Another very busy day

Today I got up early and did some cooking and clothes washing.  The apartment has its own small washer-dryer unit - a very handy feature that avoids having to us the communal laundry area in the dank basement.  However, the instructions are all in German, so I had to find the manual online and then put it into Google translate.  The result was rather mixed, and it took me quite a while to figure out how to set it up.  I was tempted to give up, but persisted until I got it to run properly.  Meanwhile, I had set up a stew - which generally lasts for several days - and some hard-boiled eggs, which make a very tasty, convenient, and transportable snack.  As I do more of this kind of housework, it makes the apartment fell more and more like home :-)

At 10am I headed to the Zurich Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) to meet another friend, Hans-Peter.  I worked with Hans-Peter some years ago at a big Swiss bank.  He moved on to a position at an IT consulting company, and he wanted to pick my brain about how best to proceed with a couple of clients he's been working with.  Unfortunately, I somehow managed to completely screw up in terms of my train connections and arrived twenty minutes late :-(.  Nonetheless, we had a great meeting.  I made up for the time lost by joining Hans-Peter on his train ride back to his office, which almost exactly made up the twenty minutes!

Then I headed back to the Hauptbahnhof to meet Marco, one of my more unusual Swiss friends.  I met Marco because he teaches a special form of swimming called 'Total Immersion', which another US friend once told me about.  A few years ago, when I was in Zurich for a few months, I noticed that there was a TI school in Zurich, which turned out to be headed by Marco.  I studied with him for a couple months and, though I never mastered TI, I was very impressed by TI and, even more, by Marco.  It turned out Marco was a champion swimmer, and a damned good teacher to boot.  He's the tall guy in this picture:



It also turned out that Marco had spent a part of his childhood in Delaware, very near our home in Pennsylvania.  His mother was a teacher at the Sanford School, where they lived on campus.  After we got to know Marco, his wife Jeanine, and their two children, we invited them to visit us in the US.  To our surprise, they agreed, although Jeanine had to cancel at the last minute.  So, Marco and his kids stayed with us for several days a couple years ago.  Besides taking them to Longwood, Wintherthur and Hagley, we arranged to take them to Sanford and meet the current principal and staff, some of whom remembered his mother!  This was a walk down Memory Lane for Marco, and also gave the kids an interesting experience.

Anyway, today Marco was in a great mood, despite the fact that he recently discovered he needs some surgery on his shoulder, a common problem for competitive swimmers.  But otherwise, things are going well for him and his family.  Besides catching up on personal news, he told us some great stories about his swimming the English Channel and Bosporus Straits - really one-of-a-kind experiences.  All this over an outside lunch on a beautiful sunny day in downtown Zurich at the restaurant "Movie".





After saying adieu to Marco, we wandered around downtown Zurich, then headed home for what turned out to be - for Lynnie - another long nap.  I did some catching up on email and Facebook, plus reading about the fallout from the first 2012 Presidential debate which took place Wednesday.  Around 5pm I got a call from Philipp saying he was still in Zurich (he lives in Winterthur, another city about 30 minutes away) and would like to get together.  So, he ended up taking a tram to our area, and we met him for a drink.  We had a long discussion about my earlier meeting with Hans-Peter - also a friend of his - and we discussed some new business ideas.  Finally, we headed home to a light - and late - dinner, plus a Skype call to Lynn's Mom.  Time to say good night .......