Welcome to Wander We Go. I’m Alex.
I write about life in Zürich, travels throughout Europe, and musings on both.
All tagged expat life
2025 was a year of pushing boundaries—some successful, some less so. It started with a skiing disaster that left Raunaq with a torn ACL and ended with me confidently calling myself a hiking consultant without apologizing for it. In between, I explored ice caves inside a glacier, spent a nerve-wracking night alone in a snow-buried mountain hut, watched my parents step into my Swiss life for two precious weeks, and stood among 20,000 people at a turnip lantern parade (yes, really).
Running, at its essence, is simply the physical motion of putting one foot in front of the other. That’s all it is. Nothing more, nothing less. No matter your reason, find something that resonates with you, and let it carry you forward, one step at a time.
It was a huge year of growth and learning, with a whole lot of fun and adventure along the way. Some of these experiences involve discovering beautiful places Switzerland has to offer, but most, in fact, are about the different ways we began to really find our own place here.
A grab-bag of things I’ve have noticed about Swiss Life lately - from the way that the Swiss form lines (or lack thereof), to the gorgeous autumn colors, to an interesting observation between integration and assimilation.
Absinthe comes from the French region of Switzerland, in an area called Val-de-Travers, in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. It was produced here from the 18th century until 1910, when it was vilified, banned and bootlegged for nearly a century. Absinthe was re-legalized in Switzerland in 2005, and has slowly been making it’s revival. Today, around twenty microdistilleries produce absinthe throughout Val-de-Travers, and export many different types of the spirit all over Europe.
Moving to a new country is equally thrilling and terrifying. It’s an opportunity to call another country home, learn a new language, and foster your own independence. It also means you’ll be far away from friends and family, will be surrounded by a completely unfamiliar culture, and will need to build a whole new community from scratch. It’s exhilarating and exhausting and frustrating and adventurous and lonely and heart-burstingly full all at the same time.
Raunaq and I have been living in Zurich for over a year. Given that we hike a fair bit (in Switzerland and elsewhere), I thought to put together a “Swiss Hiking 101” guide for anyone interested in exploring this lovely country on foot. Generally, we hike moderately challenging to challenging trails, but if you are not an avid hiker, don’t despair. Every single mountain included in my hiking lists have trails for all abilities and interests, and no matter what you chose, it’s absolutely worth trying at least one hike while in Switzerland. It’s really a hiking paradise.
As we are approaching our one-year anniversary in July (“expatversary,” if you will), I started thinking about all of the things that really surprised me when we first moved to Switzerland. It’s actually a bit funny writing these out now, because as we have adapted to the Swiss lifestyle, we’ve simply gotten used to most of these things as a way of life. I’ve written about my unexpected favorites, things Switzerland does well, and things they could work on, so this list is a new mix of all three. Some affect my daily life, some don’t, some things I love and some still leave me a bit bewildered, but they all contradicted a previously held notion in some way.
