Woke up around 11:30
Answered messages, went downstairs and read about Haskell. Saw Juyoung on her way out to show a friend around Zurich.
Met Navi and Alex for lunch at an expensive (by US standards) but tasty Chinese restaurant. After that, we walked around the Aldstadt (Old Town) which was beautiful.
I felt like wandering around on my own so I left Navi and Alex, who were planning to get their half-fare cards at the station, and kibitzed on an epic chess match!
These fellows were pros at playing on the big board and slid the pieces around with their feet. Both the players and kibitzers were like players and kibitzers everywhere :D The players were intense, brooding, and given to egotistical cackles and remarks on the one hand, and griping and swearing on the other. I heard a lot of the German word for s**t, which incidentally was about the third word I learned in German (from my grandma, who used it as a polite swear word in the States).
I also caught some snippets of language, like “damme” for queen (I guess of Italian origin) and nehme, which I’d just learned (the German word for “take”). I understood a lot of what was going on in the familiar context, which was neat. I even predicted a tricky tactical move :D
After all this, I wandered down to the lake, then to the gym after noting that Aldi’s was closed (sad). Again, the main gym was occupied, by some sort of crazy mass hallucination cardio with organ music, so I ran on the elliptical like the shades were chasing me, then headed back to Culmann for a shower. Struggled through scheduling classes to sit in on, which was an exhausting mix of catalog-combing and calendar-copying. When that was done, I had the most amazing hot pizza, a take and bakc from Aldi’s. Then I played a litte foosball, wrote this log, and crashed.