I shall be back in Zurich, Switzerland after teaching two courses in Aachen. I shall be in the Microsoft Zurich offices meeting with some people there.
Zurich is an interesting town with a long history and much less visible devastation from the "war centuries" that one sees in most of Europe. Napoleon fought the Austrians in the area but the town itself was not attacked.
Zurich is on the Limat river and touches the long, skinny, deep lake Zurich. The lake is very clean and the water sports on it are fun.
My daughter Adinah (15) is blogging about her job in Zurich at http://adinahwyle.blogspot.com/ and she has some photographs there of swimming and speed-boating.
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Driving from Dusseldorf to Aachen, Sunday 20th July, 2008
The drive from Dusseldorf to Aachen is interesting. There are very many tiny cultivated fields and dozens of wind turbines generating electrical power. In Germany, apparantly if you generate power using a "renewable" energy source (wind, solar, hydro) the government will pay you 10x the normal price per kilowatt hour. So, for example, if you mount solar panels on your roof, it is more cost-effective if you pump the power into the grid and then pull power back out to run your house because you are paid 10x what it costs you.
There were a few areas of the highway where there was no speed limit but I did not go over 200 for more than a few kilometers because it was really scary and the roads were wet. There were crazies going very fast (about 240). The GPS systems navigated me to the hotel in downtown Aachen without a single wrong turn or difficulty. It is unfortunately very slow to drive in or out of the downtown Aachen area because the streets are narrow, one-way, and serpentine around the pedestrian-only zones. I cannot imagine trying to drive around Aachen without a GPS.
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