Getting. It. Done.

A lot has crystallized out of the past five weeks. Until a few hours before flying out of Chicago, I did not have a place to spend my first night in Zurich. After a few jet-lagged nights in a youth hostel, a second-year student offered some space to crash on his living room floor, where I've been for the entire month of September.

Until a couple weeks ago, I didn't know how long I'd be staying in this living situation. This week I move to a more permanent solution, "more" being the operative word. It will last through February - sharing a place with a few second year students I've gotten to know and enjoy.

Until one and a half weeks ago, I had no idea what my class schedule would look like. After sitting in a couple extra lectures and spending a lot of time poring over the course catalogue, I have a reasonably interesting schedule lined up with classes ranging from Neuromorphic Engineering to Robust Statistics to Basics of Instrumentation.

Until a few days ago, I didn't know German. Oh wait, that's still true. But it does feel good to have gotten past all these events that, like the distant Alps, loom as hurdles in the future as you approach them. And perhaps also like the Alps it can take some work to get over them, but it all gets much more accessible with a halbtax card in your pocket and bread and chocolate in your backpack. (A halbtax card is a travel pass you buy on an annual basis that makes almost all train travel within Switzerland half price. Pays for itself pretty quickly.)

So life is settling down to some sort of normal (yeah, Mom, I know, "what IS normal??"). I've applied for a residence permit and a bank account, am finding running routes around the city, will get a bike soon, and am slowly figuring out what my schedule and rhythm will be for the next little while.

Just in case you were curious, here are what some of the local Alps look like ("local" might mean a two hour train ride away, but hey, I have more Alps than you do so quick nitpicking).

Riding, Reviving

Bon Bon on a Bike is about to come back! After just over two and a half years in Chicago, this guy's moving on. Back in March I applied for a few master's programs in Europe to study Biomedical Engineering. I was fortunate enough to get accepted by all three programs (TU Delft in the Netherlands, Aalborg in Denmark, and U Zurich in Switzerland), but ultimately the Alps won out.

The past two months have been a blur - two weeks in Minnesota for camping and canoeing the Boundary Waters with Nate, Mitch, and Amber, several weekend trips for family reunions and weddings, wrapping up work projects as much as possible, trudging through the paperwork to get a Swiss visa, figuring out how much stuff I can afford to take/get rid of/leave, training for a half-marathon (finished in 2hrs 10mins!), tweaking my bike setup to optimize for touring, planning said tour between Pueblo, CO and Priest Lake, ID (via Kalispell, MT), and on top of all that desperately trying to learn as much German as I can before being plopped down into an intimidatingly multilingual country. Whew!

With only three days left in Chicago, it's probably time to  buckle down on packing - right now there are only three boxes packed. With the advent of this Next Step, I'm reviving this blog. Hopefully I'll get a few entries in during the bike trip, and will keep on posting while I settle into my first international move as an adult (not counting SST). So on to further adventures and the next stage of life!