Zurich Street Parade

My brother Clarke has been visiting for the past two weeks so I’ve been lax in blog postings and email returns between our myriad of adventures.  Sadly Clarke begins the trek back to NC tomorrow morning and is furiously packing so I can begin the updates on all that has transpired.

Dan, Clarke’s college roommate, encouraged us to meet him in Zurich for the 19^th annual Street Parade.  Zurich’s Street Parade is an amalgamation of techno and house music, about ten stages, underground rising star DJs, 700,000 revelers often in costume,  innumerable “love mobile” floats, and one giant parade all co-existing along the picturesque shore of Lake Zurich.   The street parade is meant to promote love, peace and tolerance and after the physical parade the partying continues at house and techno parties taking place in various pubs, clubs and warehouses around the city. 

Aerial view of parade from organizing website

We weren’t sure what to expect but I began getting a general sense of what awaited us on our way to the train station in Basel when I began seeing group after group of creatively dressed people all heading the same direction as us.  I’d describe the costume levels on par with Halloween in Salem.  Luckily for us Dan brought over a slew of hilarious Uncle Sam costumes from the US.   

Team America

Our rag-tag group of Uncle Sams was unexpectedly popular; we made friends from all walks of life and I got asked to pose in many a picture.

Embracing the stereotype!

As the sun set and the crowds grew wilder, Clarke and I bid farewell to both Dan and Zurich to head to our next adventure - Lichtenstein Independence Day.    

The Road Less Traveled By

My girlfriends and I set off the other weekend with a vague aim of seeing St Moritz, a ritzy Swiss resort town near Italy.  The ensuing trip brought to mind my favorite poem, Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.  We began without a GPS, automatic drive, lodging, or itinerary.  The logical choice was the highway to St Moritz, a fancy hotel, & a weekend of lounging around the lake.

The road less traveled began about thirty minutes into the trip when I saw a sign for Heididorf and begged for a detour.  The story of Heidi living in the Alps with her grandfather was one of my favorite stories growing up.  My grandmother use to act out the story with us - Naturally I was Heidi, Clarke was Peter the goatherd, and Alyson was Clara.  Sorry James – you were a goat.  In the outskirts of Heididorf, brushing the Alps they’ve created the village from the story and I was beside myself with excitement.  Here we are below with Heidi’s barn.     

Klosters, ski resort favored by European royalty, was our next haphazard stop.  Highlights included a picnic in a restaurant and a bungee swing.  From Klosters we loaded the car onto a train and barreled through and under mammoth mountains for twenty minutes in pitch dark.  None of us were sure whether we were emerging a 20 km away or being teleported to the moon.  After our suspect train ride, we wound up on a road so off the beaten path that at several points you had to avoid hitting buildings and cows with remarkably the same frequency as it wound through picturesque villages.  

   

We decided to stop for the night in a village a stone’s throw from the Swiss National Park.  I befriended the front desk clerk and we ended up bunking in the undeveloped back component of a fancy hotel complete with a sauna, nice restaurant, & delicious buffet breakfast.  Before retiring for the evening we visited the mountaintop painted village of Guarda, population 186.

Sunday we ventured into the Swiss National Park and wow what scenery.  The lower section was prime grazing land and we encountered a good number of cows.  Not a bad life these cows have ...

The view from the top was definitely worth the effort.

After we hiked down, we did eventually reach St Moritz which lived up to its beautiful & glitzy reputation.  Sitting in the patio of a nice restaurant, wrapped up in lush blankets, was the ideal spot for a post-hike celebratory drink but I was glad we chose the road less traveled by.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

FC Basel

Continuing with our newfound, World Cup induced love of futbol, the gang decided to take in the season opener of FC Basel against our arch rival FC Zurich.  FC Basel is of course sponsored by none other than Novartis – the company patron saint of seemingly all of Basel.  Novartis has infused lots of money in the team and we’ve won the Swiss futbol title five times in the past eight years. It took a herculean effort to even get tickets.  Let me tell you how challenging filling out online ticket forms in Swiss German untranslatable by even the famed Google translator was.  Nevertheless, we got decked out in the team color, red, to cheer on the team and showed up at will call the night of the game not really knowing what to expect.

Inexplicably we ended up with fantastic, front-row seats all the better to see all the action both on and off the field.  The persona of the orderly, misanthropic Swiss seemed to dissipate before our eyes the closer we got to the stadium.  For the first time since arriving in Switzerland, our group was not the most rambunctious; quite the contrary really as we gazed around the stadium at the throngs of warring Zurich and Basel fans. 

We were seated near the main operational base of FC Zurich and my were they organized.  There was no haphazard cheering or weak wave attempts.  Thousands of them mysteriously chanted in unison.  The part I found most intriguing was the firecrackers and smoke bombs many of the fans set off.  At some points, it was challenging to see the field through the smoke - In the US, you’d have been tasered.

FC Basel overcame an early deficient to win the game 3-2.  The crowd went wild!  The players on both teams demonstrated a heartwarming show of European sportsmanship by making their way slowly around the perimeter of the field applauding their fans. 

Our group may well need a few pointers from the team.  We’ve signed up for the Novartis Cup later in the month: 5 on 5, 20 minute games, bracket-style elimination.  Team name: Nein Nein Fraulein.   

Berlin Beckons

Last weekend I journeyed to Berlin to visit my friend Adrienne.  She’s in Germany for six months as part of an international development course sponsored by my former company.  I never made it to Berlin during my light bulb stint although I did have the opportunity to sample every restaurant in St Marys, Pennsylvania at least twelve times.  Beef on wick and pierogies both really grew on me after the first year :)

It was wonderful getting to catch-up with Adrienne and she very graciously toured me around her new city.   In our old lives, we often went running during lunch with another friend.  After I arrived on Friday evening, we probably walked for miles to see Berlin in her lite-up splendor.  The picture below is of me in front of the Brandenburg Gate. 

On Saturday we hit all the Berlin highlights from the East Side Gallery to Hitler’s Bunker to the Holocaust Memorial.  The subdued feeling of Hitler’s Bunker took me by surprise.  The former bunker’s ruins have long since been demolished and in its place are innocuous looking apartment buildings.  The picture below is of Adrienne in front of the East Side Gallery which is a memorial stretch of the wall near the center of Berlin with over 100 paintings. 

My favorite tourist attraction was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.  It’s an entire museum dedicated to stories of creative and daring escape attempts from East Germany.  The engineer in me wandered around in bewilderment at the ingenuity of some of the devices on display from the hot air balloon to the hollowed out cars to the mini-sub.  You would love this museum Dad.  See me below with the Russian and American guards in front of the checkpoint.

As with all my weekend trips, the time to return to Basel for work came all too fast.  Thanks for hosting me Adrienne!  Mary Beth - really you can't come up with any business trips to Germany?  See all the fun you're missing ...

An Outsider on the Inside

Though my blog topics may not reflect it, a fascinating component of life in Basel is going to work.  I’ll save the daily grind disparities for another post. In a marked departure from my old life where the majority of each day was spent firefighting, I don’t have any daily responsibilities in Basel.  Similar to consulting, I’m an outsider brought in to solve a specific problem.  Unlike historical consulting, I have a Novartis badge, boss, and team even though I technically work for an am ultimately responsible to MIT.  Lou Gerstner, former IBM CEO, lifted IBM from near bankruptcy to a perennial computing powerhouse by being an “outsider on the inside” which affords you a certain level of emotional detachment from the company’s challenges.  We interns clearly have big shoes to fill!

Novartis has a public, high-level strategic partnership with MIT that has bred a palpable reverence for the university amongst employees.  When my bespeckled, white-haired advisor visited earlier in the month, you would have thought the President had arrived.  Though I don’t carry Dr. Welsch’s level of clout, I’m still amazed that I get to spend my days learning through asking people of all levels intrusive questions in the name of research and sitting around brainstorming. 

However the MIT besottedness is not without its drawbacks.  I learned the hard way that people take my spoken stream of consciousness thoughts literally when they tried to immediately implement one of them.  Since then, I’ve learned to process thoughts silently and asked my team members to cease introducing me as the MIT guru. 

On a lighter note, just like work in Boston, I’ve found myself in the roles of English tutor and reigning generational explainer.  As the only native speaker on my Basel team of ten, I’m called upon to proof presentations and contracts, decipher foreign email correspondences, and explain colloquial expressions.  We had hilarious conversations last week about the difference between guinea pig and piggy bank and the real meaning of “that’s what she said”.  In addition, I’m the youngest by at least fifteen years and have tried to shed light on the differences between and uses of twitter, facebook, gchat, linkedin, etc. 

As much as things change across oceans, plenty of things remain the same J  

Where I work below ... more to come on the reason for beer and balloons