Living, traveling, and hair dryers
I know everyone’s been trying to IM, mail, call, smoke signal, etc. and I’m sorry for not giving substantial feedback, but if I responded to every “How’s Zurich?” question I wouldn’t work for Google, I’d have a company called “Jess’ Personal Zurich Information Service” and it would involve answering that question 40 hours a week, every week, with perhaps two weeks off (I am an expat after all) for vacation.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love that you love living vicariously through me. If you didn’t, then I’d write this blog mostly for myself, which hell, I do anyway but now I’m giving you an excuse to look at it because it’s no longer about what I ate for breakfast in Mountain View, California. It’s now about what I ate for breakfast in Zurich, Switzerland. Yesterday that was a dry croissant at work, because we arrived too late at the cafeteria for breakfast. Maybe this weekend I’ll even get bold and try the bakery down the street from my temporary apartment. Everyone together now: oooooooo
Anyway, to answer your question, I’m only two days into Zurich, so it’s kind of like when someone serves you dinner and you’ve just put the fork in your mouth and haven’t even chewed yet, so all you really taste is burning, and the eager beaver chef demands, “So how is it? Hm hm hm hm hm huh?!?!” and you think, not only have I not even tasted it yet, I haven’t even smelled it, and even if I had, I can’t answer since I have food in my mouth! So yes, it’s kind of like that. I am physically in Zurich, but like a traveler who spends one week in every country, I haven’t lived Zurich yet.
And on that topic: traveling vs. living. Traveling is wonderful, but it isn’t living, although it would be awesome if I worked for National Geographic or something and traveled for a living, but since most of us including myself can’t or won’t do that, we just travel to various places and live in one place. I lived in Pittsburgh, PA for a while, and even though I truly lived there for a year and definitely wasn’t just visiting, there’s an element to living within the U.S. that’s the same everywhere you go in our fair country. The grocery store might be called Giant Eagle instead of Safeway, and there might be snow instead of rain, and people say “yinz” instead of “you guys,” but in the end you can still buy that gallon size shampoo and drive to work in the weather and for the most part, people speak some form of English, however butchered by our regional accents.
When you travel you stay in places like hotels, hostels, and B&Bs, where you don’t have to figure things out like what kind of trash goes in which garbage can and what the rules are for waiting in line for the bus or how you’re going to get halfway across town without a car or a cab or how to apply for a mobile phone so you don’t have to pay $2/min every time someone calls you. Today I had to figure out where to buy a hair dryer. This ostensibly simple procedure is magnificently complicated in Switzerland by the fact that the Swiss don’t seem to require home appliances of any sort; they either don’t use them or somehow already have them — perhaps they’re built into the house? They certainly aren’t built into the corporate housing my company’s rented for me. My take on it is that hair dryers are unglamorous requirements of everyday life, and advertising such things on giant billboards the way we do in the U.S. would be uncouth here, and so you are left to “know,” as the Swiss do, where to find everything you need to survive. I mostly hate Walmart but as I wandered around downtown Zurich looking for home appliances I thought, “What I wouldn’t do for that $6.95 rollback special on hair dryers…”
Hair dryers, in fact, can be found in central Zurich for no less than 50 Fr. (~USD $45), along with 70 Fr. hair straighteners and 100 Fr. toasters. I thought perhaps these were special Swiss made toasters but they’re all stamped “Made in China,” just like the toasters back home. Evidently when said toasters cross Swiss borders their value skyrockets just like crack when it crosses the U.S. border, except as far as I can tell the toast is just toast with no hoped for butter high.
But I digress. I don’t myself think that living is about common drudgery and traveling is about hedonistic carelessness, even if, when I drove across Canada, I really did whatever the hell I wanted, including driving 100 mph in a 100 kph zone and then pretending that I didn’t know the difference when I got pulled over. Bat eyelashes four times in quick succession. I really did that. But if you think that I think that living in a foreign country is about suffering, then might I direct your attention away from the fat bank Room & Board couches currently being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean from one of my living rooms to the other. More seriously, I think living in a place is about intimacy, familiarity, and love like the kind one has for one’s mother, part endearment, part humor, part sighing annoyance, and part sadness. When you live in a place you are sad to leave it, overjoyed to come back to it, alternately annoyed by its quirks and rules and amused by its distinctiveness and beauty.
Now that my corporate residence is complete with a hair dryer, I’ll post yesterday’s picture of it before I trashed it in Jess’ contemporary mystery decor style (e.g., Today’s mystery: where in this impassioned interior design could my house keys be?)
If you’re wondering where the rest of the apartment is, that’s virtually all of it. The kitchen (left side of the wall of the main room) and the bathroom (an actual separate room) are remarkably unremarkable. I will be spending this week and next looking for some place more acceptable for my very picky couches, who have slyly hinted to me that they never enjoyed sharing the living room with the dining table after all!
