More from Zurich

I'll try to be better about blogging from here than I was at my Snowbird conference two months ago. (There were some things I wanted to blog about from that conference that I was planning to write after I came home, but I just never bothered and then I figured too long had passed for me to bother. If I remember some of that stuff at an appropriate time, I'll write about them then.)

Although I was exhausted yesterday, I did get a chance to walk around Zurich's old town yesterday. Sadly, almost everything was closed. There were several places I wanted to try, but they were closed because it was Sunday. In particular, I would like to try some of their cafe-bakeries. I ended up settling for Starbucks yesterday because the only places I found selling coffee yesterday were either decidedly not places I felt would have good coffee (they were generic places that happened to have coffee) or had a very bar-like environment that I simply did not find pleasant. Starbucks offered the familiar, which included iced espresso drinks (which are not easy to find in Europe, at least based on my experience and what others have told me), and this location happened to have an exceptional setup as far as comfortable places to sit go. I was very tired and wanted to be inside on a couch (and my room at the hostel wouldn't be available for a few more hours), so I decided to hang out there and read Electronic Gaming Monthly for a while. (Too bad I left my new Dragonlance book with my luggage, which was locked up at the hostel.)

Prices in Zurich are ridiculously expensive! Some of the venti drinks at Starbucks were something like $9, well over twice as much as they cost in the U.S. And people were paying for them! That was probably a little extreme even for here, but food is much more expensive here than it is in the U.S. I would say that at minimum one sees a 75% higher price for comparable things, with an even higher mark-up for drinks.

I have already seen a lot of people I know and have done some networking (partly through their introducing me to people). Also, it turns out there is a 4-part nonlinear waves session at the conference! Yeah! I'll miss one part because it conflicts with my talk, but otherwise I'll be going there until it ends. Then I'll figure out where to go starting on Wednesday.