Swiss Sunshine

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Zurich's Hauptbahnhof, or main train station, a Grand Central-like behemoth that has a river of sunshine jetting into its main pavillion. The sky here is almost criminally blue, matched only by the swan-laden Zurichsee. (aka Lake Zurich.) All that light is being put to good use, reflecting off of street after street of charming buildings. I've stuck to the old town of Munsters, cobblestoned streets, and shopping plazas today and I have yet to see a building that isnt lovely. I'm amused that many of the traffic islands and similar spots for urban greenery are simply planted with chunks of meadow. Good Swiss branding?

That graf was a lot harder to type than it would been because Swiss keyboards have switched the position of y and z. So I keep typing Yurich and skz. Blogger also appears to be country specific so all the buttons are in German. I'm relying on my memory to guess that Mitteilung veröffentlichen means "Publish Post Now", which makes me ponder how deeply divergent languages with common ancestors can get. There are a lot more comfortable English speakers here than were in Japan, and a lot more words I can figure out, but once again I feel a little enjoyably lost. Honestly given the absolut fluency of all the Swiss I've known in the US, I'm surprised my "Sprechenzie English" (phonetic spelling) line has already provoked three or or four apologetic Neins today.

I never knew that Marc Chagall worked in Stained glass, but I am now officially a fan. The only Swiss creation that I can complain about so far is the marvelously easy to use credit-card pay phone by the Zurichsee. The problem? The glass walls make it into a greenhouse beneath the Alpine torrent of photons, and I was drenched after a five minute conversation. But it was worth the thick vision of Spring.