originally, since I interviewed with the German Mergers & Acquisitions team, and this team, both of which were looking for native German speakers. Now, I'm confident in my German abilities, but I was afraid that I'd be overshadowed by the 3 native Germans who were also interviewing. It looks like those fears were somewhat unfounded, as I ended up with an offer.

I have to look at the timing (among other things) and figure out whether this Barclays offer or the Nomura offer in Capital Markets is a better fit for me. I'm leaning towards the Barclays offer, but need to look over the fine details.

Mom - you also may be happy to know that I wore one of my new shirts and ties for the interview.

So, after a long few days of business, I made it back to my apartment in St. Gallen, and now have to begin studying for my finals. For those who don't know, the system here at St. Gallen is quite different from the US. We have our semester from September to December, and then we have our finals at the end of January and beginning of February. The next semester starts at the end of February, and goes until the end of May, with finals at the end of June and beginning of July. The precise timing of my finals plays somewhat of a role in figuring out when I could start an internship, etc.

Anyway, I'm going to try to head to sleep soon and combat jet-lag. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but London was dark and I didn't have a ton of free time to roam around the city.

Mission Complete!

Travel has been completed. Now I'm eating apple pie. Hooray!

And off we go!

The past few days have been busy.

Over the weekend, my partner and I worked on our presentation for our Information Economics class. We had turned in our paper on Friday, so we had most of the content on hand, we just needed to work out the slides, and what we wanted to say. Overall, the presentation went pretty well, and I finished my 1st class here in Switzerland.

I do some coding work for the Student Union, and the IT department went out to eat. We went to a Thai place, which was actually better than I had expected.

This morning I got up at 4:45 and booked it to the airport. I did get here sort of early, but I wanted to make sure I had enough time to do things like repacking my bags. I get free wifi at any public hotspot in Switzerland through the university, so I'm all set until we board in half an hour. In about 21 hours, including a 7 hour layover in Atlanta, I'll land in Minneapolis. It'll probably be a hassle going through US border control, as always, but hey, that's life.

Mission... ...success!

Yesterday was a long day. I got up at 6:30 to get to Zürich airport in time for my flight - I arrived a bit early, but we flew out at 10:10 on schedule, everything great. I got to London around 10:50 (London is 1 hour behind Switzerland). The lady at the National Rail ticket counter got me what seemed like a good deal, £11.50 ($18.50) for an all-day train ticket from Gatwick to London, and throughout London. Unlike Switzerland and Germany, in London you often have to go through a turnstile or through little door (which will only open after you put your ticket it, it determines your ticket is valid, and then spits your ticket out again) in order to get to the trains, underground, etc. So, it was really useful that I had that day-pass.

I did a little bit of exploring throughout London, but not too much. I did see a bunch of little restaurants that smelled really good. The whole day, I was coping with the idea that they drive on the wrong side of the street. I didn't get used to it in the few hours that I was there, especially not when I was in the bus going from one terminal to the other. Also, no one in London obeys Walk / Do not walk signals. As soon as cars stop, or there's a break in the cars, people just plow across the street.

Walking through the city, I was continually reminded of how old London is. Even though it's bristling with modern technology (I saw ads for broadband for £5.99 / month), there were tons of old relics and architecture that gave the city an old feel to it as well. Take that mix of old and new, add millions of people, and there you've got bustling London. It seems like there's really a lot to explore.

Here are a couple pictures that I took.

Here's the view from London Bridge, I assume the one from the song...

This was the best shot of St. Paul's Cathedral that I could get without stepping into traffic or taking too much time.





London School of Economics. Maybe I'll do an exchange semester here during my Master's.


There was a signal disturbance on my way to the interview, so time got pretty short, and I didn't get a chance to take any pictures of Canary Wharf, which is where Nomura is located.

The interviews went alright. My various interviewers asked me about hedging and financial stuff, the financial crisis, some math / logic problems, and even one guy asked me about programming. I left feeling like it went alright, but not perfectly. After the interview, I jumped onto the train back to Gatwick, and of course I picked the train that took an hour to get there instead of the one that only takes 30 minutes (but left 20 minutes later). As I ran through the security area and got in... I saw that my flight was delayed 45 minutes.

So, I sat down and got a British cheeseburger and chips (actually not bad), and then ended up meeting this other guy, Martin, who was there for an interview (with MacQuarie, an Australian bank) and was flying back to Zürich. Martin's a German, working part time in Zürich, and going to school in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. We both talked about our interviews, and had some good conversation. On the plane, we gave some advice to the woman next to us, whose husband now works in Zürich and is trying to find a way to get a job for herself in Zürich.

After arriving back in St. Gallen, I called up my group partner, and we finished our paper. So, it was a long drawn out day, but definitely a good one.

Oh, and I just got the call a couple of hours ago that I got the internship! They'll be mailing all of the info to me (in the US, I made sure), so I'll find out all of the details then!

Journey to ye olde England

My interview in Zürich was successful! I'll be heading up to London this Thursday (no class that day! hooray!) for a Final Interview. It's pretty short timing, luckily before I head back to the US, and there were initially some timing issues with flights from Zürich to London, but everything seems to have worked out! I'll have a couple of hours before my interview to look around the city, not that much time, but enough to maybe see one or two of the important things.

I'll be sure to take pictures, assuming that the weather isn't that bad.

Zürich

I got my residency card today in the mail, much sooner than expected. It doubles as my federal ID card and my visa.

In other news, I had an interview in Zürich today with Nomura for a summer internship in London. Despite the fact that I got lost on the way there, everything seemed to go well. My interviewers seemed to like what I had to say, and I got the right solutions when working through all of their problems. So, we'll see how that goes. I have one or two more coming up, but they haven't been scheduled yet.

Oddly enough, there was no snow in Zürich, even though we have a bit here.

Another Adventure

Last weekend, Lindsey and I went up to Hamburg for the Waterkant Jam, a swing dancing workshop and festival. Had a pretty good time, we were really lucky that 1. we even got spots, since it sold out within 15 minutes or so, and 2. that we had a host. It was fun to see some of the people that I had met in Hamburg in 2008 again, and they have a pretty fun scene.

Monday morning we booked it to the airport, and Lindsey got on her plane back to the US. I was going to fly out before her, but my flight got moved to 6 PM. Not that big of a deal, sent a couple emails, and then I got some work done over the day. Sure, I probably could have gone back into Hamburg, but after being all checked in, I didn't want to lug my stuff around Hamburg. Especially considering the weather wasn't very good.

My actual flight from Hamburg to Düsseldorf went pretty well, I took a quick nap. Nothing too out of the ordinary, at this point I'm thinking that my first AirBerlin experience is going pretty well. This is when things took a turn for the worse. Around 8:40, we found out that our 9:15 (boarding time 8:45) flight was delayed until 9:45. A lot of people were upset, making calls, etc. I was thinking how that might be inconvenient, but an hour delay isn't that bad, and I could still catch a train from Zürich to St. Gallen around 11 when we'd arrive, no problem.

Around 9:35 - 9:40, we got a new announcement. Flight cancelled! Unbelievable! All 100+ of us went to the desk and started asking for some information - still not sure why our original plane was so late, but they were unable to even put us on a new plane because Düsseldorf apparently has Nachtflugverbot - no nighttime departures / arrivals allowed. At this point, they were talking about putting us all up in the hotel next door and putting us on the 6:45 AM flight the next morning. For me that wouldn't have been quite the end of the world, but there were some people who were quite upset, and needed to be in Zürich either that night or the next morning at 7.

When we showed up at the AirBerlin booth, a huge line formed (Swiss are so orderly!). I was towards the middle, but things didn't seem to be moving all that quickly. At this point, a guy named Stefan turned to the group and said "This is ridiculous, I'm driving. Who wants to come with?" Being that I was already right next to him and the guy next to me (Mauritz) was heading towards him as well, I got one of the four seats. Sandra, a Swiss woman who needed to meet a moving crew in Zürich at 7 AM, got the other seat. Stefan was Swiss, but lived in the Netherlands and had driven to the Düsseldorf airport with his car because it was the closest (and cheapest) one. We got into Stefan's car and headed out around 10, and pulled into Zürich a little after 3. Mauritz had his own car parked at Zürich airport, and was miraculously also heading to St. Gallen. He gave me a lift the rest of the way.

Just before we hit Zürich, it started snowing (it had most likely already been snowing before we got there). It's been coming down ever since, a light snowfall, nothing too intense. I was initially impressed with how fast everything had been plowed last night, even at 3 AM. As we were going down the highway, everything had already been plowed and the roads had been cleared. I'm not sure that'd you'd be able to drive 120 km/h (Swiss national highway speed limit, ~75 mp/h) down 394 at 3 AM after an hour or two of snow in Minneapolis.

All in all, the trip turned out alright. A few German cities along the way were lit up and looked somewhat serene in the dead of night, but for the most part, there wasn't much visible scenery. As far as new experiences goes, that's the first time I've travelled across a country in the middle of the night in a car, and I think the first time that I've gone 210 km/h (130 mph) in a car. Here's our approximate route:


View Larger Map

I'll take some pictures of snowy St. Gallen after it clears up a bit and the clouds clear up.

Yum

Do you know what's delicious? Swiss milk, cheese, and chocolate. Yum! I'm also pleased with my bank so far, and our Swiss knives, but haven't gotten myself a watch yet. Maybe that'll come. Anything else typical Swiss that I forgot?

In other news, I've been thinking about visiting home this winter. We'll see how that turns out.

Hamburgers!

Lindsey's been studying pretty hard for her tests, so, logically, we made hamburgers to ease the stress. Pretty easy to make, especially with Lindsey's grill pan she has. As you can see, the burgers were pretty big, and quite delicious!