Skip to main content

Our street is famous!

Zurich, Switzerland - Switzerland is - let's say - vaguely famous for its cherry blossoms. Perhaps not so famous as Washington DC or Japan, but an honorable mention, at least. The blossoms here received notoriety in Luxury Travel magazine and the official Switzerland tourism website.

Zurich is not the hot spot for cherry blossom viewing in Switzerland - the countryside is more famous - but, it does have some lovely spots. Including the street we live on! H and I live on the corner of Aemtlerstrasse and Bertastrasse. Bertastrasse, and the general Idaplatz neighborhood are (vaguely) famous for cherry blossoms - they feature prominently on the Zurich tourism website (at least, on the page dedicated to cherry blossoms), and various travel blogs like The Neutral Zone (example, example). Bertastrasse is lined on both sides with lovely pink blossoms, which Hannah and I can peer out onto from our 4th story window. As you proceed north and west along Bertastrasse from here it is intersected first by Zurlindenstrasse and next by Zentralstrasse both of which have stunning white blossoms. 

Of course, this means our street attracts a large number of Instagrammers in the early spring. The best shots are taken from the middle of the street, where the two parallel rows of trees flanking either side of the street fade into the background and provide lovely symmetry and perspective. Unfortunately, cars and cyclists are also trying to use the street at the same time to, you know, go places. This can sometimes lead to chaotic scenes as our intrepid social media photographers dart out into the middle of the street, quickly strike a pose - typically, looking tranquil and serene as the peer upward at the blossoms through the dappled sunlight trickling through the trees - and then dart out of the way to avoid being run down by a truck zipping by.









Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The dishwasher has a fondue setting

Zug, Switzerland - I visited the office today to pack up my things in preparation for our impending departure from Switzerland. While I was there, I noticed a curious icon on the office's dishwasher. Further investigation revealed that the icon was for a fondue/raclette wash function. The icon is pictured below. The manufacturer, V-Zug Ltd. (subsidiary of Metall Zug Group, a Swiss industrial holding company), describes the fondue/raclette function this way: "The typical Swiss programme for the Swiss market from the Swiss manufacturer! Caquelons and raclette pans are cleaned to perfection without having to soak first. The programme can also be used as a 'super-intensive' run thanks to its active soaking phase. Pre-rinsing of burned-on soufflé or gratin dishes is a thing of the past." V-Zug apparently makes this feature available on several of its Adora models of dishwasher.  Upon discovering this, I of course rushed home to investigate my own apartment'...

Gobble, gobble.

Sebastopol, CA - Happy turkey day! H and I are in Sebastopol, getting in a final hurrah with our families. We are t minus seven days to departure. Chaos and confusion reign as we prepare to embark on our one-year European adventure. In one of our finer moments, Hannah - overwhelmed both by the enormity of the impending change to our lives and the amount of work still ahead of us - sat crying next to an open suitcase while Mike fumed over the inefficiency created by this moment of reflection and introspection. The complications of moving to a idiosyncratic European country, protective of its culture and economy are numerous, but here are a few highlights: There is no common language. Most Swiss speak German (~60%), but large numbers speak French, and Italian. Romansch is an official language spoken by <1%. Hannah and I are attempting to learn some standard German via duoLingo. This is slow going for three reasons: (1) we are busy/lazy, (2) the Germans appreciate linguistic co...

Fording the Fjords

We stayed one night in  Ålesund and for a few days in  Øye. These cities are fun for me at least partly because they use letters unique to the Danish-Norwegian alphabet, the 'a' with the circle on top and 'o' with the line through it (official letter names pending further review). Ålesund  is a port town of about 70,000 on the western side of Norway on the Atlantic coast.  We landed there  around 1100PM, but it looked more like 700 or 800pm, owing to the latitude (about 62 degrees north). Throughout our stay here, I've been very excited about the (nearly) never-ending daylight. The sun sets at about 1130PM rises about four hours later, but the hours between are marked more by a duskiness rather than a true darkness. We only stayed in  Ålesund overnight (if you want to call it "night") before departing the next morning for  Øye, which lies at the tip of a remote Fjord, the Norangsfjorden. Some locals told us that another nearby town, Urke, had less than...