Share a vine, and perhaps a wine

After the fourth week of classes, a rhythm has started developing that makes it easier to get the feel of doing homework and studying appropriately. Of course, this doesn't rule out one or two 2am nights a week staying up to finish lab reports. It simply means I feel acclimated to being a student again. It feels good. Though perhaps ironically, I'm writing this while I would normally be in my Signal and Information Processing class. After short sleep Wednesday night and a couple long days, I decided to not get up this morning for a three hour lecture when the professor puts together very good lecture notes that I can study at leisure.

Now that we're almost halfway through October, fall is finally making inroads to Switzerland. After a few weeks of 65 and sunny, the weather now tends to 50 and raining. Not the most pleasant, but let's be honest here: after northern Indiana and Chicago, it's nothing new.

Tuesday night this week was finally moving night. One short ride on the train and a couple 5 minute walks and that's all it took. Bam. New apartment. Across the street from my 3rd floor (really: 4th, but they start counting at zero here) bedroom window, there's another apartment building with old-style roof tiles. The rounded corner of the building is directly in front of me, with a large rounded balcony wrapping the end of each floor. This particular building's tenants seem to have specifically gotten apartments with balconies in order to grow impressive bundles of potted plants. A number of plants drape over the edge of the balcony, some sending vines nearly two floors down - a kind of shared garden world that must brighten the scene for many other tenants in my building as well.

Our building is not as new or well-maintained as the place I lived through September. This whole neighborhood looks older - steep, tiled roofs with the occasional attic window poking through, some kind of stucco finish on the outside of buildings, and sidewalk edges filled with bushes and shrubs up against each building that are not maintained so heavily as to look picture-perfect and sterile. It feels much more organic, more of a home than a street lined with new, spotless shops, with all greenery nicely contained in limited and sharply delineated areas, not allowed out of its prescribed bounds.

The buildings here vary in color from a pale green that's nicely set off by the rust-orange roof tiles and dark green shutters, to various shades of gray, beige, and very pale yellow. Though each building is different - color, roof line, absence or presence of balconies and bay windows - they are all very much in the same style. From my window you can see a series of adjacent roofs where each one is successively higher by a few feet than the previous as the buildings sit higher and higher up the hill towards Roeschibachplatz and the Wipkingen train station. Down the hill in the other direction is Wipkingerplatz, a Zurich Kantonal Bank, the Coop grocery store (pronounced "cope"), and Limmat River as it winds it's way north out of Zurichsee ("Zurich zay" - Lake Zurich)

And here's my view. It's not the mountains, but it's not bad.