Niko’s Tales of Zürich and Elsewhere

Today at Bellevue there played a piano player. I have no idea how he got his piano there. It was a full size upright, the kind that entire companies exist just to move. The man was rockin’ one of my fave Chuck Berry tunes, “You never can tell,” throwing in some seriously — and wonderfully — discordant backing chords. Quite the busker experience. Coming on the heels of playing some guitar with Christian it was a rather nice treat. Wish I had a movie to play you.

Sechseläuten was on Monday. We had beautiful weather this year and Böögg met his end in a mere 13 minutes or so. Plus, I was able to capture his burning with my new camera’s “Rapid Burst” mode. I’m rather fond of this picture. Note the bursts of flying snowman-remnants.

It appears that there is a bit of a break in the Zürich swing community. We used to take lessons which we found through swing.ch. Our teachers were Lawrence and Ursi, two genuinely great teachers. After we had progressed through all the levels they offered, we started bouncing around between the various more advanced offerings, but never found one that quite fit. Either the level was a bit too advanced, or the time was a bit too late, etc.

At some point, Ursi started offering independent lessons, so we decided to give those a try. So far, they’ve been excellent: they focus on core material, such as improving your ability to lead, musicality, etc, rather than learning a lot of moves which I don’t remember anyhow. Furthermore, they occur on Tuesday at 18:15, which means I can leave work at a comfortable time and that we get home at a reasonable hour.

I’ve heard rumors that Ursi’s departure was not totally friendly: there seems to be bad feeling between our old teachers Ursi and Lawrence. This is a shame, as I liked them both very much. For the most part, though, I didn’t care to learn the details of the dispute: I just figured they should kiss (3 times of course) and make up and get back to the dancing.

While I still don’t know any details, I have recently found something which makes me inclined to back Ursi: Lawrence registered the URL downtown-swing.ch (note the dash) and set it up to redirect to his website, swing.ch, rather than Ursi’s site, downtownswing.ch. Now, I don’t know about you, but I strongly suspect the would-be dancer was really looking for Ursi’s site when they entered that URL.

I approve of competition, but that’s just dirty. Lawrence, shame on you.

When I was younger my mother used to tell me that my birthday — which happens to be today, by the way — was special because it fell on the first day of spring. Imagine my surprise then to discover that many years the first day of spring is in fact March 21st! To this day I must admit I feel the 21st is a bit of an imposter. Anyhow, the weather in Zurich has actually been fairly spring-like of late. At least it was until this morning when what did I see outside my window but snow and lots of it! Of course, Zurich weather being the fickle mistress that she is, the sun has already emerged and banished those clouds back to the wintry hell from whence they came. I’m not sure whether that bolsters my claim to being born on the first of spring or hurts it!

I had forgotten how cheesy the magic-drugs analogy was on season 6 of Buffy… but otherwise the season’s better than I remembered.

If you had asked me to predict what foods I would miss here in Switzerland, I might have guessed Mexican, or bagels. But I would never in a million years have guessed Nilla Wafers. And yet, sure enough, what did I wake up with a craving for? In general, the variety and quality of wholesome, nutritional food here in der Schweiz is pretty good, but in terms of crappy snack food, they come up short. What Swiss offering can compete with the legendary empty calorieness of a Twinkie, or a Hostess Cupcake? How can paprika and plain potato chips hope to prevail — all by their lonesome! — against the massive onslaught of different flavors available in the U.S.? No, I’m afraid there’s no contest! When it comes to snack food, I’m a true patriot.

I was listening to “Help!” today when I remembered one of my all-time favorite Beatles songs: “You Like Me Too Much and I Like You!” Looking at the chords in my handy fake book, I see it’s written by George Harrison. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened: he must be my favorite songwriter of the Fab 5, despite being far less famous. I admit that he didn’t pen any of the epic Beatles tunes (with the possible exception of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), but nonetheless his songs always have a certain quality that I like. They are often fairly sparse and simple-seeming, but with a quirkiness that I find very appealing. Hard to put my finger on it.