Quote:
Originally Posted by JanRe
Tell us about your impressions of the city, country, food, people
I've been here for a little over 2 months. But it's during lockdown so my views are extremely meaningless. I could revisit this thread in 6-12 months to give a better review later hopefully.
My personal goal was simply to move to the best country and city in the world. Through lots of research and exploration over the years, my verdict is Zurich. It's where I plan to spend a lot of time to set up my new home base, hopefully eventually buy property, start a family, everything.
The most striking thing that pretty much anyone could tell you is how expensive everything is. It's truly shocking. While it's fairly affordable to me (ty Bitcoin), I still just get sticker shock all over the place. Human resources in particular are even more.
But with the high prices come top tier everything. The quality of the city, people, infrastructure, food, culture, customs, it's all really top notch. I actually didn't know that cities could be quite as nice as Zurich. I thought there was always some kind of upper limit as to how nice cities could get because of tragedy of the commons types of issues. Zurich raised the bar. On that note, I visited Geneva for a while to compare the two (I do speak French nearly fluently, so I was looking forward to being able to communicate more effectively here) but quite frankly, Zurich outdoes Geneva by quite a bit when it comes to long term living imo. So learning a fourth language, Swiss German, it is. But I am still curious to look into Lausanne and maybe a few other cities, I could potentially talk about them later when I can get around to visiting them.
Food: I religiously eat out at many restaurants anywhere I travel but again, we're dealing with lockdown, so I'm rather muted on knowledge here. I have to say that I'm probably going to be somewhat disappointed though. The good news is that all of the ingredients and processes are going to source everything from tip top starting materials since they care so much about things here. It's also just such a healthy country too, and it shows. The bad news is there's quite a lot of tastier countries and restaurant prices are fairly exorbitant. Pure Swiss food also, while fine, is a bit heavy and definitely not something I'd ever be eating extremely regularly I don't think but I could enjoy it a few times a month.
People: They are so nice, intelligent, good opinions, fun to talk to. That is kind of a surface layer thing, I think becoming good friends with Swiss is difficult, which is kind of a true stereotype. On discussions, I feel like I have fairly balanced and nuanced points of view but I'm even more careful when I engage with Swiss people because if I step too far out of bounds by being too certain on things I seem to get called out more often than not lol. I do get mistaken for being a Swiss all the time so people just love to come up to me for some odd reason and speak Swiss German to me. I only know a few hundred words at most right now so I always have to let them know pretty quickly that I'm just some dumb tourist.
I could also kind of talk about dating in Switzerland but to be brief, I'll boil it down to a couple things: It's extremely tough, worse than I could have imagined. You need a lot going for you and to be quite serious or you won't stand much of a chance imo. It would have to be one of the worst PUA cities of all time (which isn't my personal goal but just saying in general). Girls are unbelievably intelligent and fun to talk to though if you land dates, I've never seen anything quite like this. Strangely, they are kind of similar in points of view as I've seen less variation between girls than I'd normally expect but since it's something I view as "good", it's okay that it doesn't vary too much from good.
Side notes: There's a lot of cool benefits to Switzerland in general, I could talk about them for quite some time. But some of my favorites are:
Central location - get to all the hot spots in Europe so easily from Switzerland.
Infrastructure - Switzerland cares deeply about it's construction in so many capacities from how it develops its land to it's individual buildings.
Things to do - They really just have limitless high quality things to do which given it's size is just so impressive to me. A welcome change from Vegas for me as I mature out of that semi gimmicky segment.
Currency - The Swiss Franc, imo, is the strongest fiat currency in the world. And they also issue 1000 CHF notes which is just insanely cool.