Day 5 in Zurich -- well, 4.5 really, as we spent the afternoon in Berne, after a morning of window shipping and a quick, slightly awkward visit to Cabaret Voltaire (in defense of the bored clerk on the Macbook, I did show up the instant it opened, or maybe even before it was properly opened, and the first pseudo-customer of the day tends to be a rude awakening).

The proximity of European cities (Berne is 50 minutes by train, Geneva is less than three hours, and Paris -- where we considered a too-ambitious day trip before settling on Geneva -- is 5-ish) makes it easier to understand how you could... say... conquer Poland in a little over a month.

Zurich is lovely and safe -- though in the words of Le Corbusier "The Swiss are clean, and industrious and to hell with them" -- but I'm excited to venture out to the more French-leaning portions. Not that my French is any better than my German, or my Swiss-German. I'm still pretty much stuck at "weiss wine" and "rote wine" and since I'd gotten used to saying "schoen" for "thank you" in Berlin and they don't say it here, I basically find myself mumbling some nonsense combination of "greutzi" ("hello" in Swiss-German), "grazi" ("thank you" in Italian), "merci" ("thank you" in French and Swiss-German) and "danke" ("thank you" in German and Swiss-German) to anyone who gives me something or does something for me. And since I probably also look deranged when I mumble it, I can't really even hope that body language will get my point across.