Dad Comes for a Visit



SUNDAY, August 13, 1995.

Here I am at the Cafe Uetli, enjoying a highly evolved weekly ritual called laundry. I've completely given up hope of ever using the laundry facilities in my building. It hasn't happened, and now for lack of even trying, it will never happen. I'm over it. It really doesn't bother me anymore, but I'm still thinking about writing a letter to the bank expressing my sentiments and asking if I should logically conclude that it's perfectly alright for me to come to work naked.

I'm starting to develop a sense of Zurich. I finally have a grip on the geography - it helped that I had two visitors to give tours to and that I took both of them up to the Uetliberg for a view over the city. I can now point out my home and my office from above. Things are starting to click, well just a little bit. I still haven't learned any German (or Swiss-German). I can say hello, good-bye, thank-you, bon-appetit, good morning, good evening (I think), and on a good day, I can count to three. Still, the place names are starting to sounds familiar. Schmiede Weidikon is now a part of my day to day vocabulary. I've even finally figured out that "Uetli" is just a name. Cafe Uetli. The Uetliberg. The Uetlibergstrasse. It's everywhere!

I'm quite at home at "my" lab. This weekend, I've spent quite a bit of time there. On Friday night and Saturday (ok, so I have no real life), I was working on "the book," which has proven to be quite a project. I can remember the first time I was at UBILAB when I gave my talk in November. It seemed a strange, cold, and foreign place. I now have the familiarity, the intimacy (if you will) to feel at home. My stereo and CDs have come to the lab (for the sake of the book project), I've got food downstairs in the fridge, and when no one's looking, I've even gotten a drink of water from the ladies' room on my floor. The men's room is downstairs. I'm a productive, contributing member of my team, and an offer has even been extended to me to stay an extra month - through December 15. Perhaps I will. There are many factors involved.

My last travelogue went out two weeks ago and was written at this very table at the Uetli Cafe. A few things have happened since then. On Tuesday, July 25, my father arrived in Zurich. The first night he was here, I took him to see my apartment and we tried a disappointing Italian restaurant I'd been eyeing in my neighborhood. After dinner, I fed him the last of my reserve supply of Panforte, stashed away from my last trip to Siena. What a lucky dog! Of course, I was working, so he was left to entertain himself during the day on Wednesday, wandering around downtown. Wednesday night, we had dinner at a cool fish restaurant right on the lake. The funny thing was, along with the ducks and swans that I expected to see swimming in the lake hoping for scraps of bread, there were people swimming in the lake near the restaurant as well. I still have trouble swallowing the fact that the lake, smack-dab in the middle of the city is clean enough for swimming. Thursday night, we went out for Rsti, a typical Swiss-German hash-browns-like creation which I experienced for the first time at Michele's place in Bern.

Photos of Mulhouse

Photos of Lucerne

But enough Zurich! I took Friday and Monday off from work and Tuesday was a holiday, so we blew out of town for five days on the road. Time to visit more cities and give dad a taste of what I've been doing. First stop was Mulhouse, France because of the antique car museum there (my dad is an old car nut). We checked out the museum, filled with an impressive collection of Bugatis (I'd never heard of them either) and then spent a few hours in Colmar. Of course, I'd just been in Colmar about a month ago (yawn! been there) but it really is a cute city and a heck of a lot more interesting to explore than Mulhouse so I thought dad should see it. Back in Mulhouse for the evening, we'd planned to have a nice French meal (and you know how I enjoy that) but our restaurant plans fell through because the chef was on vacation. We ended up at a really tasty bistro where I enjoyed my Foie Gras and the rest of my meal, but it was somehow a let down. Gee, the last French meal I had was at a Michelin 3-star in Strasbourg - I guess you can only go down from there. Frightening, but I realized that I speak way more French than I do German, and it's not like I speak French.

Having gotten our dose of France and most importantly our (dad's) dose of old cars, it was back to Switzerland. We arrived in Lucerne and took the scenic route to our hotel; we had a bit of trouble finding it, accidentally taking a bus way too far downstream, but what's life without a little adventure? We dumped our bags and just went out exploring. It's a picturesque little Swiss city sporting its trademark covered wooden bridges and plenty of frescoes. We window shopped, browsed the Picasso museum, and the walked down along the lake to the transportation museum. Woo hoo! More old cars, and trains, and planes, and bicycles. The highlight was a live demonstration of two cars colliding head on, each going only about 5 or 10 mph. Anyway, they were special cars with special safety belts. The willing victims got quite a jolt. I was impressed. It did a good job of reinforcing my fear of traffic accidents. We puttered around, ate an authentic Swiss dinner, and called it a day.

Sunday, we took the train to Airolo, checked our bags at the station and picked up the rental bikes that I'd reserved. It was a fun bike ride through a Swiss alpine valley. Luckily, it was basically downhill the whole way. The same ride in the other direction would have been brutal. Dad was worried about riding in the Alps, but it all turned out all right. After about three hours of coasting downhill and pedaling in a nasty headwind on the flats, we rolled into Biasca. Along the way, we saw some nice scenery, waterfalls, stone bridges, but it was short of awesome. We sipped sub-par cappuccino while waiting for the train back to Airolo. We collected our bags and rode the train back along our bike route on our way to Lugano.

Photos of Locarno and Bellinzona

Photos of Zurich

So there we were in the Ticino, the Italian speaking region of Switzerland, and here was my big chance to show off a little Italian for my dad. Naturally, I had no clue where our hotel was, and I managed to find it by asking people for directions in Italian. When we were checking into the hotel, the clerk switched to English. Ho hum. We had a relaxing time down there, eating pizza in the main piazza, paddle boating out on Lake Lugano, and day tripping up to Bellinzona and Locarno. In Locarno we saw the set up for an outdoor film festival (sponsored by none other than Union Bank of Switzerland) and wished we could stay for a film. We also took a funicular up to the Madonna del Sasso, an impressive old church perched high above the town and offering a great view of the area. We just took it all in, enjoyed ourselves, sampled the local torta del pane (bread pudding), and marveled over the high price of bottled water.

We were back in Zurich on Monday night. We spent Tuesday around the city. We visited the Uetliberg, a small mountain on the lake, offering a perfect view of Zurich and housing the city's TV antennae. Later, we headed to the zoo to look at some cute, but rather depressed looking animals from habitats around the world. For dinner, we had one final blast of Swiss cuisine, Ruchlette, a dish which involves a typical overdose of melted emmenteller. Wednesday morning, dad's visit was over and he left for New York.



Copyright 1997 by Bradley Edelman
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E-mail: Brad Edelman