chagall is nice

since becoming museum girl, i've been somewhat embarrassed to say that i love monet, because it's just so... commonplace. at least i can be a tiny bit less ordinary by having discovered that i'm also terribly moved by the fanciful works of marc chagall. the zurich kunsthaus has quite a nice set of his works, and i was itching to visit THE chagall museum in nice. it was everything i'd hoped for and more! small enough that you can savour every single piece, and very nicely laid out. swoon!

back to the city of lights

for me, though, it's really the city of falafel! behind this blurred picture of b, the heavenly pockets and plates are being assembled. yum. paris has so much to offer, but i'm easy to please -- completely satisfied with falafel and a few hours at the orsay. some day i'll figure out what all the excitement over ritzy shopping and fine dining is all about. oh yeah, and of course, it was great to see b, b, and the other gk again!

the family business

it's all well and good to enjoy waffles and chocolate in belgium, but no trip to brussels could be complete without spending some quality time with kwak beer! it tastes much better drunk from its trademark glass, a work of true marketing genius. and what a trip to see 'kwak' on signs outside restaurants and bars. i've decided that some part of me must be descended from dutch-speaking tribes. after all, the name is there, and there's the mysetrious allure of dutch to my ears...

interlude

i will catch up on blogging some day. in the meantime, here's an update from the present! the tyranny of eurail has ended (i.e., my pass expired) and i finally had the freedom to spend a weekend doing nothing in zurich. except for laundry and su doku puzzles. people often think i'm kidding when i say i have ocd issues, but i don't think many could match my feat of 16+ hours of su doku in two days, including one 9-hour stretch with no breaks! sigh.

i'm not much of a turkey eater, but i'm feeling sad this week about missing thanksgiving at home. it snowed today, the first snow with big fluffy snowflakes, and i loved it. coat, scarf, hat, and mittens have all come out for the winter, and i'm surprised that i'm kind of enjoying the cold. (maybe because it's not that cold.) but i have LA weather on my google home page, and i wouldn't mind being in 82º LA right now either, puttering around at home and being fed in unhealthy quantities by mom.

cinque terre

i was ready for a break after over a week of work travel, so i headed off for a beach weekend in cinque terre. there's something about italy -- it's grungy, the buildings are run-down, trains are late, and i can just barely understand the language -- but i keep going back. obviously, it's the food! for someone who never really liked italian food, i've become quite the pasta lover. and you know how i feel about gelato. so i ate well and enjoyed the stunning coastal beauty of the five towns in the wonderfully uncrowded off-season. the place is probably too small for the hordes that swarm in during the summer, but i would highly recommend it in the spring or fall, and hope to return for a longer stay sometime soon.

bed bugs!!!

warning: extremely gross stuff ahead!!! i've stayed in all sorts of places on my weekend adventures, both nice and not so nice. i didn't expect that a 4-star hotel would be the one that introduced me to the terror of BED BUGS!!!!! i can't even begin to describe how absolutely disgusted i was for days and days. parts of my body looked diseased (e.g., >50 bites on the lower left arm alone) and i had to carefully wear concealing clothing for a while. YUCK!!!!! everyone: take a moment tonight to appreciate the peaceful sleep you'll be able to get in a clean bed.

so i will always remember granada as the city of bed bugs. okay, fine, the alhambra was beautifully intricate and i was blessed with blue skies. but the good parts are hard to pick out of the memories of panic and horror left in my head...

amsterdam is lovely

i lucked out and had a second weekend in a row loving my weekend destination. i spent a beautiful fall weekend in amsterdam, taking in lots of museums and biking all over the city. i liked it quite a lot, especially the language! there's something about dutch that catches my ear and i will have to learn it one of these days.

i love vienna!

i made some really ambitious plans to visit vienna and budapest in the same weekend -- one action-packed day in each. little did i know that vienna would become my answer to that previously unanswerable question: what's been your favorite city so far?

it was a bunch of little things. it's very clean like zurich, but has more to do. i loved the first cafe i ended up in, even if i decided after two tries that i'm not a sachertorte fan. huge grand buildings, in good condition and with solid tourist infrastructure. i lucked out by being there on the one night a year the museums stay open until 1 am. there was a traveling exhibit from the orsay including a lot of the works that were missing when we were in paris. i kept thinking, "I FOUND THEM!!!" i was so excited to be able to see them! $2.50 standing room opera tickets appealed to my frugal side, even if i decided after two shows that i'm only a shallow opera fan (frivolously amusing plots only, please). i heard (but did not see) the choir boys sing mass. and i got a dose of history at a fantastic exhibit on austria since world war i. it made me want to bust out the european history books again. i just loved it!

if you haven't figured it out yet, i didn't make it to budapest. ah well, next time! (and i'll have to take a train that doesn't go through vienna.)

settled in, or not

when s&j visited me, as soon as they got to my apartment they marched into my kitchen and turned my refrigerator on. apparently, they thought it was ridiculous that i was living sans fridge, but i thought it was ridiculous that they were turning it on when there was nothing to put in it except chocolate. over the next couple weeks, though, with the parents visiting and a couple weekends spent in zurich, i actually acquired things like leftovers and milk. it was almost like i really lived there!

then the visitors all left and i was back to my old ways of eating at work every weekday and leaving town every weekend. (yes yes i'm still behind on this blog.) the result? yesterday i dumped out congealed milk and an unspeakable something from tupperware. back to just chocolate in there keeping cool.

what happened?

suddenly, the leaves are changing and i've busted out my scarves. autumn is here, and my assignment in zurich is more than half over! unbelievable!

[photo credit: sis]

roman find

i reunited with the fam and we spent a quick two days in rome. the sights were of course magnificent, but the real high point was discovering an amazing new dessert: tartufo! it's a huge blob of chocolate gelato mixed with chocolate chips/shavings and other chocolatey goodness. i guess i don't know exactly what it was, except that it was delicious! it was also, shall we say, mood enhancing. i kept poor tired s up all night engaging in various ridiculous activities. such as wiggling.

trompe l'oeil

this picture is funny because strange perspective effects make me look even smaller than i really am compared to my (mostly) tall, white, male co-workers. hee hee. we went hiking for an offsite, conveniently on my one day back at work between vacations. (though i paid for it by staying up all night working... in case those of you who think it's all just hiking and traveling for me were wondering...)

magic mountain

mom and dad joined me and s in europe, and we headed off to zermatt, city of the matterhorn. we spent one whole day on trains following the "glacier express," taking the long scenic route to zermatt. (but we all dozed off during one of the prettiest stretches.) for dinner, i finally tried my first cheese fondue. it was terrible! then we spent a day worshipping the mountain. disneyland made a good copy - it looks just like the matterhorn i grew up with.

yellow dog

s has asked: where the mongolians? we happened to be in san sebastian during their film festival, so we popped in to watch a movie about a nomadic mongolian family, die hoehle des gelben hundes (the cave of the yellow dog). not bad at all. the most striking thing was that mongolians look like koreans! and similar language elements too. i never knew.

eating in españa

it's obvious to anyone who knows me that anything called "chocolate con churros" is a dish i'm sure to go out of my way to try. but oh no! the churros were decidedly not delicious (to my disneyland-trained taste buds), and they gave me so much chocolate that i figured i should just drink up the remainder after the greasy sticks were finished... (and s hinted that she'd seen somebody else doing this) we were in a hurry so i just poured it down my throat. plus, i don't think it was really a single serving size but s didn't help me out much. i went into such sugar/grease shock that i was totally knocked out for the entire scenic train ride to bilbao, and couldn't eat anything sweet the rest of the day!

during the whole trip, dinner was usually pintxo (basque version of tapas) hopping, which was always great fun even if i couldn't actually eat much. little dishes are put out on the counter and you just eat what you want and figure out the bill later. the cheese sandwich (one of my staples in switzerland) of spain has turned out to be tortilla con patatas -- a fat omelette filled with fried potates. i love breakfast eggs and potatoes, and here they are rolled up in one dish, often in a baguette as a sandwich. i think i ate this every day. it's a good thing i brought vitamins.

alone in the dark

on our second day in spain, we ended up in a nature reserve where the camping season had already ended. the nice lady at the office (after we spent about an hour asking her questions about nearby hikes) said we could camp there for one night anyway, since it was obvious that we had come for "el camping." BUT, as we lay in the tent that night, we kept hearing noises in the night and i was super jumpy. we were alone in the park... or hoped we were! tooooooo scary. in the end, we decided that there was too much potential for a really bad situation. so less than two hours after the tent went up, it was folded up again and we were walking down the dark road to the next town, about 7 km away. a grim situation.

after only 15 minutes though, we came to a little bed and breakfast. we weren't sure they would be awake, but they answered the door and there was the nice lady from the park office! we heard her say to her mom, "these are the girls i was telling you about!" it was pretty hilarious, but i was so overwhelmed with relief that i didn't appreciate the humor until later. i've never been filled with such gratitude and comfort by the sight of two beds in a little cabin...

just can't get enough

day (night) 1 of our spain trip. what do you do during a one-hour layover in paris? if you're me, you run as fast as you can to falafel alley and hope desperately that you don't miss your next train... it was a crazy sprint to the marais and back, i wolfed down said falafel in seconds due to the adrenaline, and s laughed out loud at my red face, vein popping out of my forehead, and hand-fanning-face-while-saying-"la stresse! la stresse!"... but it was worth it! YUM!

updated: i stand corrected! from s: "the vein was in your neck, not your forehead! not even gaston's veins bulge in his forehead! hahahahaha!"

off again

oh goodie, more visitors! s&j are coming tomorrow, then i'm going with s on some kind of tbd adventure in northern spain. we haven't figured out yet how to balance out city/beach/nature time, but we're just going to wing it. so what about all you people who haven't visited me yet? when are you coming??

hagelslag

one of my dutch coworkers brought back a box of hageslag from amsterdam. in his words:

"Hagelslag is the Dutch contribution to world cuisine, much ignored by the rest of the world (except for decorating cakes) awaits you in the kitchenette near the espresso maker and consist of very small pieces of chocolate to be put on bread. For the uninitiated, you have to put enough butter or similar on your bread lest the chocolate pieces will fall off again. It works also great with peanut butter. Maybe next
time."

basically, they're chocolate sprinkles to be eaten with buttered bread. but oh my goodness!!! it's delicious!!! dare i say, even better than chocolate croissants! because you can control the buttery-ness and chocolatey-ness. i've eaten way too many pieces today... YUM!!!

new country

one of my aforementioned hikes was on the east side of switzerland, near a gateway city to liechtenstein. i finished hiking pretty early and figured i may never be in the area again, so i hopped on the "liechtenstein bus" and ended up on my first journey (since moving here) to a country i hadn't visited before!

but actually, it wasn't too exciting. they use swiss francs, speak a similar dialect to swiss german, and it's an open border. in fact, i tried hard both ways to spot the "welcome to liechtenstein" (or opposite) sign, to no avail. no clue where the border was. anyway, at least i can say i had a meal in a new country!

you (swiss engineers) raise me up

i've gone on three great hikes in the past couple weekends in different parts of the country. (including my first real hike in the alps -- i look at my pictures and still can't believe i was actually in such a beautiful place) all of these recent hikes involved those famed feats of swiss engineering: mountain railways and aerial lifts! i.e., cable cars, gondolas, chairlifts, and sturdy trains that go up and down impossibly steep inclines.

these rides provide stunning views and take the most difficult part out of high-altitude hikes. but even more importantly, the closed-compartment ones provided me with something i've really been missing: a place to sing at the top of my lungs!!! it's not something i can do in my quiet swiss apartment, and i don't drive here, so i've really been repressed. but not anymore! sure, the cars aren't completely sealed so people traveling the other way or people on the ground may catch a bit of it, but not nearly enough to be painful and i simply beam at them so they'll just think i'm ridiculous more than a disturber of the peace. hee hee!

rheinfall

after p&b left, i spent one day recovering then went right back to my solo traveling ways. this time off to schaffhausen to visit europe's biggest waterfall (due to width, not height). it's no niagara, but there's a viewing platform *right* next to the falls so i hung out there for a while -- glorious! all i really want in life is to live near water.

my friends!

the whirlwind trip through three countries was just fantastic, but it was even better being with friends from home! i miss you guys!

the whole week's worth of adventures would be too much for a single blog post, so i'll just mention some of the most memorable things:

• our first night, sharing a sleeper train cabin with loudly snoring korean guys. a foreshadowing of things to come?
• really, really great falafel in paris! so good we had it two days in a row.
• everything is closed in europe in august!
• i can't get enough of chocolate crêpes and gelato! if you know how extremist i can be about some things, well, yeah -- it was gross.
  
• small treasures can be found in cheesy street markets.
• i can now order radler in five countries.
• p loves the durian bear!
• rick steves is a pretty good guide.
  
• who wants to go to venice with me in the off-season?
  

the embargo on people pictures is now being lifted. enjoy! (collage courtesy of picasa)

outta here

p & b are in town as my first visitors, so we'll be traveling around france and italy for the next week or so. woo hoo! this is especially good timing because this weekend is the zurich street parade, "the largest house and techno parade in the world." we'll be escaping just before over a million crazies descend upon this usually tame city. yow!

charming, sexy ewan is irresistible

OH MY GOODNESS!!! at the end of a long series of misadventures, i actually got a ticket for guys & dolls on saturday and saw earnest ewan from the THIRD ROW! there were moments when he and his brilliant smile were no more than 15 feet away from me... aaaaaahhhhhhhh!

curry curry

swiss food is notoriously uninteresting, so i was excited to be called to london for a short work trip. i had the BEST bhengan masala ever on wednesday night. yum!!! i found a korean restaurant on the way to the indian place, so i'm going to get some db3 today! hooray for london!

but there's some sad news too. i just found out that my great love ewan mcgregor is playing in guys and dolls right now in london! but they're sold out for the rest of my stay -- alas!!!

germany, swiss national day, and message from mom

we had a 3-day weekend last weekend so i braved the 8-hour (each way) train journey to osnabrück, germany to visit j. he was the consummate host! except that he forgot that you're supposed to let your guests beat you in chess. it was nice to hang out with a "local" (my zurich life is full of temporary ex-pats), and i enjoyed seeing j in his native habitat. i realized that my german hasn't improved at all in the last month. also, i discovered that i like radler (beer + sprite), though i still drink it at the same rate as regular beer -- last estimated to be one every five hours.

got back monday night in time for a nice swiss national day bbq on a roof. we saw lots of little fireworks shows from a distance and it reminded me of july 4 from our roof at home. i tried quorn for the first time -- not bad!

and to preclude further comments from bored fans, i will end with a quote from a birthday email from my mom (with age obscured to preserve the illusion of youth):

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I can't believe you are already XX!!! It's time to look around seriously for you know WHO."

laundry day

last friday, after passing my 3-week anniversary here, i decided it was time to attack the laundry problem. (yes, i have a LOT of underwear -- i wasn't even running out.) downstairs i went with my newly bought detergent and big blue laundry bag. there were a few german-french-italian instructions on an open flap at the bottom of the washing machine, so i tried understanding them, loaded the machine, pushed some buttons, and let it start. did i say open flap? all of a sudden, the machine was barfing large quantities of water out the front. this didn't seem quite right, but i wasn't sure, since there was a drain in the room where the water was properly headed, so it could have been some weird swiss thing. i was worried, though, and thought maybe i shouldn't have put ALL my essentials in that first load. after a few minutes, the machine gave an error code that indicated (surprise): no water. i tried again, this time attempting to close the flap. however, right behind the flap was a large open pipe, so when the spewing began again, the flap was no help in holding back the deluge. i looked around helplessly. conveniently, the instruction manuals (three versions of each) for the washer and dryer were in the room. i found the french one since i had the best chance of understanding it, and saw some pictures of a removable part that plugged the offending pipe. of course, the plug thing was sitting just to the side of the machine, right in front of me where i was sure to not see it... i screwed it in place, started the thing up again, and heard the satisfying sound of water collecting in a basin. success at last!

the gentle downhill slope

it's official!

i love this place

most things are closed on sundays, so it's the perfect time to go hiking! just like the last time i went hiking, every time i turned a corner, i found the scenery so beautiful that i had to take a picture. then at home, i realized i had a million pictures of green countryside, cute farmhouses, blue lakes, dramatically cloudy sky, and this time, snow-capped alps in the distance. the photos are almost boring in their similarity, but when living through it, every turn broke my heart again with its beauty.

milan!

i was thinking of making my first trip out of the country a visit to my long-lost beer-brewing cousins in belgium, but the train planning proved too difficult for this novice, so i opted for the easy direct line to milan instead. even though the day involved waking up at 5 and getting home at midnight, i had an incredible time!

i emerged from the subway stop in one of the main plazas at the same time as a loud american guy. as soon as he came out onto the square, he started shouting, "oh my goodness, LOOK at this place!" and generally being loud and flailing his arms. i was embarrassed for him, but inside i was screaming the same thing. wow!

il duomo is the most intricate cathedral i've seen -- i guess that's what they mean by gothic. it was a little much for me, but the scale of it is amazing. i walked through the glass-roofed galleria, passed by the la scala opera house, then a stroll through the ritzy fashion district. i thought i wasn't a museum type of tourist, but i must be changing. (g, will you ever travel with me again?) i spent a couple hours at the pinacoteca di brera and emerged with a few favorites from the afternoon. then i walked over to the castello sforzesco and the big park behind it. then on to the church where leonardo's "last supper" is housed. apparently you have to reserve way in advance to get in to see it, so i just looked around the church proper and snapped a picture of the entrance to the last supper area. after that, i had just enough time to get slightly lost on the way back to the train station and hopped on the last train to zurich. whew!

overall, the city is grungier than zurich. people kept telling me before i came here that switzerland is so clean, but since it's all i've known so far, clean is normal to me. italy? not so clean. i took my bathroom break at the four seasons hotel while i was hanging with the fashionistas -- that was clean!

language-wise, even though i had my canzoni going full-time on the ipod to get my brain in gear for italian, i didn't have a chance to drop any lines like "the gently blowing breeze is changing my destiny tonight." i did manage to successfully order a couple gelati though.

it was so much fun!

i was blonde too

i forgot to mention a story from last saturday. in the cab from one club to the next, my slightly inebriated companions got into a conversation about how they were all really blonde when they were kids. (they're mostly in the darker blonde / light brown hair camp now.) comments such as "i was a blonde angel" and "i was really, really blonde" abounded. i was thoroughly amused by how the demographic of people i hang out with has changed so dramatically in just a couple weeks...

lakeside

when i found out s was going to the zurich office a long time ago, i was so jealous and just kept picturing him strolling around the lake. even more than yodeling through the alps, it's my mental image of switzerland. i was a little bummed that i didn't get a chance to escape the city this weekend, but i did walk all over town, visiting a bunch of parks on both sides of the lake. it was hot and humid, and the whole city was out sunning and swimming. and ironman switzerland was going on! those people are amazing. i spent a good amount of time just admiring them! p called me on my new cell phone and it was my first contact with home since i got here. sniff sniff.

my lungs! my lungs!

did i say i was coming out of retirement? jazz last week was pretty nice, but this saturday i found myself at a techno club, and although i felt like i was "experiencing europe," it wasn't really me. we didn't stay there too long, instead making our way over to a place that sw calls a hellhole... as you can see, it was a great night out! and although the people i was with were nice and i'm getting to know them better, boy do they smoke a lot. yup, europe.

snickers on pluto

i did my first hike yesterday! started a short tram ride from my house, climbed up a bazillion stairs to the top of uetliberg, then started down a path called "Planetenweg": the solar system at a 1:1,000,000,000 scale.

first, the sun, followed by mercury just a short distance away. looking at the second picture, you can see the sun in the back left and the stone marking mercury in the foreground. mercury was about the size of a bb. although i passed venus, earth/moon, mars, and ceres (what?) pretty quickly, i knew it would be a while before i got to the end so i decided that i'd take a break and eat my snickers bar when i got to pluto. well, despite the lessons imparted to me by dr. ω about the unexpected scale of things, my poor snickers bar got increasingly warmer in my pocket as it took me -- walking at a brisk pace on an easy path and stopping only to snap pictures of the planet markers -- a full HOUR AND A HALF to get pluto! yow!

of course, it was all gorgeous and i loved every minute of it.

heeding my lesson from the night before, i ate a nutritious dinner (including multivitamin) and slept a solid 15.5 hours! whew, i'm back to normal!

hungrybee

you may be wondering why this suissebee is posting at 7 am on a sunday! i thought i woke up early yesterday (6:30), but today i was up at 3 am!!! this is VERY unusual. after all, it's been said that i should be on the show "man versus beast" to see who could hibernate longer: me or a bear...

i think i'm over my jet lag, so my only guess is that i was too hungry to sleep. my stomach was bothering me last night so i skipped dinner (and have generally been eating poorly -- the hpb is temporarily on leave). i think all this dairy is starting to get to me, and i ran out of lactaid yesterday. (side note: this is worrying me quite a bit. i think the shipping people lumped my box of lactaid pills in with the contraband vitamins they removed from my boxes... so now what? somebody better visit me soon!) anyway, these swiss people sure like their alpine milk products. i don't have any food at home so i came to work to eat breakfast. and what did i just eat? cereal with whole milk, yogurt, and an ice cream bar! if i never post to this blog again, you'll know what happened to me...

parking in bern

i got up insanely early on saturday so i walked around zurich before meeting up with my fellow daytrippers at noon. alas, i confirmed that outrageously-cheap-in-the-states h&m is about-normally-priced in switzerland. finally got some francs! then spent a good 45 minutes exploring every aisle of a grocery store. my family beer does not seem to have penetrated mainstream zurich yet; i'll have to start pushing it with the locals. and i was disappointed in not finding my favorite kind of milka in the chocolate aisle. where will i get my BUTTERKEKS! BUTTERKEKS! ?

so anyway, four of us drove to bern, the capital. we had absolutely no plans so most of our time was spent aimlessly walking around, getting food, then getting drinks. not the most exciting trip, but there were a few redeeming factors. it's a medieval city, so it's very cute. fast river, unique city layout. and the parking lots are very safe:

the other funny thing about the parking lot in bern was that there were all these spaces marked "reserved for women". our german driver (female) claims that these spaces are wider than normal. take that as you will.

we took the scenic route home via thun, interlaken, and luzern. translation: we drove through a lot of incredible lake and mountain scenery. wow! can't wait to spend some quality time with the alps.

time for some ice cream

i'm having fun! met a bunch of people last night from all over, including my first sb! haha. we went to see war of the worlds. i wasn't really paying attention because i was trying to read the double (german & french) subtitles the whole time. and i was introduced to a truly bizarre swiss custom: they abruptly stop movies in the middle -- sometimes even mid-sentence, i hear -- and you see a little commercial for ice cream, followed by a 10 minute intermission! apparently, this is truly tragic when the movie is good. but it seems to work -- of the four of us, two people got ice cream!

it was a fun night full of firsts. first tram ride, first time down the city's main street, first time seeing the river and the lake, first time walking around the city at night, first time ordering at a restaurant, first time going out (bar then jazz club),... this bee is coming out of retirement!

i'm new here

a few things have happened since last night that have been reminding me that i'm still new here.

1. since i'm still franc-less (recall euro blunder), and didn't manage to remedy that yesterday, i was driven to taking a roll of toilet paper from the office bathroom (since i'm running low at the apt). my laptop bag was quite poofy as i left last night.
2. i couldn't find my way out of the building yesterday. this is not a large building.
3. i discovered, to both great delight and dismay, that i can indeed take a hands-free shower. that's right, the attachment thing pivots downward. okay, you can stop laughing at me now.
4. once again because i'm franc-less, i need to borrow money from a coworker for dinner/movie tonight. sadly, not much has changed from my mv days.

that's right, i'm hanging out with my coworkers outside of work! so i guess some things are changing. so i need to run now. but not before leaving you with a picture of a cuuuuute dog that came to work today. she was SO well-behaved all day, until we left her unattended with the leftover cold cuts from tgif...

smells like europe

i miss you guys already!

i stopped in london on my way over, which was fitting because it was my spring london visit (+ lunch with g) that got me started on this whole zurich thing. i was watching the news with a huge crowd of people when they announced that london would be hosting the 2012 olympics. cheers and applause all around! i cried a little. everyone was so happy... and today it's so sad.

i got into zurich and found my apartment all right, even though i was a dork and got euros instead of swiss francs before leaving. (too tired!) good thing the taxi driver didn't mind, with a generous exchange rate. the apartment is all blue and green and turquoise, with a hint of that artificial fruity smell that reminds me of europe -- something in their soaps and detergents. i'm not sure i'm going to like this living alone thing. what if there are silverfish???

i unpacked just the essentials. (can you spot the two familiar friends on my bed?) where are my boxes? i need my hangers. the shipping people busted me for trying to send vitamins and a swiss army knife. oops! the fact that my boxes aren't here yet makes me feel justified in bringing so much in my luggage. too bad the "north face" bag couldn't make it to europe before dying. that was worth it just for the laughs.

i had an hour of daylight left so i walked around randomly / got lost a little. passed some tourist destinations without realizing it. my ears are starting to recognize swiss german. i hope i can pick some up in addition to german german. at night, i discovered that my shower is either made for a giant or is only meant for handheld use. it really could be either. on my first day at work, i confirmed that it is indeed an office (mostly) full of tall white men! from all over europe, and they all speak way more languages than i do! i love it. one of the snack rooms is all chocolate; not a snack room like in mv, but i think i'll live.