1.5 million down, half a million to go

Hi! Thought you'd all like to know my to-do list is shaping up quite nicely. Things are getting finished up and checked off and in no time at all I'll be on a train skipping town! I'm flying out of Zurich for the first time. In fact, this will be my first time in Zurich at all. Do airports count though? Probably not.

Anyway, I'm writing this post partly to inform you that in my next post, I might include music...So in case it would annoy you to stumble across that unexpectedly, consider yourself forewarned.

We have had splendid weather this weekend! Yesterday I took a break from packing to go swimming at Birsköpfli with a friend from school. First, we had to go swimsuit shopping, cuz I didn't have one here. I've decided that from now on, I'm always going to do my swimsuit shopping on the way to swimming. A little pressure makes the decision ten times easier. I picked a suit and shorts probably within 20 minutes--record swimsuit shopping time I'm pretty sure. So I bought my suit and changed at the store and then we hoofed it across town through crowds of Orange soccer fans toward the pool, since we had been told the river-access place for swimming was closed during the games. The pool was closed too, but a nice traffic control guy pointed us toward Birsköpfli and off we went. Swimming in the river beats the pool anyway. We had to ask directions a couple times, and that proved to be a fiasco. We knew we were going to get lousy directions when people asked if Claudia could please speak High German (one guy thought we were looking for beers). We ended up walking almost 2 hours, bumping into a classmate, stopping for ice cream, and fully giving up before we happened across the swimming hole. By that time it was 5 o'clock, so we waded in and cooled down but didn't really swim, per se. It's a nice place though! Kind of a lot of people, but still not too bad, and it was nice to spend some time with Claudia.

Ok, I was mostly just posting to remind all you lucky Oregonians that we get to see each other in as few as TWO days! Just two days! Woohooo! :)