So, the reason that I haven’t been posting much about the whole Swiss thing, the last two or three weeks, is that I’ve been increasingly stressed out over still being stuck in a company-rented studio after more than a month—not that there’s anything wrong with it, but last weekend I calculated that (figuring from when I left Seattle), I’d been on the road, living out of a suitcase, for seventy days. I’m not sure whether that’s a record for me or not—the time, when I was fourteen, between when my family left San Diego and when we found a house in Tokyo must have been almost as long, if not longer—but the inability to completely unpack or completely relax, the slight but undeniable conditionality of any privacy I might have, was really starting to get to me. I had a couple of weekends here and there where I decided I wasn’t really up for anything but sitting on the couch playing video games, and at least one Sunday where I never left the studio or even got out of my bathrobe, but it’s only in the last week or two that the idea I should have moved to New York or LA or Tokyo has (however briefly) crossed my mind, or that I had to remind myself that Switzerland Is Not The Enemy.

(It’s nothing, really; not even as bad as I expected it to be before I came over. You should have seen what I thought of Tokyo that first year. But I destroyed those notebooks, so you can’t.)

But! All that’s over now. (And just in time, since someone else was expecting to move into the company studio Sunday.) I have an apartment.

Figure 1. The top balcony’s mine. And no, the building next door doesn’t actually curve like that.

Figure 1. Floor plan. Both of these pictures stolen from the real estate listing site, since apparently the cable for my digital camera wasn’t in my bag like I thought it was. More later.

The address, for those interested in such things: Hagentalerstrasse 15, CH-4055 Basel, Switzerland. (Apparently apartment numbers aren’t used here—perhaps because that would encourage having one’s mail delivered even when one hasn’t made one’s name known to the building owners. Those following along at home will also note the use of ‘ss’ instead of ‘ß’. You think that’s odd, you should see the way they spell actual Swiss German.)

Anyhow: I haven’t really slept in my own bed yet, since IKEA managed somehow to deliver some important parts of it—like the mattress—to someone else and say they can’t get me a replacement till Wednesday morning. (I picked up a sort of minimal futon for 30 francs to use in the interim.) And I don’t have a couch since I used up most of my furniture budget for this month on the bed.

But I have an apartment! So I guess I’m staying.