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This summer I have a 3-month break in my PhD to do an internship with Google in Zurich. Time flies, 4 weeks are over now, but already this first part has been so great experience that I have to write my first ever blog about it :)  Free Food I am still trying to get used to number one benefit, free food the whole day, you can see on the right that a lunch with main, pancakes, freshly sueezed orange juice and fruit-chocolate dessert can compete even with lunches at Merton. To eat Lindt chocolates, or drinking coke all the time would not be the best choice for the health, but to have it occasionally is nice :) Especially when I compare it with situation in UK, when sometimes there is nothing to eat. It is gossiped that avarage new employee get extra 5 to 7 kg in the first month. We will see if I succeed to avoid it.

 Switzerland and Zurich

Definitely the country with the highest living standard from the ones I visited so far. No demaged building, many luxurious cars, everything cost approximately 2-3 times as much as in UK. Trains, trams, ... everything is integrated, goes often and on time. Infromation is basically always in German, French, Italian and English at the same time. People can even usually speak 2 or 3 of these languages (DE, FR, EN) -- and I was told, but don't know if it is true, than in higher society when a German Swiss meets a French Swiss, they both speak their own language. German is Swiss German, so even born Germans have problems to understand it, however everything is written in "normal" German, so I try to read morning and evening free newspaper when I commute. Moreover, the next week I shall join my German classes, so finally I might learn zu sprechen. The city of Zurich itself has a beatiful lake and scenery (it is the real "Mountatin View"), I especially recommend to visit it when it is sunny and take the boat.

 Alps

Two weeks ago Dano visited Spilik in Lausanne and then we went for a two-day trip to Alps. Scenery was beatiful, very nice weather on Saturday, but rain and strong wind on Sunday. I did especially like many waterfalls and we touched snow as well. We slept in cottage slightly over 2000m to finally reach Arpelistock (3035), which was my and Dano's altitude record (when cable cars and planes don't count). If you like mountains, Switzerland is country for you. Pictures are worth thousand words:

and I am already looking forward to this Sunday's hike with fellow interns to the five lakes in Mount Pizol.

Thanks God Its Friday Friday 5pm, in the whole building it starts to play loud celebration music. It has surprised me a lot the first time. It is the way to call everyone down to the Milliway restaurant to TGIF, to have some beer, wine, Q&As and to welcome Nooglers (new googlers who joined that week). Others make fun of them. They have to slide down the slide to the restaurant, there is a presentation slide about them and we also got hats! There are some finishing their bachelors and many doing masters or PhD now. Zurich office is truly international, and so are all interns - from US, UK, Romania, Poland, Serbia, Egypt, Iraq, .. -- and of course Slovakia, with the best interns per capita ratio!

 The Office

There are more than 700 software engineers and also around 60 interns, so it was easy to find friends. Except eating together and having trips in and around Zurich, we often go to one of the game-rooms, where we can relax during the working day - to play table-tennis, table football, pool, guitar-hero, etc. There are even football and frisbee games once a week during lunch time!  See some photos of other interesting rooms below, mini-kitchens in style of joungle, sky lounge, library, then the water lounge - the darker room where you can lie in the arm-chair and watch aquariums:

That's for today. The next time I will try to bring some insight to Google culture, how is it to do things at scale (with thousands of computers and datacenters around the world), how exciting it is to see all the plans for the next months and also to be able to try all the features long before they go public. And what do I do there? It is confidential for now, but if it works out well, all your search queries will use my code;)

Few Swiss facts:

• Prices: coke in vending machine 3 eur, cheeseburger in MacDonalds 3 eur, flat (3-rooms) 400.000 eur
• People: compenent and helpful, more reserved and sometimes openly don't like foreigners.
• Long cinema break in the middle of the movie to let people go to toilets and buy new refreshments.
• American citizens are not allowed to open bank accounts in UBS and Credit Suisse since it is ineffective for the banks to provide information about Americans' accounts to their government.