City of Mozart, No Longer Prized for Salt

Ah, Salzburg! Where the sun was shining and the air was... bitterly cold and dry. There was snow on the ground with no inclination to melt; as such, all the feet passing over it at the outdoor Christmas Market had turned it to the color and texture of sand. Despite the temperature and the fact that you can see everything of interest there within 2 days, I really liked Salzburg.

The best view of the city came from high atop the Hohensalzburg Fortress's viewing platform, where I got a great 360 view of the whole city, thanks to the audio tour.



Salzburg also held some of my favorite cathedrals I've seen to date, with the detailed, pleasantly-colored ceilings of the Dom (Dome) and St. Peter's putting them into my top 2, in that order, and Franziskaner not working it's way into my favorites but still providing a huge, impressive (though somewhat gaudy and vaguely cultish) golden altar centerpiece... thing.

The whole town is packed with history, mainly regarding Mozart, which means lots of classical music concerts and impromptu street musicians. The royal Residenz, where Mozart gave many concerts in his all-too-short career, hosts some really amazing woodwork on it's floors; hundreds of years old and still looking great, and so detailed! (Stupidly, I didn't take any pictures of the really cool star artwork on the floors, though that might have been due to the museum workers constantly breathing down my neck.)
But really, the main reason to go to Austria is to eat excellent pastries. My new favorite is called Creme Schnitt, which is Austrian for "vanilla layer cake with sugary glaze on top that suits madam just fine." In addition to all kinds of cakes and strudels, Salzburg is known for a strange creation called Mozart Kuglen, or Mozart balls, which are chocolate-covered balls of marzipan (possibly with some pistachio added in). I lucked out in that both my Creme Schnitt and Mozart Kugeln came from Fuerst Cafe, which is supposedly one of the best in Salzburg. However, after just 2 days of exposure to all the delicious sweets, it took another 2 days to be able to touch chocolate again. Just in time for Christmas, thankfully.

2 Things

Firstly, snow! And lots of it!

Over the past 2 or 3 weeks, there have been a handful of days in which it snowed. The first big snow we got was a couple inches and actually messed up the bus and train schedules (the bus schedules royally, and the trains only a smidge). Earlier this week we just got a dusting, though definitely enough to close schools in Chattanooga. Last night it snowed a lot more, though, so we're back up to a few inches, with temperatures well-below freezing to keep it around a bit.

Secondly, cooking! Super-sweet stuff from scratch!

I wanted to expose the European heathens to a traditional batch of homemade Christmas candy, including peanut butter fudge, chocolate-dipped pretzels, and divinity. However, if you know anything about candy making, you'll realize this list holds a serious problem for me: about half of the ingredients for these candies simply don't exist in Europe.

So in addition to the final products, which remain to be seen, I've already gone about making some of the basic ingredients, namely, peanut butter, "corn syrup" (or super-saturated sugar syrup), and marshmallow creme. It sounds like a lot of work, but really I'm the winner in this situation, because the marshmallow creme is fantastic.

Sennentuntschi

Last night I saw the movie Sennentuntschi, and then I didn't want to fall asleep. There is talk of it being released in an English subtitled version, possibly under the name "Killer Doll" or "Thank God There Are Subtitles Because this Movie is Entirely in Swiss German." I, of course, was not so fortunate to have subtitles, but knowing a little German helped immensely, though I had to have a few gaps explained to me after the movie.

This movie is supposedly Switzerland's first real entry onto the horror movie scene, but what it really is is messed up, and some of the imagery near the end is particularly creepy, burning itself into your brain. As the movie focuses on some killings that take place in a nice little village in the Alps, many Swiss were worried that tourism would suffer after the movie came out, but I doubt the movie will be that popular worldwide.

As for the movie theater experience itself, it was fairly standard, with plenty of overpriced popcorn and a small, cozy theater. Americans, take note: if you ever find yourself attending a movie in Switzerland, you have an assigned seat, theatre-style, none of this "pick a seat, willy-nilly" nonsense.

Before going to the movie, I got to see a little bit of Zurich's Christmas market (the third of it that's inside the train station, because it was really freaking cold). There are tons of little stands there selling everything from hats and candles to spiced wine and sausages. Also, there's a pretty tree covered in Swarovski crystal decorations. Yes, every one of those little dots hanging from the tree is a Swarovski.

The Ugliest Hilton in the World

... lies in Basel, Switzerland.

Getting to Basel (or Bal / Baal, as the French Swiss call it) is not a particularly scenic trip, unless you like craptastic views of industrial towns, quarries, and nuclear power plant towers. Once I arrived in Basel... things still didn't look much better; the sunshine and "warm" weather I'd been expecting had failed to materialize, and my day in the city was grey, cold, and damp. But once you manage to get past all that, Basel actually has a few cool offerings.

Most important, there is this little creperie tucked away off a main road in the Old Town area. It's a little hole-in-the-wall type of place, but Swiss style, meaning it has lots of cute, cozy seating inside, eclectic decorations on the walls, and paper plates to serve their very delicious crepes.

Post-crepe, it's easy to stumble upon the Rathaus (city hall), which happens to be very red and covered with murals and golden statues, and the Muenster church, both within the Old Town section.


If you're lucky, not only will the Muenster provide you with a break from the grossness of Basel, but it will also have organs playing and choirs singing in some of the little chapels as you stroll through and imagine you're a monk. (That's what you're supposed to do when you walk through churches and cathedrals, right?)

Couple these sites with two museums (Cartoon & Comics Museum and the Tinguely Museum, which was crazy and awesome and very bizarre all in one) and I filled a whole day there, with no time left to cross between the borders of Switzerland, France, and Germany that meet on the northern section of the Rhein river. Overall a nice trip, but Basel isn't winning any beauty contests in my book.

Of Castles and B.B. Kings

Two weekends ago, as I was in the grip of the European Tonsillitis of Doom, I took the time to go infect other locations in Switzerland, namely, Luzern. Normally I would be all too happy to nurse a sore throat by lying in bed with some soup all Saturday long, but this particular weekend was special. It was the start of the highly-respected Luzern Blues Festival, and the entrance to the first night's show was free. When you combine those two phrases ("blues music" and "FREE!!!!!"), there's no keeping me away.

So Simon and I took the train to Kussnacht and hiked 3 or 4 hours along the lake to Luzern. Kussnacht to me embodies all the elements of what makes a town Swiss: a lake, mountains, rolling green hills dotted by a few houses, a bus station, and of course, happy Swiss cows.


Along the way was a castle with a vineyard, rather closed for the season but still impressive to look at.

Once in Luzern, we met up with friends for Thai food (cheap by Swiss standards at merely $20 an entree) and headed to the show at the Schweizerhof hotel. The show ended up being far from free once you included the cost of beverages from the bar, but the venue was lovely, and while the music wasn't B.B. King (or Kim Massie, for that matter), it was a good show with an actual blues band imported straight from the U.S. Though I'm not sure what they were thinking when they played that polka..

Becoming "Culturally Aware"

How many times have you used the phrase, "I'm hungry enough to eat a horse"? Well, this week in the IBM ZRL cafeteria, you had that chance. On the menu was horse, or Pferdesteak. While a few members of my group were quite pleased with their equine lunch (served with a side of fries), others found the idea less than appealing; this polarization wasn't confined to specific countries, with people from different places and backgrounds chiming in for different sides. Even among the Swiss IBMers there were different attitudes towards eating horse.

While I personally find the idea of eating Secretariat rather horrendous, I also acknowledge that part of my revulsion is based on American cultural taboo that differentiates a foal from lamb or veal. The whole situation made me think back to a different lunchtime discussion about being "culturally aware," a term IBM had coined in its sensitivity training but that was jokingly turned around to mean that if you find something offensive or unlikeable, you must not be "culturally aware" enough.

Then I reflected on things I've found surprising or unlikeable while in Switzerland. A surprising thing is that Swiss friends kiss on the cheeks when meeting or leaving one another. Not to be outdone by the French, they take it to the extreme, with 3 alternating-cheek kisses. This fact wasn't particularly unlikeable, merely very surprising to a "hugs-only" American. Other surprises include blatant nudity in the evening papers and on television, which in the US would be covered by a black censor bar or just banned entirely.

Then there is the less desirable eating of foals, and funnily enough, a matter related to swing dancing. Apparently in Switzerland, it's expected that one dances at least 2 dances in a row with a single partner before moving on. Bailing out after the first dance generally implies that the dance was just terrible. For so many reasons, I dislike this unwritten requirement, though I'm at least aware of its existence now.

So I guess I will remain blissfully "culturally unaware" about things like horse meat and "required-dances" swing dancing, but if that's what bothers me most about Switzerland, I'd say things are going pretty well. So how culturally aware are you? Would you eat a horse?

A Little Taste of Home

Prepare yourself for a shocking and controversial statement: Nutella is not a suitable substitute for peanut butter.

I know, I know, you might say, "Just because it's made with a different nut doesn't make it inferior. You're just a dirty anti-hazelnut American!" .. and any part of that may well be true. However, I'm not a Peanut-Supremacist; far from it, in fact. I openly embrace nut butters of all types, particularly of the almond-variety, and quite frankly, I didn't even think peanuts were all that great in the first place. But that doesn't change the fact that an entire jar of Nutella contains less protein than a single Snickers bar.

One need only take a look at the nutrition facts on a jar of Nutella to see that it is far from a real nut butter. The first ingredient is.. sugar. Followed by plant oil, cocoa, and finally hazelnuts. Don't get me wrong; I'm not being anti-Nutella here. On the contrary, I think this ingredient list qualifies it as a fabulous breakfast topping for toast. (Keep in mind that this is coming from a girl whose breakfast of choice is, unapologetically, an Eggo topped with chocolate chips.)

Needless to say, the lack of good nut butters in Zurich is somewhat of a death-blow to vegetarians. Sure, they have Barney's Best, which is apparently like the German version of Skippy, but I was hoping for something a little more fresh-ground and a little less sugar and oil-filled. So yeseterday, stuck at home sick, I decided to make some peanut butter from scratch. Turns out this process isn't so hard, especially if you have modern conveniences like nut crackers and food processors. Sadly, I possess neither, but it's still a pretty easy process.

So I went through the grueling process of shelling my pre-roasted peanuts until I could shell no more, which was disappointingly short. Then I used a crappy hand-blender (that only works during the half of the time it's not sparking) to grind and mix them, to delicious though poorly-photographing results. (Seriously, the pictures of it on my phone just kinda look like throw-up, so I'm not gonna post them.) With a spoonful of honey mixed in, this peanut butter might just be my food of choice for the next few days straight.

Not Mad, Just Disappointed. And Maybe a Little Mad.

Disregard everything I've said about the trains running on time.

Okay, maybe not everything... maybe not even most of it. But when it comes to morning buses, don't give yourself a mere 5-minute connection time to make your train from the bus. Twice this week my bus has just refused to show up, or possibly showed up at the time the next one was supposed to come. In any case, it starts the morning off badly for me.

My first late bus incident got me to the local train station about 3 minutes after my train left, which meant I needed to find a different route. I ended up in the Hauptbahnhof (Zurich main station) and had to walk 10 minutes across the entire length of the station to make my next connection. That train's arrival into Rueschklion doesn't coincide with the bus that goes up to IBM, so I walked up the hill that morning.

Today when my bus didn't show, I went back inside and waited for [one bus eariler than] the next one that would put me on the proper train. Unfortunately, all the free papers get cleaned out of the trains before the time I was on it today, so my commute was sans reading material.

Just fantastic, Zurich. Anymore behvior like this, and you might just put your buses on par with AC Transit. (Okay, that's a little harsh. But seriously, stop it.)

Hello, Sunshine!

The sun decided to make a brief-yet-appreciated appearance Monday morning after three days of Vitamin-D-less grey. The free (read: trashy) papers report daily on the hours of sunshine expected in different regions of the country, and over the weekend it was "0-2 hours" EVERYWHERE in Switzerland, even my beloved Bern. To be fair, Switzerland's a pretty small place, so it's sort of like saying that all of North Carolina is cloudy. Apparently I can expect a lot more of the same over the next few months. No more Berkeley-style "grey in the morning, sun in the afternoon"; it's Zurich-style "grey all the time," even in my office down south in Rueschlikon. Today is another exception; however, the temperature is just above freezing, so the bright sun just confuses me.



On the up-side, it's already begun to snow in the higher altitudes, and with temperatures already dropping below freezing this week, I'm hoping for a pre-Halloween snow! For some reason it seems like IBM still has the A/C running sometimes, and sometimes one of my officemates opens the window for a while, but no worries: I can keep my feet warm on my laptop's power brick. (Believe it or not, having a different three-prong plug design for every European country doesn't actually improve the electronic's power consumption. Shocking, I know.)

But due to the turn-for-the-crappy of the weather, I've started taking the bus up the hill to IBM from the Rueschlikon train station some mornings, especially on days like today when I've been duped by the sunshine into dressing for warm autumn weather. The bus stop sports a bright, colorful glass waiting area, and today's sunshine really brings out the best in it.

Fitting In And Standing Out

There are a lot of things you have to get used to when you first show up in Switzerland. First, expect to hear a variety of languages spoken around you. Second, realize that most of these languages you thought you were hearing are just heavily-accented German or English. Third, don't be too shocked when the trains and buses arrive on time. Fourth, be prepared to see a lot of cows within the city limits, each with its own little bell around its neck. Fifth, avoid eating out too much because you'll be very disappointed with the quality of food for the price you paid.

I'm adjusting to Swiss life fairly easily in many ways. I have a monthly train pass and a Swiss bank account (current balance: zero Swiss Francs), and I've bought more bread and cheese in the past 3 weeks than I had in 6 months in the States. Unlike some other trips I've taken, I definitely look like I could be a native Swiss person, in both appearance and dress.

Unfortunately, this false impression often initially leads people to speak Swiss German to me, which immediately gives me away. Not being able to speak the language here is a big hindrance for me, and while I can get by with English in most places, it would be nice to go to the supermarket and not be scared that the cashier will stray from the typical checkout discussion pattern. If you don't want me to understand spoken German, you need only speak at a normal-to-fast speed or toss in some big words.

With that said, I can read and understand simple German fairly well, and I get to work on my reading skills with the 2 free daily papers that get distributed on the trains. Despite all the practice, I've still managed a humorous screw-up: instead of using dish soap to wash my first set of dishes (by hand, of course), I accidentally used polish. Oh yeah, and they weren't my dishes, they were Simon's dishes.

It actually says that it's for the "care and cleaning of dishes," so can you really blame me? Other than the fact that it was clearly manufactured in, say, the 1970s. I'm just hoping the chemicals in it didn't become toxic after breaking down thirty years later...

Of course, some things are just easy to understand, especially when accompanied by visual clues such as the "Anarchy A" symbol. ("Against the Fuzz and Prisons") Thank heavens these little sprayers used High German for their graffiti.

In Memoriam...

I received the call Monday night that my grandma had died. While her health has been up and down for nearly the past decade, and even more so in the past 8 months, her death was very sudden and unexpected, caused by a sudden onset of problems nobody could have foreseen. It's gonna take a while to sink in.

She was the Keys family matriarch, and her death marks the end of an era, as well as the start of many changes. There won't be a funeral or memorial service for her, so here's my little offering of memorial for Barbara Keys, Player of Card Games, Writer of Letters, Baker of the World's Best Cherry Pies, and the strongest-willed woman I know.

I found this flower on the ground on my walk home from work Monday, freshly cut from someone's garden. I hope she would have liked it.

IBM: Day Zero

Why Day Zero and not Day One, you might ask? Well, buildings in Europe apparently follow the same numbering scheme used by many computer programming languages, in that the first element is always numbered zero. So the ground floor becomes the zero-eth floor, the next floor is the first floor, and so on.

I started at IBM Research Zurich today. My commute takes just under an hour each way, which is kind of a pain, though not too terrible in that it's via the trains. While one might think that a long commute by train is a God-awful way to start a morning, one might change their mind in Switzerland, where by the magic of the Swiss, the trains just aren't loud, even in the smoke-filled main train station, the Hauptbahnhof.


After arriving, I learned that my would-be manager has moved to China, and my new manager is currently out of town. So I met with three other members of my group (none of whom are Swiss) to discuss my upcoming project. More details on that as it opens up.


Apparently in Switzerland (and all of Europe, I'm told), it's a law that every office must have windows, or for jobs in which windows are undesirable (think dark room work, meat freezers, etc.), workers must be given access to windows or outdoors during the day. What that means for me is that I get a desk in a big office (once populated by 10 grad students, now by merely 5) with an entire wall of windows. The view is nothing spectacular, but it sure beats no window at all.

Interesting Tidbits in der Schweiz

This blog started off as a place for me to post paper commentaries for a computer networking course at Berkeley, but I'm commandeering it for my travel journal. I won't be attempting to write something everyday, but I will be using it over the course of the next 6 months to post things of interest about projects I'm working on, as well as Switzerland, the people, and the language(s) around me.

After a grueling 18+ hour-long journey that took me through Atlanta, Chicago, and Sweden, I made it to Zurich. Fortunately, signs in the Zurich airport are written in English, as I understand approximately one word of Swiss German. Swiss German is quite different from high German, "standard" German. Now, high German is rarely described as being a fun or romantic language.. but I find it to be one of the cutest languages I've ever heard, namely because of the vocabulary. While English speakers are no strangers to compound words, they typically reserve compounds for more complicated concepts. Not the case in German.

Take "airplane," for example. A simple enough word for a simple enough concept, right? Not in German. "Airplane" can be reduced to even simpler concepts, translating as "Flugzeug," or flight-thing. Ice skating in German becomes sled-shoe-running, glove becomes a hand-shoe, and my personal favorite is the translation for crosswalk, which is zebra-stripes. Well, the newest addition to my list of Fun German Compounds is Kuschelwetter. I heard this word used on a German news channel for the weather forecast. Kuschelwetter describes wet, gray, rainy weather, and what does it translate to? Cuddle-weather. Whoever says Germans are cold and impersonal clearly never visited in autumn.

In Pursuit of Free Phone Calls

In my attempts to get free international calling, I'm bringing a wi-fi-only calling configuration to my Google Nexus One platform. Unfortunately, Google Voice isn't a VoIP service like Skype; it requires use of the cell network to move packets around. I say "unfortunately" because the process of making and taking calls becomes a lot more complicated. This whole process took me two consecutive evenings to complete, but the ultimate payout is worth it.

Here's what I'm using for my configuration, which is successfully taking inbound calls and making outbound ones:
Google Voice + SipDroid + sip2sip + ipKall + PBXes + Google Voice Callback

My loose translation of what goes on when I accept a call on my Nexus One:
IPKall and PBXes are both associated with the same SIP number, so when a call comes into the Google Voice number, it forwards to the IPKall number, which is tied into a SIP number. The SipDroid app uses its PBXes call path settings to accept calls to this SIP number. Essentially, it creates the connection from my phone to the other destination by going through the path "Google Voice->IPKall->SIP number, taken by SipDroid app using PBXes".

When I make a call on my Nexus One:
Google Voice Callback intercepts my call; it calls my number on one end of a connection (which goes through incoming process mentioned above) and then calls my intended destination with my Google Voice number showing up on the caller ID. I didn't initially understand why this app was necessary, but really it's about bridging the VoIP-cell gap. Without it, my cell phone wouldn't understand how to make use of its SIP+physical number setup to traverse the cell network used by Google Voice.

*** Update (Nov. 26, 2010): I've been using this setup now for the past 2 months to make calls from Switzerland to the US. Call quality is pretty good, but sometimes with a slight lag (not a noticeable problem if you and your other party both talk and process slowly). The quality of your WiFi connection can dramatically impact the quality of your calls; initially the wireless network I was using was having some hiccups, and calling was essentially unusable. On the up-side, text messaging works great even with a bad WiFi connection.


Slightly more detail on the different pieces of the configuration, if you care:

Google Voice: app on the phone that calls numbers with Google Voice number; when verifying the phone with Google voice, I use the physical IPKall phone number

SipDroid: app on the phone, "softphone" that ultimately accepts calls. Connected to PBXes setup

sip2sip: sip phone DID number provider (sip:2233#####@sip2sip.info) [sip2sip.info]. Acts as sort of the transitioning point from cell network to VoIP.

IPKall: real phone number that's associated with SIP number; Google Voice thinks this is the phone number that my (non-existent) carrier has provided me with.

PBXes: creates routing paths that tie a SIP number to actions [pbxes.org]; SipDroid uses PBXes settings to take incoming calls for a given SIP number

Google Voice Callback: connects my phone and my callee's phone by first calling me and then the other end