Zurich - Brief Visit

Zurich - Boats Closed for Winter

And so I’m back in Zurich again, but just for two weeks.

I’d been warned that the weather had turned colder, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been and I was lucky that the day after I returned, it was bright blue sky. This time, coming back to my flat finally felt like home. After all the effort I’d put into getting curtains hung, sorting out my finances, buying extra furniture, arranging my internet access, etc, this time, there wasn’t really anything to do to the flat and I could settle right back in.

The flat itself was also surprisingly warm. My rental contract states that I have to leave the heating on even if I’m away, so I’d turned it all right down, but the flat was plenty warm enough. It’s sufficiently cold at night that I need to shut the windows, so I’m spared the noise of the planes now. I’m also using my duvet, but I’m sleeping pretty well.

There’s still quite a bit of admin that I wanted to get done and almost a week has gone and I haven’t made much progress. I sometimes feel that everything goes wrong for me much more often than for other people!

I’d applied for some credit cards with Swiss airlines so that I could build up some airmiles – and mostly, to take advantage of their 20,000 miles welcome bonus so that I could upgrade my flight to Miami in December (more about that later this year). The credit cards arrived, but my welcome miles haven’t been credited and my flights to and from Zurich to Hurghada also haven’t been credited, so something’s gone wrong there. Also, they require an MTAN (a code sent to your mobile phone) for you to login to their internet banking, but the MTAN is just not arriving to my phone for some reason. So one step forward (got the cards), and three steps back (need to get my flights credited, need to sort out the MTAN, need to get my welcome bonus miles).

Another thing that went wrong was my bike pump. I bought a new one when I was here last and took it back to me to Egypt, since I can’t seem to get my pump over there to work on my Flying Pigeon. I brought my hand-held pump with me back to Zurich to see if that would be OK for my Zurich bicycle. I pumped up my back tyre without too much problem, but when I did my front tyre, I couldn’t unscrew the pump from the valve afterwards. At the moment, the pump is still hanging from my front wheel as I just can’t remove it. I can only hope that if I try every day, it’ll gradually budge and I’ll get it off. I spent ages on the internet to see if anyone had a similar problem, but this seems to be fairly unique to me.

On the plane coming back to Zurich I wondered why I’d been so keen to come back to Switzerland so soon, but actually on entering my flat, everything suddenly felt good and the time too short. Time is always too short, wherever I am!