Sunday, November 21, 2010

fire drill

I took a train earlier today from Dijon (France) back to Zurich. After a 5-hour ride, I went to dinner with some coworkers. I got back to my hotel after that and checked my email at 9pm CET. I had a 15-minute-old Google Voice transcript from the guys who were supposed to deliver our furniture. I checked the timezones, and it was 12pm PST. They were supposed to come between 1-4pm, and they were going to arrive at 12:15pm. Plus, I had called earlier in the week and specifically told them to call D on his cell, not me on mine. WTF?

I quickly dashed off an email to D hoping that he would check his phone even though he was supposed to be at basketball until 12:30pm. I then tried calling him using the "call" function inside of Gmail for the first time ever...straight to voicemail. I must have tried ten times before I realized it was useless and called the delivery people instead. They seemed very confused. "Where are you? Belmont?" "No, Switzerland!" Finally I told them that D would be there at 1pm, even though I couldn't confirm that because I had no way to reach him. Unfortunately the furniture delivery company and the furniture making company are not the same company, and according to the delivery guys, they were not told to come between 1-4pm, they were merely told to deliver today. ARGH.

I was really afraid they weren't going to wait, so I called our friend up the street who has a key to our house. No dice. I randomly complained to another friend online, but she lives over 30 minutes away and doesn't have a key. Finally I tried again and got the first friend, and he said he'd head over. I took a quick shower to rinse the train smell off, got back online, and found out that he had gone down there only to find no one there. I then asked his wife to call the delivery guys and figure out what was up. They had gone to lunch. Of course.

I heard that in the end they came back and D met them there, but I'm still in Switzerland and I still have no idea what happened. Anyway, this whole episode just stressed me out to a stupid degree. I know delivery guys are always late, but since when do they show up EARLY? I hate the service industry.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Zurich 1, Mountain View 0

In Mountain View we have a slide that goes from the 4th floor to the 3rd floor.

Here in Zurich, they have a fireman's pole that goes from the 2nd floor to the 1st floor, and then a slide that starts on the the 1st floor and ends right in the middle of the ground floor cafeteria. The slide is curved in a tighter spiral than in Mountain View, and isn't covered the whole way, so you kind of get the feeling that if you weighed a little more and went a little faster, you might be able to jump the side while sliding down. Also, they correctly 0-index their floors here.

(Tip on using a fireman's pole: brake with your legs!)

high school...not totally useless

I'm spending a week in our Zurich engineering office, visiting some engineers that I've worked with for years, but many of whom I've never actually met face-to-face. It's been fun; everyone's really friendly and I've gotten lots of invitations for lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks, and even foosball.

Anyway, I flew Swiss Air nonstop from SFO on the way over, and all the announcements were done first in German, then in French, and finally in English. It was the same at the Zurich airport, and again on the rail (6 CHF from the airport to the "Hauptbahnhof" main station). I was a bit surprised to discover that my high school French is good enough that I usually understand what's happening without having to wait for the English translation.

(As an aside, there are like twenty kinds of Swiss chocolates in the various kitchens and cafes on the seven floors of this office. It might be deadly to stay here too long.)

Friday, November 12, 2010

travel fears

I travel a fair amount. I've visited East Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, Australia and New Zealand, the Middle East, and many parts of Europe. When choosing travel destinations, I like to pick places that are different from the places that I've already been. I find a lot of people rule out destinations because they're afraid of terrorists or pickpockets, but I figure the first is a very low probability occurrence, and the second can be minimized by wearing money belts and not carrying valuables.

One place that I am wary of is China. I went once in 2002, and we had a good time. We spent half the week in Shanghai, attended a friend's wedding there, and then spent the rest of the week hiking at Huangshan. The scenery was gorgeous, we had lots of yummy food, and we enjoyed travelling as a group. We also found what appeared to be a tape recorder in our hotel room.

Many years later, a friend who is a US citizen but was born in Taiwan was denied a visa because her US passport lists "Taiwan" as her country of birth. They insisted that she change it, so she decided not to go after all. D's US passport also lists Taiwan as his country of birth. This was not a problem in 2002, but I would not be surprised if it was a problem now. I would be very irritated if we paid $150 only to be denied a visa.

In addition, the food safety and pollution issues seem to get worse and worse. The WHO has reported that 750,000 people die prematurely every year because of air and water pollution-related diseases including respiratory illness, lung cancer, heart disease, making pollution the leading cause of death in China. Acid rain falls over 30% of the country, and has spread to Seoul and Tokyo. Some of China's food safety incidents have gotten international attention (melamine in baby food and egg products, pesticides in the powdered ginger imported by Whole Foods). Other incidents were widely reported only in Asia, but still sound quite serious. For instance, there were reports of sewage in stinky tofu, plastic in tapioca pearls (to improve texture), and pesticides and sulphur in mantou (to increase the chewiness and whiteness of the steamed buns).

In my mind, if I travel to the Middle East, there is a very small chance that I will be killed. If I travel to China, there is 100% chance that I will have to breathe the air and eat the food, thus ingesting and/or inhaling potentially dangerous chemicals and carcinogens. I'm trying to figure out if I just have a mental block because of all the anti-Taiwan sentiment in China, or whether it's reasonable for me to fear visiting China?

(This topic came up because I was looking at some amazing photos posted by a Shanghai-born friend who recently returned to China.)

Friday, November 05, 2010

meaningless victory

Yesterday D had to get his car serviced, so we drove two cars to work. On the way home, he suggested one of us take 101 and the other take 280, so we could figure out which is faster on a weekday night with no carpool. We laid down some rules (max highway speed, max local speed), I picked 101 so I wouldn't be tempted to exceed them, and we were off.

I pulled into our driveway about 38 minutes later. D arrived just over one minute after. We concluded that despite the frustration of having to fight traffic, 101 is nevertheless a more efficient route, time-wise. (We are thinking of replicating the experiment with our roles reversed, though, as I think I tend to do better in traffic.)

 

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