Zurich - Ballet

Inside Zurich's Beautiful Opera House

One of the best things about living in Zurich is that there are always plenty of things going on and I can get to see cultural events that aren’t really available in Hurghada (it’s a luxury item, after all). So, over the last week, I’ve managed to go to the ballet twice. It’s typical that there’s nothing for ages and then a whole raft of things happen at the same time.

The first one was Nederland Dans Theatre (NDT) – an old favorite of mine. It was in Oerlikon and I met Lena after work, when the weather was still beautiful, so we sat outside and had a curry beforehand at the nearby restaurant. A curry sitting outside in the evening sunshine followed by a ballet – life can’t get much better than that! Moreover, Lena had managed to get a half-price deal for the tickets.

It was a great performance as usual. Actually, it was NDT 2, the younger version of NDT; most of the pieces centred round human / love relationships in one way or another and at times, I thought, exuded sensuality. There was also some teasing of the audience, particularly at the end, where one dancer was even nude but carefully hidden, until the very end of the performance. It was lighthearted, modern, and yet classical. I came out of it with a reinforced feeling of how very lucky I am to be alive and what an amazing thing life, and people, can be.

The other ballet was equally astounding but a complete contrast. It was the premier of Faust with the Zurich Ballet and it took place in the opera house, so tickets were four times more expensive! By contrast to NDT 2, the tone for Faust was spooky and dark; the music perfectly created the tone for the starkly dramatic scenes that played out on the stage.

I’ve never studied Faust and I don’t even know it very well (the ballet was just part one of Faust), but I find it surprising that Goethe, who I think of as a well-educated academic himself, should portray the quest for knowledge as something that eventually leads to ruin (as a philosopher, the quest for knowledge was always regarded as good; although I remember feeling a certain admiration for Darwin when I heard that he was physically sick when he came up with the evolution of the species, but pursued that theory nevertheless because he thought it was the truth – which made me ask myself whether it is good to seek knowledge even if you think it’s evil, and I guess that’s where the Faust story starts to connect…).

Anyway, the ballet was perhaps one of the most dramatic I’ve ever seen. Somehow the background dancers in the scenes really added to the spookiness, I guess like something lurking in the dark that you can’t quite grasp.

So, two very different performances, inspiring very different reactions, but both were brilliant. I’m so lucky that I myself can live between two worlds!

Zurich - Spring at Last

Thun in Spring

Finally, I feel able to go out and do something rather than just stay in my flat or go swimming in the local pool. This weekend, the sun was shining and it must have been mid-to-high 20s in the sun. There was a special offer on to go from Thun to Beatenbucht by ship and then up to Beatenberg by funicular and then further up to the Niederhorn by cable car. It was a good excuse to go exploring.

However, when we got to Thun, bought our tickets, and tried to get on the ship, we were informed that the water was too low and we had to take a bus first a bit further up the lake and join the ship later. For a moment, we thought they'd sold us tickets for a boat trip that wasn't running!

This was the first day of the summer season for the boats and the funicular and, I guess because the weather was so good, the boat was pretty busy and there were three separate buses to take people to the ship. Once we were on board, the ship zig-zagged across the water giving you good views of the mountains on either side and the picturesque towns by the water (I had a little fantasy about living in the area!). We had a drink at Beatenbucht before getting the funicular, hoping that the crowds from the boat would disperse. It was a successful ploy as we subsequently had the funicular to ourselves.

I’m not so fond of heights, but the funicular was very solid and the ride was smooth, so I had no problems at all. We rose up between the hills covered with freshly-green trees on either side; below you could see the lake and the snow-capped mountains beyond. Seeing all this greenery, it seemed impossible to think that there could be any snow on this side of the lake.

We changed half-way through to the cable car that runs in groups of three up to the Niederhorn. Again, they were pretty solid constructions, so I didn’t feel scared by the height. Cows were grazing at a steep angle on the hillside, confirming another Swiss stereotype. All of a sudden, occasional pockets of snow appeared in dips in the ground, which were then replaced by a full blanket of snow as we approached the top.

There were many hang gliders out – at one point we saw about seven all gliding in close proximity to each other. I took many photographs of these, although sometimes they were gliding so high up, I couldn’t get both them in and the mountain. It’s not something I have any ambition to do!

I didn’t have the right shoes on for snow (I was wearing my summer clothes, while I had the opportunity), so I didn’t climb the path of rivulets and snow leading to the top. Nevertheless the birds and the hang gliders kept me well entertained. The restaurant seemed to have run out of most of its food, so we didn’t eat anything.

We made it back down to Beatenbucht just in time to get the last ship back to Thun. En route, a stream of of small one-man sailing boats crossed right in front of us; apparently it was a regatta. I’m sure they should have got permission to sail in the path of the big passenger ship (as indeed the driver indicated to them), but they didn’t seem at all bothered that they were sailing where they shouldn’t. On top of that, a few of the boats  looked like they were about to capsize as they tipped onto their edges as they sailed along. Still, it all made for good entertainment. A couple of people also passed beside our boat on stand-up paddles; some people were even bathing in the lake (Brrr! That's not for me).

Afterwards, we wandered round Thun. It was my first time here and the area is stunning with lakes and mountains – your stereotypical Switzerland. And in the sunshine it looked absolutely amazing. It was particularly good just now, because the mountains were still topped with snow, yet the lake was blue, the trees were blossoming, and the weather was hot enough for us to sit outside on the boat. It’s not often that you can get all those things coming together at the same time.

In parts, Thun reminded me of Rapperswil (the mountains, lake, and rooftops), in other parts, it looked like Basel (the old buildings), elsewhere it resembled Lucerne (the wooden bridges), and other streets could have been from Bern (the colonnaded pavements). It was like a mini-Switzerland all rolled into one! I imagine it would be a nice place to live, but the property looked quite expensive when we peered in the window of an estate agent.

We finished off with dinner by the waterside and I realised that, even after all these years, whenever I travel somewhere, my weekends in Switzerland still make me feel like I’m on holiday. It’s a lovely feeling.

Italy - Easter Holiday with Sheila

Sheila's Italian House

Finally, it’s getting spring-like here in Switzerland, but it’s been a long time coming. Over Easter, it still felt like winter to me and I’d arranged to visit Sheila who has just bought a house in Italy. Well, I guess she’s owned the house for two years now, but it still feels to me as if she’s only just got it.

I took the train down from Zurich because she’s out in the countryside of Abruzzo near a village called Palmoli. If I’d have taken a flight to Rome, I’d still have needed four hours on the train to get to Vasto (the closest place with a train station) and would also have had the hassle of getting from the airport to Rome station.

The ten-hour journey itself was smooth and fairly easy and made me realize that I must spend a weekend in Milan at some point (where I changed trains) because it’s so close and the train is good (I was traveling first class on the way down – special offer! – but even economy is fine).

I was picked up at Vasto by Craig (the English builder / handyman that Sheila has been using) in an old and bumpy car/landrover type thing (sorry, I don’t know my cars). It was night time so I didn’t get to see much other than experiencing the bumpy roads.

People say I was brave to move to Egypt, but I don’t think that’s nearly as brave as what Sheila did. She bought a house in Italy in the middle of the countryside that was not deemed habitable and it had no heating, no electricity, and no bathroom. I just bought a flat by the sea that was ready to move into and had English-speaking electricians and plumbers in house if anything went wrong. That wasn’t brave at all!

After a lot of people making promises and not doing anything, Sheila ended up having most of her work done by Craig, who probably overcharges but he at least gets the work done. If I’ve understood correctly – the Italian system just seemed weird to me – she was allocated a project manager by the commune (county), and he has also done quite a bit of the work.

Anyway, somehow, I’m not sure how she managed to do it, she’s turned one room into a bathroom, got electricity in the flat, and had an air conditioner (aka heater) installed. The latter was in place just before I arrived. She has a fireplace, so before I came, she’d been surviving by making fires, but apparently the chimney is too small and needs a flue so if it’s windy, she gets smoked out.

Even though the weather had suddenly turned for the better as I arrived, it was still really cold at night, so I have no idea how Sheila coped without the heating. She’d bought me a nice thick duvet, so even though I’d go to bed thinking I’d be too cold, I slept really well. My mother would have put that down to the country air!

I was also impressed at how many people she knew and how well she’d settled in. It’s a small community, so I think everyone likes to know what everyone else is doing. The big piece of gossip while I was there was that one of Sheila’s neighbours, who is often drunk, had driven into town and up onto the pavement and written off his car. No-one was hurt, but this was still high drama.

Her neighbours are basically farmers, so they often give her produce such as milk direct from the goat, olive oil from their own trees, home-grown vegetables, etc. It’s probably about 20 minutes walk to Palmoli which is the nearest village (but it has a castle) and there are allegedly buses every hour going to Vasto, but because it was Easter, these didn’t run while I was there.

It’s also a bit back in the dark ages – one of her neighbours can’t understand why, if he’s single, and she’s single, they shouldn’t (insert rude word here – he wasn’t subtle!). On the plus side, because it’s a close community, everyone helps everyone else, and she’s been invited to several parties, so it’s very sociable.

The countryside is beautiful and her house comes with quite a lot of land. I spent some time sowing some of her flower seeds, since I don’t get to do gardening very often and it was wonderful to spend some time out in the heart of nature. It wasn’t massively hot, although we did have some lovely days, which was enough for me to get badly sunburned on my face as I hadn’t realized just how sunny it actually was. Oops.

We looked round a large villa that was for sale (150k including a lot of land and enough facilities to be self-sufficient) but currently being rented out by some Dutch holiday makers just around the corner. It was beautiful. Sheila said that she knows someone else – I can’t remember what nationality, maybe also Dutch? – who had just bought a house in Palmoli itself for just 5k (because everyone knows what everyone else is doing). There are some real bargains to be had!

The whole experience put me in the mood for buying property again (which is always a bit fatal), so I’ve recently wasted a lot of time skimming through various property portals. I’ve always liked the idea of living the “good life”, although I suspect in reality I’d just want it in short bursts. However, I need to remember that my current aim is, and should really remain, to save and pay back my debts (current mortgage). But the temptation to ignore that just now is very strong…

Zurich - Review of Garmin Forerunner 735 XT for Swimming

Partial Snapshot of Garmin Report on a Day's Swim

Well, I’ve managed to have a few swims now using my new Garmin Forerunner 735 XT; it’s still early days and I’m not sure I really know how to use all the features yet.

Overall, I am really pleased with it. I’ve been complimented on its appearance twice (without people knowing it’s a swimming watch). I did try to upload a more traditional watch face for it but I haven’t quite fathomed out how to do it at this point.

It’s recording my laps well. There have been a few occasions where I’ve not started a new length obviously enough (you need to stretch your arms out as you kick off for the watch to understand that you’ve just turned round) and sometimes two lengths have been counted as only one. These mistakes are easy to spot, because when you look, you can see that you’ve taken twice as long as normal to swim one  length, so you just need to split that length into two.  Garmin doesn't have an editing facility, but I’ve since found a free program that does it for me (http://www.swimmingwatchtools.com/index), which I can highly recommend.

I’m now swimming about 2.5km/hour max compared to my previous 2.3 km/hour max and I’m hoping this is a function of me having improved over time and not anything due to Garmin measuring differently from Suunto! I think it is my improvement, because when it compares me to the general population, on the Garmin site I’m in the top 65% (I swim better than 35%), whereas on the Suunto site I was in the top 70% (better than 30%), so those stats seem comparable given my increase in speed. I don’t know yet whether the percentages go up in 1% or 5% increments; on the Suunto it was 10% increments, I think, so if it’s 5% on Garmn, that will be more motivating.

Although the Garmin records most of the things I want, I find the website a bit frustrating on some levels. It seems a bit arbitrary as to which metric it will use for which part of the site. To view progress, I have to go to reports and then select swimming. There, average pace for each undertaken swim is minutes it takes me to do 1km swimming. Since I usually swim 1250m, I’m not sure if it’s taking my average or my fastest or the first 1km. I’d rather it gave either average pace (mins:seconds) per 100m (which seems to be the standard swimming measure) or average km/hr. Even better, I’d prefer that you could choose. They have all of these metrics at their disposal, after all.

However, at least average pace allows you to see your progress over time (you can select over last week, 4 weeks, 6 months, 12 months) for all your swims. What’s more frustrating is that this is the sole metric you can use for all swims. For instance, it tells you your average number of strokes per length to measure progress, whereas average strokes per minute may make more sense as that applies to all swims. If you sometimes swim in 50m pools and sometimes in 25m pools, you’ll have more strokes per length for longer lengths and so you can’t compare your two swims. Average SWOLF has a similar problem because SWOLF, too, differs according to pool length.

In addition, the scale on the graph depicting your progress could be better; my progress will no doubt be slow, so it would be clearer and more motivating if the scale could make the differences more obvious. They are all just dots on the same line at the moment (you can see a little difference, but it doesn’t leap out at you).

The progress summary section simply provides total distance swum, average speed (km/hr in this instance), and total calories. I’d rather it told me how I’d done compared with the previous week/month (eg, you swum 2 sec faster per 100m this week as compared with last month, but you’ve swum less often and less far). The progress section was better on the Suunto (although it did not provide those latter statistics either).

Garmin has a Trophy Case which gives you your personal bests and the dates. It provides total time taken in minutes for each distance (100m, 400m 750m, 1000m, 1500m, longest distance). I wish it would at least show the average speed or pace for the personal bests, or again, that you could choose yourself what information to look at. Since I never swim just 400m, for example, I have no idea how fast that time taken to swim it is compared with my usual swim or how much slower my current swim was vs that personal best. I also can't easily see how much slower I'm swimming over the longer distances vs the shorter distances, which would help me see when I start to wilt during my swims. Since the program has presumably gone to the effort of calculating the quickest sections for each swim, it may as well provide you, the user, with the details (such as the pace)!

The statistics for the individual swims give me all the information I want (snapshot provided at the top of this blog). The watch provides total calories, distance and duration of swim, average and best pace in mins:secs per 100m, speed in 100m/hr (km/hr would have been more intuitive, but it’s OK!), average number of strokes per length and average stroke rate per minute, average SWOLF. For individual lengths, you can see time, pace (mins:secs per 100m), number of strokes, SWOLF. It’s clear from my statistics that I slow down towards the end of a swim when I’m feeling tired, so that’s something to work on. In the snapshot above, my average speed declined from exactly the time that I looked at the watch to see how I was doing, so I'm now forewarned not to reduce my effort when I see how far I am.

You can join groups, but I can’t really see that they serve much purpose. There’s a leaderboard in each group, but the only option for swimming groups is to compete on total distance swum over the current week to date. It would be nice to have average speed and other metrics as well. There’s a challenges section, but those are also limited to distance and I’ve found only one swimming group (the over 50’s swimmers group) that uses the challenges.

I miss the ability that I had on the Suunto to create tags and then analyse my swims by tags. For instance, I had tags for 50m, 25m, sea, and lake, so that I could analyse my data by pool length and by open water type, as I suspect my times may differ between these.

However, despite all this, generally I’m happier with the Garmin than with the Suunto. The watch face is clearer and it provides me with my key metrics (time and distance and pace) while swimming and it’s very easy to read. It was always a struggle to read the Suunto. I’ve currently got the watch set to a 25m pool which was easy to set up, and now it seems to start almost automatically on that, so that saves a lot of faffing about before starting. Overall, I found the Garmin more intuitive to use than the Suunto. It automatically classified my swimming as freestyle and I didn’t have to “train” the watch, as I did with the Suunto. That also makes things a lot easier.

Astonishingly, no review of the Garmin told me that swimmers can set the watch to buzz when you're on the last lap of your target distance (or target time, or alert you if you're not going to your target speed). Swimmo and Swimovate plug this feature as if they are the only ones to have this function and then there it was on my Garmin! I've only used the alert for distance so far and actually I’m too impatient and still look at my watch part-way through to see if I'm anywhere near finished, but maybe I’ll have the occasional day where I’m not wondering when I can allow myself to stop! I’ve yet to use it for speed (that’s a bit scary because it’s quite challenging!) or time, but I assume they work just as well.

My absolute favorite feature is that when I save my swim at the end of my session, it buzzes me to let me know if I’ve achieved any personal bests in that session and then shows them to me on my watch. I’m always holding my breath at the end to see if I’ll get that little buzz. It’s a kick if I do, and a disappointment if I don’t! I would now add that to my list of desired features.

Zurich - Toilet Problems

All Solved!

Although everything in my flat was generally fine when I returned back to Zurich, a small trickle of water was constantly running in my toilet. I worried at first as to whether it could flood, but that didn’t seem to happen; it was, however, a waste of water.

I went into my rental agent to ask for a plumber to fix it and they suggested that I contact the Hauswart (janitor) instead since he may be able to fix it. I didn’t even know that we had a janitor. Actually, that’s a bit of a funny word in English because in the UK we don’t really have janitors in blocks of flats. In Germany, though, it was common and it’s also common in Egypt, so weirdly I know the word for janitor in German and Arabic even though it’s a word I barely use in English. But I digress…

So, I had to phone the janitor, which was a pain as I don’t like the phone. However, I braved it (but left it for a day while I psyched myself up). He turned out to be very nice on the phone and spoke fairly clearly, so it was all OK. I had a clear image in my head of him being small, in his early 60s, balding but with some grey hair, and with a big smile. It’s strange how you get an idea of the person when you just speak to them on the phone.

Anyway, it ended up being very Swiss because the appointment was for Saturday at 08:30am. They really are obsessed with early morning starts over here. So much for my weekend lie-in! The doorbell rang at the appointed time, maybe even a bit earlier, but I was completely confused when I opened the door and saw a young, thin guy standing there with long black hair and a serious expression. That’s not what I thought the janitor looked like! He saw my confusion and then himself got confused as to whether he’d got the right address. I just couldn’t get over it as I’d really got it into my head that he would be in his 60s.

He fiddled around for a while with my toilet but in trying to mend it, he made it worse. Water now gushed down constantly into the toilet rather than it being just a trickle. He explained that he’d tried three or four different solutions, but actually each thing in the toilet was broken. My flat is quite old, so I’m not really so surprised. Anyway, I was left with a worse-functioning toilet and a temporary solution of pushing in a stick to stop the water from gushing through all the time and taking it out when needed so that the cistern fills and then flush the toilet manually. However, the water went through so quickly, the cistern didn’t really have time to fill up, so I also had to pour jugs of water in at the same time, and fast enough that it didn’t already go through before I got to the second jug, so that I had enough water to give it a proper flush. I ended up flushing the toilet only when I really had to.

He said they’d make an appointment for me with the plumber. I thought I hadn’t understood, since I couldn’t comprehend how they could know when I would be available, but it turned out that the plumber would phone me. Ugh! On the plus side, I pointed out my dripping tap that the plumber didn’t fix last time because I hadn’t got agreement from the rental agent. The young guy took a photo of it dripping and agreed that the plumber could also do that at the same time.

The plumber managed to phone me just as I was about to go into a meeting, so I had to ask him to phone me back. On top of that, he rattled away in Swiss German, so I had to ask him to speak high German, but I still found his accent pretty difficult. Fortunately, he made an appointment at 11am (that’s more like it!) and turned up 30 mins early looking more like I expected the janitor to look like. Because he was early, I hadn't gone through the fiasco of flushing the toilet, so had the embarrassing task of doing it (fairly incompetently) while he looked on.

He was so Swiss I was a bit scared he would be hostile to me as a foreigner (don’t ask me why I’m scared of that, there’s no rationale behind it at all), but although he looked a bit serious when he came in, he ended up coming across as kind, friendly, and trustworthy. And he fixed my toilet (and my tap)!