Out of order past: the beginning of the beginning

Thursday!~

So it was several weeks ago when I arrived and it took me about a week to make my first friends. I met Sara (second from the left) by bumping into her during lunch time near Rennweg, which is a place in the very heart of the shopping district of Zurich. She had originally approached me for her work, which was a fundraising job for disparate people in South America. Of course my German is horrible, and apparently her English was not so good, and oddly enough we ended up conversing in Spanish. Believe it or not, I made out alright and not just as a bumbling idiot. In the end we ended up trading numbers and made an appointment to joop later.

When I got off of work, I was running late, and my phone battery had died. Just my luck. However, I managed to remember exactly where she was working and what time she was getting off, thus I managed to scramble to my destination just in time. There I met two of her other friends, Sarah (second from the right) and Oliver. (first on the right) Luckily for me they spoke English quite well. We ended up going to this small pub that is next to the Sihl River. It was crowded and full of people enjoying the weather and their beers, so much so that we could not find a regular seat.

The patio area was elevated above the river on one side, with the adjoining pub next to it. We ended up maneuvering our way downhill next to the river, balancing our beers in an act that would have impressed the people from Cirque de Soleil. There we camped out next to the Sihl as I made an attempt to decipher the Swiss-German conversations, trying to pick up little nuances that would give me details into what they were talking about. I probably looked really confused like a monkey in space, but they were polite enough to explain, in English, what was going on.

The scenery was real green, but the river was a little low. The off thing was that someone at some point had gone out and spray-painted the rocks in the middle of the river that jutted up like pink and green droplets of candy. Odd, indeed. We were later joined by a couple of other friends' of Sara, Julia (center) and Sushi. (Yes, Sushi. on the right) I had to keep myself from looking too surprised, but I think I failed miserably. All of them were still in students at the university, and incredibly friendly and outgoing.

When it started getting a little to dark to see, and because of the amount of beer intake, a little to difficult to traverse the gravel hill that led down to the river, we decided to call it an evening. On our way out I noticed a sign for an Amp Fiddler concert here in Zurich. Oddly enough I had recently listened to his live set on Gilles Peterson's Worldwide, and it was totally dope. "Sweet" I think to myself, I'm totally going....!