Where do I look for Zurich contracts?

[oracleslave]

contracting now in the same place for 3.5 years,

Part of the furniture by now. Where's the christmas do this year then?

[Sysman]

Well my wife has started me on Zuri-deutshe(?) lessons which seem to involve mainly her saying some gooblegook and then both her and the children laughing at me when I try to repeat it! Hmmmmm ...

Your best bet is to learn normal German first. There are Swiss German lessons available, but they demand a certain level of High German before they'll let you enrol.

So I take it you are just an English speaker. Any other advice you might have whenever you have some spare time would be much appeciated. Typical pitfalls, how to organise etc.. e.g. am I right in saying I don't start a company like here but instead become an employee of an agency (that seems to be what people are telling me).

Yep, you go the agency employee route. Since you are married to a Swiss national, you may have other options, but you probably want to get settled in and find out if you like the place before exercising those.

[Lewis]

Your best bet is to learn normal German first. There are Swiss German lessons available, but they demand a certain level of High German before they'll let you enrol.

Yes this is a big dilema for me. The problem is I'm pretty bad at foreign languages and learning both High German and Swiss German might be quite difficult. I thought I could start on one and move on to the other. I was thinking that for day to day living and socialising Swiss German would be more useful and so to learn that first. But I know that High German is used when writing and is a more useful language to know. I'm not sure what the best approach is. Do most people speak Swiss German in offices over High German?

[Lewis]

p.s. I am told there is quite a large US/UK expat community there now. We already have Swiss friends but a few friendly Uk people would be nice to know. How do you find it, are you friends from here or there or both?