Zurich - Back Again

This is Not Sahl Hasheesh!

Well, it’s the yearly shock to the system as I return from temperatures in the mid 20s to temperatures below 10 degrees centigrade. I’m a bit late with the blog this week because my first job on returning is always to get my Swiss tax return done and once I get started, I need to finish….

The weather really wasn’t that bad on the first few days I was back. I’m usually not too bothered by colder temperatures at first because there’s a certain novelty value to it after five months away, but it was still too cold to sit outside. Nevertheless, I could see some blue sky, so it was fine (the snow came a week later).

As usual, it’s different things that strike me on returning each time, so on this occasion I was somehow struck by how large Zurich is. I remember that this is how I felt on moving from Horsham to Zurich when I first came over to Switzerland. Most people feel (even complain!) Zurich is small, but those must be city people; once I’m used to Zurich, it feels manageable, which I like, but there’s plenty to do here, so I don’t really ever get the impression that it’s small.

Maybe it’s something to do with travelling in on the train to meet up with someone that made it feel large this time; after all, anything that requires a train journey isn’t such a small distance. But I think it’s also the large buildings that I passed on the train, the many shops as I got into the main station, and the plethora of public transport that all help to add to that impression.

Also, for some reason, I was particularly struck by how dark my bedroom is at night. I wake in the middle of the night and I struggle at first to see anything other than black. In Sahl Hasheesh, the fountain by my bedroom is lit up at night, so some of that light filters through my curtains. It doesn’t bother me at all (there’s something reassuring about having some light), but now that it’s not there and I just have darkness, it feels quite strange.

On my first night back in Zurich, when I woke during the night and gazed into the darkness, I just couldn’t figure out where the door was in my bedroom. I couldn’t even work out where I had the lights by my bed. I stretched over to put one of them on and I couldn’t work out why the bedside table was so high. I finally found the switch but I still hadn’t plugged the light back in to the wall, so it didn’t work. I tried the other side and then, with the light working, I saw that I didn’t have a table on the side I’d originally tried, just some drawers on which my lamp was stood. The door turned out to be the opposite side of the room from where I thought. How can you forget such things in just 5 months? Or even just a few hours, since I’d seen the room when I went to bed.

I was also surprised that the sound of the planes in the morning was really not that bad; I think it’s maybe only bad during the summer when I have the window open (and then it’s deafening but I get used to it and can even sleep through it – not sure if this is good for me from an evolutionary perspective, though).

It took me a few days to get back to cooking for myself again; for some reason, I felt strangely reluctant to make any meals at all, and also irritated that no matter how often I shopped, there was always at least one ingredient missing that I needed. After a few days, I was getting really fed up with going to the Coop. I’d done too good a job of winding down my storage cupboards before I left last time. On the other hand, I found myself delighting in every morsel of food I ate – the pumpkin soup, the panatone, the salmon in pastry, the cornflakes, the chocolate... Each time I had anything, I’d be struck at how delicious it was. I’ve not had that before on returning, but it was a delight!