Zürich

"Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice."

• Marco Polo to Kublai Khan

Winter

These are my personal photos of Zürich, which is a city on a lake in central Switzerland and my home. I am not a good photographer and these are not great photos. Nor do they represent everything about this place.

Spring

Water

Boats zig-zag the lake between Zürich and about a dozen other towns. There are, of course, trains, but boats were here first by about a thousand years.

The lake is also great for swimming.

And it has room for everything else that won't fit on dry land.

Limmat is the bigger of Zürich's two (three, if you count the canal) rivers.

You can swim in Limmat almost everywhere.

Sihl, the other river, is shallow. You can follow it on foot all the way, up the river valley, to the lake and monastery at Einsiedeln.

The canal that connects the lake and the river Sihl is basically a third, very short river.

The canal - Schanzengraben - is set up for water sports, swimming and slow boat rides.

Life

Zürich is my favorite place in the world.

I like its rhythm, which is the rhythm of a summer afternoon.

Walking around random streets always lifts my mood.

Animals

There's a little mouse that lives at my local beergarden.

Geese will mess you up. Don't f$#!k with geese.

Two blocks from where I used to live, near the university, an apartment building had a backyard with two pet pigs.

Zürich's population of cats do whatever they please. I don't have good photos of the famous cat ladders of Zürich, but Nat Geo does.

Autumn

Many things I failed to get a photo of don't exist anymore. In the 12 year that I've lived here, Zürich's population grew by about 30%. That's enough to bring some changes.

Gone Forever

Like every other great city, Zürich has a housing shortage. As one of the 30% of Zürich's population who have moved here lately, I am a part of this problem. Some of these places closing or moving out of the city are therefore partly my fault.

These are some of the places in Zürich that I miss and don't have pictures of:

• The Brocki near Wiedikon that closed years ago.
• The Koch Areal
• The time when the biggest department store on Bahnhofstrasse was a 5-level bookshop (now a Zara)
• The original Minimum

It's an odd feeling that just your existence in the place you love has made it in some ways worse.

But I have also been to the places people are moving from and they're on the whole not better off. The city I am from is another one with massive growth and I like it better for that.

Summer

Changes

I moved to Zurich for a job, in October 2013. The streets that are familiar to me now were then a mess, and I got lost on my first day of walking around. I don't remember taking this picture, which is the oldest one I have of Zurich. But looking at it now, I know exactly where I was stood. I bought my Yamaha at a music store across the street from this spot.

From some of the other pictures I took on that day, I know that I took the stairs down to the river and then turned left and walked to the lake. Then I walked to Bürkliplatz and turned back North. I took the last picture that day - of a parking meter, for some reason - at Talacker. After that I must have taken tram number 11 back back up the hill to my temp housing and started looking online for places to rent.