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