The last days

I am probably the most intermittent blogger ever and I am sorry not to be more regular. It is not that I don't like to see myself online--who doesn't?--but time is getting tight here. We leave in two weeks and the time is largely filled with sorting and packing our stuff, making arrangements for living in California again, and visiting all of our favorite places using all of our favorite modes of transportation. On top of that, Markus' family will visit us here this weekend for a last hurrah (related to my birthday so there really will be hurrahs!) And then we will spend our last weekend in Europe at his parent's house in Germany. With any luck, the weather will be pretty good for the next two weeks and we will be out and about a lot.

But I am still collecting the bits and pieces of observations and oddities about life in Switzerland. One of them is the age of public transportation here. We just spent a week in Germany and were surprised how modern the buses and trams were. Zurich has a few modern trams and buses, but overall they are very old-fashioned and probably from the 1970s. I notice this particularly because modern transport accommodates wheelchairs and strollers well by either being at street level and without steps up, or in the case of buses, kneeling. The old trams and buses hardly accommodate strollers and it has been a big challenge for me to get a stroller and two kids up the steep stairs of our local tram. And I purposely brought a small collapsible stroller. What most people have here are giant prams or wide jogger type strollers that only fit into specially modified doors of buses and trams. This means when the bus stops you can't get on the door closest to you, but have to race with the stroller to the one door you can fit into. What this breeds is very helpful behavior from the people around you because you just couldn't get on and off without help from strangers. However, it seems strange in a city where there is clearly lots of money and most things are very modern. My theory for explaining this relates to how well-maintained everything is in Switzerland. I guess that although they are old, the trams and buses are kept in great shape and therefore last forever. Certainly this is the cleanest public transit we have ever been on, even when it is old. Great preservation of resources, but this would be a hard city to be disabled in.

Our trip to Germany was great, if hectic and exhausting. But this seems to be characteristic of our last weeks here anyway. We are trying to do it all (and some of it again!) Then we will be back home again living off memories of trams and trains!