Zurich: The city that prides itself on being ordinary.

[RandySF]

NOTE: I want to live there.

The most sincere compliment you could pay Zurich is to describe it as one of the great bourgeois cities of the world. This might not, of course, seem like a compliment—the word “bourgeois” having become for many, since the outset of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century, a significant insult. “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom,” felt Gustave Flaubert, a standard utterance for a mid-19th-century French writer, for whom such disdain was as much a badge of one’s profession as having an affair with an actress and making a trip to the Orient. According to the Romantic value system, which today still dominates the Western imagination, to be bourgeois is synonymous with laboring under an obsession with money, safety, tradition, cleanliness, family, responsibility, prudishness, and (perhaps) bracing walks in the fresh air. Consequently, for about the last 200 years, few places in the Western world have been quite as deeply unfashionable as the city of Zurich.

Zurich is exotic. We normally associate the word “exotic” with camels and pyramids. But perhaps anything different and desirable deserves the word. What I find most exotic about the city is how gloriously boring everything is. No one is being killed by random gunshots, the streets are quiet, the parks are tidy, and, as everyone says (though you don’t see people trying), it is generally so clean you could eat your lunch off the pavement.

What most appeals to me about Zurich is the image of what is entailed in leading an “ordinary” life there. To lead an ordinary life in London is generally not an enviable proposition: “ordinary” hospitals, schools, housing estates, or restaurants are nearly always disappointing. There are, of course, great examples, but they are only for the very wealthy. London is not a bourgeois city. It’s a city of the rich and of the poor.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/24/alain-de-botton-relects-on-zurich.html

[gateley]

1. Sounds wonderful! It's now officially on my "political asylum" radar! :-) nt

[AndyTiedye]

8. Good Luck With That

Switzerland is beautiful, but it is perhaps the hardest country in the world to immigrate to.
Better have lots of money too, the Swiss Franc is at an all-time high w.r.t. the dollar.

[gateley]

10. Good thing it's just a fantasy, then. I wouldn't have the

money to move to Tacoma.

[KamaAina]

2. Zurich is perhaps the oldest inhabited place in Europe

inhabited since the Neolithic (New Stone) Age.

Perhaps it was the model for Bedrock. :-)

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. Zurich & the villages along the lake are the most wonderful places

Great transportation, beautiful scenery & people (why are the Swiss so attractive??). Housing is very expensive as a result &
it's very tough to become a citizen.

[RandySF]

5. My wife was there last year.

And she complained that public transportations is much more expensive than it is here.

[The_Casual_Observer]

7. Everything is much more expensive there.

[JPZenger]

4. Zurich must more sedate after tax evasion crackdown

I read an article about how there was much less flaunting of wealth in Zurich after the US, Germany and other countries cracked down on Swiss-sponsored tax evasion.

[AndyTiedye]

9. It Isn't All Sedate

When we were there, at one point we were walking down the street and heard yelling above us,
and a crash of breaking china or something.

As near as we could tell, couple of women seemed to be having a domestic disturbance, in which they were expressing
their displeasure with each other by throwing each others' dishes and the like out the window onto the street below.
We avoided the flying saucers and cups, but it did suggest that the Swiss are not always as staid as they are made out to be.

[phusion]

6. Almost half of Zurich residents identify as non-religious

"In the city of Zurich, at the end of 2010, 165,686 (or 45%) had no faith, did not respond, or identified with another confession, Catholics numbered 111,946 (30%), and members of the Swiss Reformed Church numbered 94,419 (or 25%) <34>"

Sign me up!!