I am in a Europe

Been meaning to post for a couple days .. of course I am teh lazy. So, quick highlights below

Wednesday
— Arrived safely in Zurich!
— Made it to the hotel w/o incident using trains.
— Hotel is in a cool location. Lots of shops/restaurants, two stops from work and two stops from the airport.
— Hotel elevator has a door that you open once the lift has arrived. So, it basically has an open side, where you can see the floors going by/touch the wall as you go up and down. Pretty neat, kinda freaky.
— Smoking room :-/ Think I am used to it now, though, don’t smell the smokey smell anymore.
— Found out that even after spending an inordinate amount of time Monday looking for boots, it was all for naught as they gave me two different sizes of shoe in the box >:-/ Hopefully they will take them back upon my return. I will be angry if that is not the case.
— So, I had to go boot shopping again. Found boots in a place where they didn’t speak English, eek! I feel like an ass being a dumb American everywhere. Later I realized I could/should have just spoken French to them. Silly me.
— Dinner with my teammates from the CT company - a lively Irish lady and a libertarian New Zealander. Both are “gun people” and “going to work on me”. As if I didn’t get enough of that in Texas, sheesh.

Thursday
— First day of work
— Youngish/Hip-ish co workers, everyone is pretty nice.
— Their building has coffee machines that grind the coffee when you push the coffee button - way cool.
— There is a smoking room right behind me. Made me kind of sick the first day since I was still a bit jet lagged and all.
— They smoke everywhere here. Inside smoking has yet to be banned, which is lame bc I hate having to shower all the time bc my hair smells like smoke.
— There is a caf on the top floor of their office building. Salad bar means that I can eat something, yay! Though, I found out the first day that what I thought was potato salad was indeed all cheese .. kinda weird to have a cheese salad, but whatevs!
— Went out with coworkers that night.
— Drinks are dang expensive! 15-20 francs for a cocktail, and that is about ‘medium priced’. The money conversion is mostly 1-1, 93 cents = 1 dollar.
— After dinner they took us to a club. It was amusing. Girls got in free and got a free drink token. Woo! sometimes being a girl rocks. Free drink was just a glass of champagne.
— They had a “Cape Cod” on their drink menu, so Peter would be vindicated. It was like 15 francs or something, so eff that shit!
— The club played pop songs that I continuously felt I almost recognized .. so it felt like copied American pop, it was weird. When they did play American songs, they were old .. like from when I was in high school old. I was confused.
— I felt old at this place .. and I’m sure I am the youngest of my coworkers here .. so, that was awkward.
— Helen (Irish lady) loves to dance, and was hilarious at it.

Friday
— Was the first one to breakfast, guess the other two were a little spent from the carousing from the night before.
— Finished up some java code for a piece of the project which was nice to have a finished thing at the end of the week. Plus I love teh codings.
— Got Indian food for dinner. Noms.

Saturday
— Somehow managed to stay up til 3 am on the ol’ internets the night before, so slept in until 2 pm :-/
— Alistair (my project lead from CT comp) and I met up with an Accarda coworker who showed us around old town Zurich.
— It was pretty dang cold, and I stupidly wore my Converse (because we were going to be walking a lot) and my feet FROZE.
— The co worker talked a lot .. and it was kind of awkward because there were probably lots of places I would have walked into had I been by myself, but alas, just some minor window shopping.
— I felt bad being so bored, but come on, I didn’t come to Zurich to talk about American politics.
— Zurich is old! There’s Roman stuff around! From like, 2000 years ago, which is kind of mind boggling.
— Saw two very cute kitties in a furniture shop.
— Had some pretty tasty Chinese food.
— Got back to the hotel area too late to go to the grocery store .. wanted to get chocolate and booze. :-/
— Spent the evening just chillin in my hotel room .. pretty lame, in my opinion, but I don’t really know where to go by myself …

Today
— Went back through some of the old town on my way to the kunsthaus (art museum).
— While I was standing in line to get a ticket this old guy passing through (the line formed through the middle of the lobby) gave me his ticket badge thing…
— I should have just gotten out of line and seen what kind of ticket it was (there are separate tickets for the exhibition and permanent collections) but I was silly and stood there, thinking I could ‘guess’ which it was and buy the other when I got to the counter (they just had letters on them that weren’t helpful..)
— Of course I guessed wrong … I was pretty annoyed, because I had planned to get a ‘combo’ ticket, but now I just wasted my money on the one that could have been ‘free’ ..
— Anyway, I somehow managed to wander into the permament collection w/o having my ticket checked (total accident! I saw people coming out of that room w the same button I had).
— Of course when I realized it, I hid my button, and tried to avoid the museum workers … felt like a minor criminal.
— I think one dude may have caught onto me somehow (maybe I was just paranoid) so I didn’t make it to one part of the contemporary stuff, but still got to see a good deal of it.
— All in all, a good time at the museum.
— Now I am back in the hotel. Writing this. IT IS TAKING SO LONG.
— Watching some Olympics kind of ..

Overall
— Pretty glad most places have menus in English. Don’t know any German vocab, which makes things hard.
— Hotel is two stops from the main station in the middle of Zurich, which is awesome.
— Still need to get some fancy truffles to nom.
— Still need to get some local wines to try. Things close pretty early, and EVERYTHING is closed on Sundays.


This got kind of long for ‘quick highlights’. I will try to take more pics and what not and post some of those soon, too.