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.

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.