Diversity and Insularity

I haven't been blogging of late because my parents have been here for several days. They are off on a field trip (one I hope to take as well one of these days) to Appenzell (small cheese-making place in the alps) so I have a bit of free time today. We have been having a great time visiting all of our favorite places around the city, riding buses, trains, boats... a classic tour of the Scherer-Morlang haunts. They have also been busy with the boys so I have had some time off, and someone else to plan meals and supervise playground visits! Yeah!

This morning I went to my second Spooglers meeting. This is the group that has formed in Zurich of spouses of googlers. It is about 50 people strong now I think. They have coffee every thursday morning, and this weekend they are hosting their annual spring brunch (at google, but believe it or not it is potluck!) It is a very congenial, international group of so far all women. There are several americans, but also women from Finland, Holland, Sweden, France, Viet Nam, India, China, Germany, Australia, etc. It is a good indication for me of what Zurich google is all about: talent from all over the world. Many of them are moms and I have already made several play-date arrangments. Coffee is a challenge with Timo along, but I am hoping to find a babysitter so that I can have these mornings free.

Google here is very impressive. The interior is wild, with lots of playful decoration and games-rooms. And the food is great. The kids also appreciate that there is a train that runs right in front of the cafeteria...keeps them busy. Markus had a funny story of Zooglers the other day. They have a fresh-squeeze orange juice machine in the cafe (but it is only available at lunch time). They originally got oranges from Italy, but it turns out to be so popular that they go through several tons of oranges per week and apparently have drunk Italy dry. So now the oranges come from Argentina. One more account of decadence at google!

Zurich seems like a good home for a multi-cultural (orange-juice drinking) google. At the playgrounds there are always people from all over. And I find this true of those people I interact with. The teacher of Nic's playgroup is from Uruguay (married to a Swiss); Our landlady is originally from Spain; and so forth. Talking to spooglers from all over people are finding their niches here without much problem. In this way it is kind of like a European bay area--accepting of diversity. Oddly, the politics and systems don't seem to reflect this as well as the day-to-day living. Poltics and institutions here are very conservative. Everyone from outside complains that the school system is very rigid in that it is hard to get into, and the curriculum is old fashioned. Children in the 6th grade must "decide" whether to attend gymnasium and afterwards university and it is very hard to reverse this decision in either way later (and deciding really means have you got the aptitude). Not a good place for late bloomers. It would be interesting to see if girls do particularly well in this system, as they tend to be more mature in an academic setting at a younger age....

Politics in this area are also quite conservative. The Swiss People's party, a very conservative party simliar in many ways to the populist/anti-immigrant parties seen elsewhere on the European right, is the dominant party here in Zurich and is central to national level government as well. My father asked me the other day why Switzerland is not a member of the EU. In California I would have given an answer about Swiss neutrality and its financial and trade interests related to that. Now my answer would be more about politics and government style. The extreme federalism of the system here means that there is much less national level government than you find in other euroepan goverments (even other federal systems like Germany). Here, local and canton governments dominate. This means that there is a large amount of legal diversity across regions and cities in Switzerland. If this country were to join the EU, it would necessarily give much greater weight to the national level government over the local governments because of the way decsions are made in the EU (most important ones happen at conferences of national heads-of-state or government ministers). I can imagine that the SWiss, in an effort to preserve not only national independence but sub-national independence would see the EU as an unacceptable reduction of soveriegnty. In truth, the benefits of the EU, like greater trade (cheaper prices and more variety) or monetary stabilty don't appeal to the Swiss because they rather buy their own products and make their own deals.

Ok, as you can see, I am missing the world of political science a bit. But overall, I am enjoying just looking around and hanging out!