Car Rental

A good piece of advice from the pregnancy books Lionel and I use for toilet reading suggest that we take a trial drive to the hospital prior to D-Day. With that in mind, Lionel booked a car last Saturday morning to give the route a try. Of course, we couldn't just go to the hospital and back, could we?

So he took a 4 hour booking and we planned to do the hospital drive, to IKEA (for the umpteenth time) to get Gaby's changing table, and to the hypermart, Coop, located in the same warehousy kind of area of Dietlikon.

Mobility Car-Sharing

Mobility is a massive car sharing company here that has stations all over Zurich with one to a few cars in each station. The closest one to us, with just one car, is but a five minute walk from our home. Even then, there are another three within a couple of bus stops. While Mobility carries several sizes and models of cars, all their cars are red. (So you probably do not want to get a red car here in Zurich, just as how we won't get a white Mercedes in Singapore because it screams out "Taxi!")

With his university, Lionel got a three-month free membership with Mobility. However, he had to get his Singapore driver's license converted to a Swiss one before he could take up this membership.

Getting a Swiss Driver's License

Besides an eye test that had really funky components to them, there was no other test we had to take. (Both of us decided to convert our license because we have to do it within a year of our arrival, otherwise, we would have to take the local test to get a Swiss license.)
It cost us each:

• 12 francs for the eye test
• About 3 francs worth of stamps to send in documents when they came ping-ponging back at us
• 30 francs to the Kreisburo (the office in-charge of each neighbourhood) for a useless piece of certification which was still not what the driving office wanted
• 85 francs for the administration's paperwork

That totals up to 130 francs for each of our license.

Oh, and they seized our Singapore licenses upon our application, returning them by normal (not even registered) mail only when our new Swiss license comes. And see what they stickered to my Singapore license?

Singapore license above, Swiss license below

Pardon the digression, and back to the car rental.

I am amazed at the technology this company uses. The car is just left sitting in a Mobility labelled parking lot. alongside other normal car lots. There is no office or personnel taking care of it. How then do you collect and drop keys off? Ah, this is where that red sticker on the bottom of the windscreen is for.

Lionel flashes his university matriculation card in front of what looks like a sticker -- and Tadaa! The car unlocks itself. This is the same mechanism used to lock the car as well.

Next, we enter the reasonably clean car and a screen from the rearview mirror unfolds downwards:

Here, information about our booking and journey is shown. When the engine starts, the screen automatically folds back under the mirror, so that you do not get a chance to fiddle with it while driving.

So here we are, sitting in the car. I am taking in the feeling of being in a car again after some nine weeks of being carless while Lionel, in his usual engineer-mode efficient chop-chop self, is immediately fumbling around, looking for the car key. The glove compartment? The side pockets at the door? Under the hand brake? Nope, nope and nope.

Then Lionel suddenly feels around the steering wheel, and realises there is no key hole for the engine.

Hehe... that's when I *very I'm-so-proud-of-myself-ly* spot the "Start button" beneath the radio and aircon controls.

Seriously, you press this button and the engine starts up sans the "ee hee hee sputter sputter" sound. Very clean, very efficient. The quiet and inconspicuous engine start-up proved really face-saving when our engine died because Lionel was getting used to handling a manual car all over again.

It was so nerve-wrecking for Lionel getting us from one point to another initially. There were so many things to be alert to:

• As mentioned, the car we rented was a manual one. And it is hard to remember to press on, half release, the clutch when moving off, changing gear, and braking.
• Cars here are left-hand drive so besides the change in driver's perspective, one also has to get used to the roads being mirror image in orientation.
• We have never driven or travelled much here. The tram routes are slightly different from the car roads. So it is like driving in a whole new terrain.
• When crossing some junctions, you need to look out for trams coming from in front or behind you. They always get priority no matter what colour your traffic light flashes you.
• The lanes here are super narrow! Trams can past you with just a pen's length allowance.
• The traffic lights are super high up. I think they were made for child or short drivers, because you had to lean forward and squint up to keep an eye on the changing lights.

Traffic lights directly above the windscreen

By the time we arrived at IKEA, Lionel emerged from the car with two triumphant dark grey patches of armpit sweat on his fitting T-shirt. (Did I mention Lionel has lost his paunch here with all the expensive outside food and hence the healthy homecooked food we've been having? So now he has moved one belt hole back and he can wear his tighter fitting T-shirts again. Ooh, I like.....!)

I am so glad I was not the one driving. I would have probably got my 130-franc driving license revoked after knocking someone down at the crossing, crashing backwards when my engine dies while moving off a slope, scraping the car on a tram, mounting eight curbs as I make my turns with poor spatial judgment, turning into a lane and finding myself facing another car head-on twice or thrice, not moving off when the light turns green, lose my way for three out of the 4 hours, and have two trams crash into me.

Anyhow, guess how much our very well-planned 4 hours and 23km cost us? Just 30 Francs! And no add-ons like petrol or insurance!

We were pleasantly surprised, and now we think we may not get a car here in the end. Afterall, on weekdays, it is way easier for Lionel to take a single tram that gets him from our home to his office in under 20 minutes.  And the Clementi Central equivalent for my grocery shopping is just three bus stops away, with the return bus stopping right in front of our doorstep. So if it is just weekends that we MAY want a car, then there is no point sinking money into the purchase of a car (even if they can be three times cheaper than in Singapore), to pay a monthly carpark rental fee, and to pay for the car's regular maintenance.

We're going to rent a car again perhaps in two week's time to do the hospital route once more. This time, Lionel can focus on the route instead of the driving, and do without the sweat.

Our Rental Apartment

Lionel and I, in spite of the open, and more latent, forms of biasness against our Asian race and lack of German speaking abilities, have been offered a lovely apartment after just 4 apartment viewings in a week. From what we have heard, it would have taken most people 1-2 months waiting to get an offer in space crunch Zurich. The government is not building more residential areas to, I suspect, maintain the spaciousness and living quality of the city. (Overcrowding is something that many Singaporeans are complaining of.)

Perhaps it was my pregnant belly that screamed we didn't have much time to source for an apartment, and brought on the sympathies. Perhaps it was Lionel's benign Golden Retriever disposition that made us an attractive tenant. Perhaps the existing tenant showing us the flat put in a good word for us. Perhaps we were the only goons who were interested in that apartment. Whatever it is, there is something really "heng" ("lucky beyond a reasonable doubt" in the dialect Hokkien) about being with Lionel Heng.

Of all four apartments we viewed, we had decided that this one sitting on the first level (which means one floor of stairs to climb) was the best suited to our needs.

In Zurich, most apartments share laundering facilities. Dishwashers (another marvellous invention I shall rave about in a separate entry) are more a basic component of a home than a washing machine. That means for a small block of apartments, there usually is, at the basement, one or two sets of washing machines and dryers. And from what we have observed from the apartments we viewed, there usually is a schedule. It is quite common that each household is allocated two laundry days in an entire month -- any additional load and you may need to make reservations in advanced (if there are still empty slots).

So imagine our horror at discovering this laundry culture here. In Singapore, just Lionel and I have enough changes to do our laundry about three times a week. What more with baby coming along with her reusable diapers that we would have to change at least 6 times a day, and cutesy clothes soiled hourly with milk and drool.

This apartment in Schwamendingenstrasse (very cute sounding name if you actually read it out loud -- almost sounds like word from a child with a lisp) was the only apartment that made me feel completely at ease as a full-time housewife. It has a washing machine and dryer included in the kitchen. The kitchen was freshly renovated just a year ago too. Lovely! -- considering that my full-time homemaker status requires me to prepare all our meals everyday and I foresee myself spending half my waking hours in the kitchen.

Here is the street we will be living on.

Our bedroom faces the bus stop -- that was my only reservation about taking this place (not that we had much choice anyway; we were told to just grab anything that we got offered). However, I suppose the sound of gentle braking and the pssst.. of the bus letting its suspension go when it stops will only be a bother in summer when we like our windows opened. Once winter comes, the double glazed windows will be pretty shut most of the time.

Oh, and this apartment is the only one with a real fireplace -- like the kind where you burn real wood and the smoke goes up a chimney. Grin... We cannot wait to try that out in the bitter cold of winter, after we get a day's worth of fire insurance first, says Lionel.

More pictures to come when we have our apartment filled with budget furniture from IKEA and this even cheaper place called Conforama.

$Money $Money $Money

Day 11 in Zurich

In Singapore, our dual income as graduates settles us very comfortably in our homeland. In addition, the monthly instalments of our HDB flat (government housing that more than 80% of Singaporeans live in) come directly from our CPF (something like a compulsory retirement savings plan where about 20% of our pay ends up under the government’s lock and key till we hit the retirement age defined by them, or otherwise for repaying our housing loan). So that leaves our cash pretty much free. Supermarkets are affordable, and eating out even more affordable and convenient if it is just the two of us. Then there are the two mummies’ condominium facilities we can run to for a swim or gym workout, or the mother-in-law’s place for dinner twice a week. We were also fortunate to have been spoilt with a car Lionel’s dad got him. While we were not entirely flamboyant with our spending, there has never been a real need for tight budgeting either.

But oh, how different it is here. To begin with, I, being the accompanying keychain spouse, am no longer working and drawing an income, but yet continuing to require food, shelter, clothing, toilet paper and love. Although Lionel gets his full salary and an overseas allowance, that is just enough to feed, shelter and move the two of us about in Zurich – that is if we are extremely cautious about our spending. Furthermore, with our baby girl due in October, it’s 2.5 of us now, and soon to be three mouths to feed, three bodies to clothe, and according to one of the baby books, some 5000 diapers to purchase and pollute the land with.

The 10,000CHF cash that we nervously carried over from Singapore sublimated in less than two weeks. Here is how our five-figure sum, which we thought would have been a comfortable amount, magically disappeared:

• 2x one-year tram/bus passes: 2 x 693 = (1386)
• 2x three-year half-fare passes which allow us to buy other tickets that our current pass doesn’t cover for half the price: 2 x 350 = (700)
• One month’s rent of the 22 square metre serviced apartment that sits five levels above ground, with no lift (2380)
• One month of intensive German class for me. The class runs two hours every weekday for four weeks (650)
• One month’s rent for the more permanent two-bedroom apartment we are very lucky to get selected for (2210)
• And the corresponding deposit for this apartment (3100)

There! These are the big ticket items sans food and daily necessities. These already add up to 10,426 Swiss Francs (CHF). In case you’re wondering, the exchange rate loosely translates to 1CHF to S$1.25. So 10,000CHF here would be worth about S$12,500.

Now that we're 10,000CHF poorer, we still have got to set up our home here all over again – furnishing our rental apartment with the bare and baby necessities. Well, luckily renovations are not the norm here and our status as a poor student’s nuclear family affords us no pressure to prettify our home with expensive aesthetics.