sey085

As I may have hinted at a couple of times before, Switzerland is an expensive place. If you go to a typical store and look for a typical item (say, a trash can or a bag of potatoes), odds are you will have to pay at least 50% more than you would for a similar item in the US. Actually, that isn't exactly true. For certain things (mainly vegetables and fruits), this is definitely true. For household items and similar things, the real problem is finding "graduate-student" quality items; typically the cheapest item a store will carry will be significantly nicer or better than you really want. For example, the first things I needed to buy when I got my first apartment were towels and a floor mat. After a lot of searching, I found a two-pack of white bath towels on sale for 30 CHF and the cheapest floor mat I could find cost 40 CHF. In the US, you could go to your local Target, and probably find two (not particularly great quality) towels for at most $10 each, and I'...

As I sort of hinted at in an earlier post, finding an apartment in Lausanne has been a difficult task. When I was planning this little sojourn to Switzerland, I figured that a week or two ought to be ample time to find an apartment, a bank account, a cell phone, etc. I had heard some rumors about the excesses of red tape here, and I knew that there was a housing shortage far away in metropolitan Geneva, but I thought that my prodigious talent at bureaucracy would rule the day and I would be fine. Oh, how naïve I was those many days ago. Without going through more boring details, the bottom line is that at present I am living in what can only be described as the last available apartment in Lausanne. I got the last available room in the only furnished apartment building in the city that had any vacancy whatsoever. Let me describe it to you. I live at Avenue de Menthon 16, in the "Studio-Cité" furnished apartment building. It is in the neighborhood known as "La cité,...