FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What the heck is going on here?

This is Mike and Hannah's travel blog. Here, we recount our adventures as Americans living abroad in Switzerland. Updates to this blog will occur as noteworthy (for us, anyway) things happen and as time allows.

Who are you, again?

Mike and Hannah are married yuppies from Albany, California. Mike works as a strategy consultant to companies making healthcare products and Hannah is a food and beverage publicist. We are affable folk who make great cocktail party guests.

When did all this happen?

In December 2019, Mike and Hannah left their home in Albany, California to live abroad in Zurich, Switzerland. We are scheduled to stay here for about a year.

What exactly makes you a good fit for Switzerland?

We're rather neat for Americans, but probably insufficiently so for the Swiss. We know a handful of German phrases; we're particularly good at, "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" We like chocolate, especially Mike.

My God. Who in the world thought this was a good idea?

Mike's employer asked if he would be willing to take a position working in their Zug, Switzerland (outside of Zurich) office. We jumped at the opportunity.

Italy

Dear Reader: We visited Italy twice in two weeks in November 2021. This blog has been sitting in my drafts folder since then. I am publishing it now because my family will shortly be arriving in Rome and I have little confidence that they will manage this trip successfully without my guidance. Without further ado: -------- Our first trip was a weekend jaunt to Milan and our second trip was a weeklong sojourn to Rome during the week of Thanksgiving. Over the course of our several travels, we've developed a sociological theory: the triangle of rules. We believe that rules can roughly be arrayed in a triangle, with the points being actual rules, aspirational rules, and inscrutable rules. Societies can be positioned in the triangle based on the extent to which certain types of rules dominate the social contract. Actual rules are written rules with prescribed penalties that are respected and enforced. In Switzerland, there are many of these: trash may only be disposed of in specially m...

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...

Cairngorms

Our next stop in Scotland was the large national park called the Cairngorms that stretches across a broad swath of the eastern and southern highlands. The Cairngorms have stunning hills, mountains, forests, and lochs. The park is dotted with adorable Scottish towns like Dunkeld and Braemar and crisscrossed with windy roads that meander through the glens, over the hills, and between the mountains. Roads in the UK Speaking of windy roads. I've commented on Britain's questionable highway engineering and planning before (see here ). Seeing as the situation hasn't improved materially since our last visit to the UK, I feel obligated to comment on it again, albeit with some new thoughts. The roads in the UK are terrible. In particular, the roads in these remote parts of the country are incredibly narrow and not always well maintained: They are riddled with potholes, a key concern for Hannah who was convinced that they would puncture our tires. Hannah kept our drives through the ...

The Neutral Zone

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