Ein suuberes Züri

Zurich is nice but too rich. High tech hand dryers, automatically moving plastic foils under the toilet seats... Let me sketch a toilet in a funky bar. You get downstairs and it looks messy. Ugly tags on the grey wall. Yet the distances between the tags are regular. Instead of urine, you smeel the synthetic scent of a flower which is just too pink and fluffy for the grim ambience they try to set. Zurich is full of such examples. The streets are too tidy, the trams too shiny, the old buildings are cleaned to recently. Even the river is crystal clear. You can go price checking. Supermarkets, show windows, restaurants... I recommend you visit a trainstation and ask for the price for a trip to the nearest village. Hilarious experience. Or you can just go drink a coffee and pretend you're a millionaire.

I am here to visit Renske. Of all my study mates I have known her longest and from most different sides. Seven years of partying, cooking and talking together. Irregular at first, but our friendship grew into a set of rituals: fixed daily and weekly meetings which could be got out of only with a good excuse. For how I know her Renske has two main behavioural ways. On the one hand she highly appreciates the known, where she likes to stick to the same regular and overseeable pattern as much as possible. I recognize that side of her in myself. But at the same time she continously looks for new wolds to explore, new daring activties and new thrills. A loneliness in her accentuates a need for deep recognition by friends and family. It is a need to be carried away by a love to which she feels a sense of revolt. I have that same revolt. Yet we slowly learned to rely on this friendship.

Renske has lived in her new house for a week. In a posh neighbourhood. I find it equally sterile as the city. Slightly uncomfortable in contrast to the outside life I lived in the previous weeks. The housemates here are disconnected. I can tell by Renskes confusion that she is not yet entirely settled. She doesn't want to move for now. Her room looks good. Spatious and light and filled with her items. I presume it just takes time before her spirit fills this place.

While she works during daytime, I explore the city and find myself drawing and writing along the glowing turqoise river. I drink a good old non-light Rivella. A girl from Romania gives me company. She is sad, because her boyfriend broke up with her yesterday. Beautiful meeting between the two sides of a coin.

At night we celebrate old and new meetings with diamond beers. France awaits.