My first impression of Zürich is that the city is absolutely gorgeous. The city has a small mountain town feel while still being a large city. The city wraps around the Lake Zürich with the oldest buildings being the closest to the point where the main river joins the lake and is surrounded on the outside by large hills. The city is a mixture of old mountain style homes and modern architecture which I feel accurately reflects my first impressions of Zürich. The city itself seems very young, but also very traditional. A lot of the activities in Zürich seem to be centered around the outdoors. Because it has been sunny the week I’ve been here, there are a lot of people outside hiking and swimming in the lake. There is an amazing program offered by the city where you can borrow a bike for free and use it for the day to ride around the lake and the city. One of the most overwhelming parts of living in Switzerland for me is that they have 4 official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. While Zürich is in a German speaking part of Switzerland the Swiss German dialect involves words from the other languages. Most German classes/books do not teach Swiss German making picking up the language more difficult. The intensive language course taught at the University of Zürich teaches Swiss German to exchange students, which is helpful.
Orientation for exchange students is about an hour. There are approximately 100 exchange students at the University of Zurich, not including those exchanging to ETH. Most of the orientation was taken up by information on mandatory health insurance. Switzerland requires that all people living in the country for more than 2 months have health insurance, which is very different from the USA. The rest of the things covered in orientation were lifestyle options. One of the big things covered was the healthy living activities available in Zürich. The University of Zürich is partnered with an organization that provides gym memberships as well as excursions to go skiing, hiking, surfing, and other sports. In general, orientation was an hour long basic introduction to resources available to exchange students in Zürich mainly focusing on those two topics. It wasn’t very informative regarding anything beyond what is required to live in Zürich.
