April showers...

It's April now! Time sure seems to fly; 25% of 2010 has already gone by!

Things have been going well here. We had some snow on April Fools day, which I found to be somewhat amusing, but other than that, not too much is new. We're not on our spring break, but I have a "block seminar" for the first week of our break. I'm thinking about going to Vienna for a couple days in the second week of my break, but plans are still up in the air.

Yesterday, my roommate Eva discovered that I didn't have any plans for Easter (today), and invited me to come have Easter with her family. It was really nice, they treat it about the same way that we do (that is, not a huge deal), and it was fun to see what kind of things go on in a Swiss family. They live in a town called Diessenhofen, which is near the city of Schaffhausen. Here's a map of the town:


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They live really right on the river, so when you look out the window, you see Germany. We went for a walk into Germany, and I took some pictures of the town and our walk. Later in the afternoon, we went to the Rhein Falls, which are like the Swiss version of the Niagara Falls.



This is the view from their balcony. That's Germany on the other side of the river!


Another shot of Germany.



This is down the road that they live on, on our way down to the river.



We're crossing the river here, and this is a shot of the Swiss side.


We're in Germany! You can see the wooden bridge on the left side of the shot.



More views of Switzerland from Germany.


Some neat Swiss buildings.

March Update

So, It's been about a mont of radio silence here, and I thought it might be time for an update!

Not much as been going on, as you can imagine. The new semester has started, and things have been coming along well at my job so far, but other than that it's been pretty quiet.

Today I went for a ~10km jog with my friend Christian. Turns out I'm way more out of shape than I thought, so maybe after a few weeks of "training" I'll be able to tackle these mountain routes.

Here are a few pictures that I took over the past month.


Here's some typical Swiss cheese that I wanted to try. It was quite good!



This is my work. Not all that extravagant, but still nice.


Here's the view from my window.


More of the office.


This is a castle that we saw on our way back from Longbridge, the English camp, last weekend. It's sort of surprising how there's stuff like this all over, and it catches you by surprise sometimes. The next two are more pictures of the landscape on our way back East.

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.

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.

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.