Edit: Photos of our apartment (pre-furniture) are now available! No mum, it’s not still that tidy

There was a funny smell of burning, but I presumed it would pass. As I turned to go back to the sitting room for a few minutes, the smell continued, and intensified. I looked back at the oven, wondering what could be causing the smell… Could there possibly be some (shock, horror!) crumbs, hidden somewhere behind the dazzling clean oven fittings? Orange, I thought. Yellow, I thought. Those don’t belong there… Flames! What on earth?! The oven’s on fire!

Actually, not quite. Just the baking parchment, burnt in a nice pizza-sized circle in the bottom of the baking tray. Stephen put out the flames without destroying my pizza, and we cleaned up the ash. And so we come to “Weird things about Switzerland #203: Baking parchment that goes on fire when you put it in the oven”.

I was a little bit nervous about landing in Switzerland on a Sunday – getting keys to a new place on a Sunday can be tricky sometimes, and my experience of Munich was that you could really write off Sunday altogether when it came to any kind of administrivia. I didn’t expect Zurich to be a whole lot different, really. But I checked with the relocation co-ordinator, who assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem. When she gave me step-by-step instructions on where to go and how to get the keys, I stopped worrying. I looked up the street addresses on Google Maps, and all seemed to be dandy.

Yesterday afternoon, we landed in Zurich. Hailing a cab was no problem – and the driver was lovely. He gave us a guide to Zurich, and wished us luck in our househunting. He even turned off the meter when we arrived at the right street, and then spent ten minutes helping us locate #71. All in all, a great experience. Until we got to the door of #71, only to find it locked, with no indication of where or how one might procure keys. The apartment number that we’d been given confused the very helpful local who we flagged down – there are no three-digit apartment numbers here, he assured us. Without a name, we could have tried every buzzer in the building, but there was no guarantee that was going to get us anywhere, so we decided to leave the residents in peace. All of the names looked like personal names anyway – they all had initials, and no AGs or GmbHs to be seen.

We headed over to #69a, where my apartment was supposed to be – and yes, my name was on the buzzer of what we decided might be Apt 15. Definitely not the other three-digit number we’d been given then. There was nothing useful to be found in my mailbox – newspapers dating back to March, and a pile of junk mail that would constitute a reasonable start to the Second Tower of Babel.

After talking to a couple of answering machines, and hanging up on a few more, we decided to give up on trying to talk to the relocation people, and phoned a lovely Lady Google. She sounded suitably shocked, didn’t at all seem to mind us phoning such a rather bizarre issue on a Sunday evening, and promptly booked us in to a hotel near Google – even sending a taxi to pick us up. Thank you Lady Google!

And now, we head out to start the hunt for our very own apartment. Things can only get better, right?!

Some quick answers to the questions I keep getting asked:

• I’ll be starting work as a Technical Writer in Google Zurich, and Stephen will be continuing the job he’s currently doing, from a new location. A technical writer is, according to Wikipedia, “a professional writer who designs, creates, maintains, and updates technical documentation”. I describe my line of work as translating between geek and English.
• Yes, the photos you’ve seen of the office are real – it has a fireman’s pole, and a slide, and meeting rooms that look like anything but. No, neither of us speak French or Swiss, but I speak reasonable High German, and if my experience in Munich is anything to go by, we’ll survive just fine with English anyway.
• We’re planning on being there for “a while”. We don’t really know how long just yet. It could be three years, or five, or fifty. Probably somewhere in the single digits, but we’ll see how it goes.
• Google have provided us with a generous relocation package, and the nice men will be coming to take our stuff away this time next week. Accommodation will be provided initially, as well as assistance in finding our own place.

If you’re around, we’re having a barbeque at my parents’ house on Saturday, starting around 4pm-ish. If you need directions, please let me know. If you didn’t get told about the date previously, sorry for the short notice, and please don’t worry if you can’t make it. We’re leaving, but Zurich really isn’t that far. You can come and visit us if you like, and I’ve already got my tickets booked for my first trip back home.