The Professor in Zurich

I had a very nice trip to Zurich the weekend of November 11-13. After arriving at the airport, I took the train into the central train station and then found tram #6 which dropped me close to my hotel, the Plattenhof. The hotel is right next to the University of Zurich and my conference was held down the block at a university facility.
I arrived early on Friday afternoon and then walked down to the main part of the city. There is a very nice “old” section of the city which features major churches and winding streets limited to pedestrian traffic. Several brass bands were playing in the old section, some with greater skill levels than others. The musicians were also dressed in rather strange costumes. I wondered if it had anything to do with 11-11-11 or if it were a regular Friday afternoon activity.
Central Zurich is a shopping mecca and there were no signs that shoppers were worried about an impending economic slowdown in Europe. Prices were sky high, even higher than in Helsinki. When I first started coming to Switzerland in the early 1970s, one U.S. dollar would buy four Swiss francs. Today, one dollar won’t even get you one Swiss franc.
On Saturday morning, I went into town again and purchased the one bargain that I had discovered the previous day. At the local Co-Op grocery store, I could buy 10 bars of Swiss chocolate with nuts for a grand price of 8.80 Swiss francs, about ten U.S. dollars.
As I returned back to the hotel, the sun was beginning to shine and temperatures were headed up to above 50 degrees, an exceptionally nice day in Zurich. I even saw a man in an old Mercedes convertible who was driving along with the top down. I also saw another rather novel sight—someone was in a telephone booth at a street corner and actually making a phone call. How times have changed.
I headed back to the hotel and changed into my suit, in time to meet the Swiss North American Studies Association’s handful of delegates. We then walked down to a restaurant where I had a tasty and filling plate of Zurich-style veal with roasted potatoes. It only cost 42 dollars, excluding the bottled water. I think that someone could get rich running a restaurant in Zurich. Even the Chinese restaurants had lunch menus starting at about 24 dollars.
I then walked over to the conference room and heard short presentations from the U.S. Public Affairs Officer, who had recently arrived from an assignment in Tel Aviv, and a professor from Fribourg University who had enjoyed a Fulbright at UC San Diego in 2002. She actually stayed at UCSD for several years and obtained a Ph.D. in comparative literature and cultural studies. Indeed, most of the people in attendance had a foreign language or literature specialty.
I then spoke for an hour on what had occurred in the United States since 9/11. I was honored to learn that I was the featured speaker for the meeting which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Fulbright program in Switzerland. The people seemed to be receptive to the topic and during the Q and A we discussed some of the challenges facing both the U.S. and Europe. Quite frankly, as difficult as things are back home, the current crisis among the 17 eurozone members (out of 27 nation-states which constitute the EU) is probably more vexing and intractable. I pointed out to the audience that the distance between Seattle and Miami is almost twice as great as the distance between Helsinki and Athens, but that there is a “world of difference” between what you would see traveling cross-country in the U.S. versus north-south from Finland to Greece. Greece is charming and Athens is a living museum, but the country is an economic basket case with a plethora of major problems. On the other hand, Finland, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands have globally competitive economies but are getting tired of picking up the tab for the dysfunctional political and economic systems in southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). I have serious doubts that the eurozone can survive in its present form and this could lead to some major structural problems for the European continent and headaches for us on the other side of the Atlantic. By the way, Switzerland is “neutral” and not a part of the EU. It seems to do well economically no matter what is happening in other parts of Europe, but even the Swiss will suffer setbacks if the eurozone economy flounders.
On Sunday, I took the tram directly out to the Zurich airport and returned home, having experienced a very nice weekend in Switzerland’s largest city.