Plane movies:

The Running Man: 6/10

It was a fine action movie, but for parts of it it was hard to understand the motivation behind what the characters did.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: 3/10

I didn’t have time to finish this one since my plane landed, but it was pretty boring.

Winter Spring Summer or Fall: 10/10

Amazing and very cute romance movie, probably one of my new favorites.

Wuthering Heights: 7/10

I only watched about 30 minutes of this so it’s a little absurd to give it a rating, but it was pretty good and I imagine I will finish it given the chance.

Zurich

I landed in Zurich yesterday, flying from Hartford with a layover in Dublin. Going through TSA was super easy this time, which is surprising because usually I get such a hard time even though I try to make it as easy as possible for them. The line for customs in Switzerland was incredibly long and spanned two floors; it took me three hours just for the guy to stamp my passport. He didn’t even interrogate me about my plans the way they usually do, he didn’t say anything to me whatsoever.

After the plane, I had to take a train to where I am staying. Online it says how easy Zurich is to navigate as an English speaker, but it is miraculous that I got on the correct trains to get to where I needed to be. The trains are two floors and the train station is very big.

The hostel I’m staying at is very nice, and it’s on top of a bar (I haven’t taken advantage of that yet). One of my roommates is about 45 years old and from Louisiana doing a 3 month trip across Europe, the other is about 28 from Indonesia. The guy in the bunk bed above me farts a whole lot.

My first day for dinner I got bratwurst to go from a place the hostel recommended. It was very good and not that expensive, and I finished off the sausage pretty quick on a bench by the lake. By then it was about 6:00pm, but it felt like 12:00pm for me and I had only slept like 3 hours on the plane. Plane sleep only counts for like half anyway, so I was barely alive by then. I couldn’t go to bed yet though, so I powered through and walked a few miles along the river. So many people were swimming or just having a picnic in the park; it looked really fun. I got gelato on the way, and it was so good so I’m definitely getting gelato at least once a day. After two days I’m already averaging more than once per day.

Today is Sunday, and everything is closed (I later learned that businesses need a permit from Switzerland’s federal government to let people work on Sundays or work night shifts). My plans were to explore a little more and go to the Kunsthaus art museum in the afternoon. I walked down the Bahnofstrasse, which is apparently one of the most expensive shopping areas in the world. Everything was closed, but I could still see into the stores. Apparently it’s for the best since on other days there are huge crowds.

I met up with one of my parents’ college friends and his wife to go to the museum. They were super generous and paid for everything. The museum had lots of 20th century Russian paintings by Marc Chagall, and a many Italian paintings from the 17th century, among others. After the museum we went to an expensive French restaurant where they told me about themselves and Switzerland and I told them about myself and my parents. He kept saying that my parents were “smartest people in any room,” which is funny because my parents said the same thing about him. They were both super smart people and experienced in all the things I like to talk about. His wife was a math major, and later did a PhD in aerodynamics to work on F1 car design. She was on a Swiss team, which is what brought them to Switzerland 23 years ago. We talked a lot about grad school and jobs. Part of his work is in cryptography, which is something I have thought about looking at grad schools for since I love algebra and number theory, and cryptography is a really cool application of those ideas. They both gave me many ideas for what to do with the rest of my time in Zurich.

It’s supposed to be rainy for a lot of the next week, so my options might be limited, but I hope to see a few more things before I leave for Luzern.