On October 1, 1968, we finally arrived in Zürich by airplane, very delayed, where we were to stay for a year. Our Pan American* flight that was supposed to land in Zürich experienced engine trouble half way over the Atlantic and decided to make an emergency landing in London. Then the mess began as there was no flight to Zürich in any reasonable time. After a long period of enquiry, it was decided that we should fly to Hamburg, Germany, where there were lots of flights to our destination. So we got to Hamburg where the clerk at the reservations counter looked at our tickets and said, “Why are you here?” Of course we had to tell the whole story. He did get us on a very nice and efficient flight to Zürich on the German Lufthansa Airlines. I called my friend Prof. Dr. Marc Grünenfelder to come and rescue us, which in due time he did.
On the drive to our apartment on the Niederdorfstrasse off of Hirschen Platz, I was disappointed to see a rather Medieval city and not chalets with loads of geraniums. Our apartment building fit the reality, made out of brick. As we moved into our apartment building, I noticed an aroma that reminded me of Japan, the only other foreign country I had been to other than an evening in Juarez, Mexico. After Marc left, we got a bit organized, and I decided to go up to the ETH (The official translation is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.). On the way up I noticed some nicely dressed ladies waiting for taxies. I made it up to the ETH by climbing the stairs up a high cliff. There was a building under construction, and I was shocked to see a workman up on high iron drinking from a large bottle of beer. I visited with my fellow scientists for an hour or two and returned to the apartment. On the way down these nicely dressed ladies were still waiting for taxies, and I thought, "Boy, taxi service must be awful here." It turns out that the Niederdorfstrasse is the “sin city” of Zürich. OK, I'm afraid I was very prudish and naive, and the ladies were “the ladies of the night.” It apparently showed because we lived on the Niederdorfstrasse for five months, and I was never propositioned. Finally on the last day before we left Zurich, my wife and I were walking down the Niederdorstrasse on a Sunday for one last time and a young lady did proposition me, right in front of my wife. I wonder if someone put her up to it?
As I returned to our apartment, again I smelled the aroma I associated with Japan. I thought it just must be that I was in a foreign country and assumed the aromas were Japanese. It turned out, however, that there was a Chinese restaurant on the floor below our apartment that was the source of the aromas.
Our apartment was curious in that the “kitchen” was in the bathroom. There was a two burner hotplate on top of a counter with a tiny refrigerator over the bidet. The apartment, it turns out, was a converted hotel room.
We decided to eat out and went in search of a restaurant. There were quite a few, and the one we selected was the Swartzer Adler where I was introduced to the Swiss dish of geschnetzeltes kalbsfleish, strips of veal in a cream sauce with mushrooms and white wine. I also had some of the pear brandy that was very good. It was an excellent beginning.
The next night we were invited to a party and people would ask where we were staying. When we would tell them, they would say, “I hope you are not walking around there at night.” They seemed to think that half the people walking there at night were knifed and the other half beat up. However, in our five months living there we saw no such event or holdups. The worst I saw was one drunk push another in a parade for the Fasnacht carnival. In fact the worst sin we experienced there was the men coming out of the bars at midnight closing and banging on the garbage cans. Then they would do this again when leaving the “ladies” rooms at about 1:00 AM. The church bells of Praediger Kirche on Hirschen Platz would ring at 6:00 AM. Getting adequate sleep was difficult. To avoid all this night noise, we eventually moved after five months.
* I always seemed to experience trouble of some sort going at least one way on Pan American Airways so that I nicknamed it The Pits Airline.
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