Böögg Burning

Yesterday I was in Zürich, visiting an old friend and joining the locals in their celebration of Spring’s arrival. It is called Sechseläuten and involves a parade of various guilds of the city, as can be seen in the pictures below.


The highpoint was however the burning of a snowman-like figure filled with explosives and placed on top a big pile of firewood. Supposedly a rapid explosion (less than 15 minutes) heralds a warm and long summer. It felt as if the entire city was on the move, luckily we managed to squeeze ourselves into a position where the Böögg at least partly was visible.




The Böögg burnt very well and exploded after 10 and a half minutes (thus giving me high hopes of warm and sunny weather). Maybe this was due to the 23-degree sunshine on this day or because this wasn’t the real Böögg, but a replacement. The original one was kidnapped.

Achtung: For those who like chronological order the coming posts will be confusing as I try to catch up with events since Easter.

Deutschverständnis

Now that I have been here a while you might wonder how my German is faring. I’d say I'm at the stage where, in order to understand 99%, I need people to speak at a moderate speed. Nonetheless I was surprised during a lecture about Swiss history and politics that I understood almost everything, even the jokes. Outside of lectures it is trickier. Swiss-German is so different that even native Germans who have been here for several years don’t understand it. Luckily most people in SG are happy to speak German-German (Hochdeutsch) when asked. In addition everything is written in Hochdeutsch, giving me ample opportunity to increase my vocabulary. The exceptions that prove this rule are the SMSs. These are, more often than not, in Swiss-German and to make them utterly unintelligible they follow different spelling rules depending on which part of Switzerland the sender is from. Speaking of words, here are, in an expression of my weird humor, my two new favorite words: Kartoffelstandort and Schwalbenkönig.

LG

Skiing

When I first arrived, the sun was so sunny and it was so warm that I thought Summer must have arrived with me. As a consequence I left my winter coat in the car heading home to Sweden. This was slightly optimistic. As my Swiss flat-mate said "April macht was er will" (trans. April [weather] does what it wants). After those Summer-y days I have experienced snow, a mix of rain and fog, more snow, more fog, more rain and today it has snowed most of the time.

This has had one major consequence. Skiing. When there is precipitation in SG (elevation 600 m) it is almost guaranteed that it is snowing at the alp tops. And since there is no sweeter combination than ski slopes covered with fresh snow and free of tourists (we are now in the post-season) I am one happy (and now slightly tanned) exchange student.

But besides hitting the slopes every weekend so far I have also done other things, like...after-ski. Local beer is good and the view is just terrific. It really does help me find the energy needed for my studies.

Last week also entailed an episode that gave me some deeper knowledge of the habits of my host country. At the university canteen I saw a bottle of the local brand fruit juice. I checked the label and it said something about blood orange. Since I was feeling sleepy I thought this might be just what I needed. I was right in my assumption that I would get a jolt from this drink but pretty much wrong about everything else. As I began to drink my newly purchased beverage I quickly discovered my mistake. I had bought Molke, which is not a fruit-based drink but one whose main ingredient is a bi-product of cheese making. Even though it is supposedly extremely healthy I will wait a long time before sipping that stuff again.

Of widerlüge!

Sunshine and a cloud

All signs point to an excellent time here. People are friendly and outgoing; courses seem cool and there is a gazillion fun things to do. I am worried I might get too carried away in my optimism.

I can confirm the impression that everything here is expensive, ridiculously so. The thing that best illustrates this is the tendency of many places to charge for the ketchup for the fries. On the plus side (or negative for my studies) beer and alcohol is marginally cheaper than at home.

Something that is harder to spin positively is the course selection system at UniSG. It is very complicated and it takes forever to check if two courses have a scheduling conflict. But the mere fact that this is my biggest problem here speaks volumes.

Introweek

In a simplified form I can say that everyday last week looked like this

08:30-12
German classes
13:30-16
Intro to Uni, SG or CH. Sometimes this took the form of lectures, other times it came in the guise of bureaucracy.
16:00-18
Nap (I actually needed it)
20:00-02
Meeting other exchange students for bowling, pub crawl or a city walk
08:00
get up and start all over

Climate Change

When I arrived in SG the sun was most welcoming, pushing the thermometer above 20 degrees centigrade. When I left Sweden it looked like this

To compare, here is a picture of a Swiss valley we drove through on our way to SG.