Landed in Paradise

Dear friends,

I finally arrived in Basel! Weather is so nice here and the city is very pretty. It is my first time to visit Switzerland and I've come to love this small country already. My flight from Tokyo to Basel ended up in Zurich (because Basel airport is shared by France and Switzerland and I happened to fly with Air France, which is located in the French side of the airport) and I took a train to get to Basel. It was the most pleasant train ride I've ever had! I was like Alice in the Wonderland, sometimes I was moving up to a hill, sometimes I was moving down to a valley, with pretty country houses and endless green pastures always in the background. The earth in Switzerland is a vast botanic garden. Just imagine the following photo multiplied by a billion times until the whole earth is covered with it...

I'm still staying in a hotel near my company. In this photo of the city overview, you see the city is divided by the Rhine River. If you can find a bridge in the very right side of the photo, my hotel is located at the bottom side of the river, just right by the river actually. You can also see a white chimney near the bridge, that's where the company campus is, the chimney is for the production plant there. The company campus is huge, my office is located just across the bridge from my hotel, with a nice view of the Rhine.

If I walk out from my hotel and walk towards the river, as I do every morning on my way to work, this would be a typical scene in front of my eyes:

The sky is always blue, nearly transparent, and the water is as green as jade. It is as peaceful as heaven, though I can not imagine exactly what heaven is like. :p

So life here is very different from Tokyo. It is like a silent movie of all the beautiful things rolling very slowly. Sometimes when I walked along the river I felt like dreaming, or dream-walking. It has already become very hard to believe that I used to have a life filled with events in a metropolitan only last week! Tokyo and everyone in it is indeed unforgettable, but now I feel that all my past life is rather a movie I watched, or a book I ever read, that remains in my memory like someone else's experience than my own experience. Nevertheless, I know my experience was real. I know I had been to a wonderful place called Tokyo and had met wonderful people that I'll remembe all my life.

I'd been working under jet lag this week so haven't had many chance to explore the city. People here are very nice and kind. The city is quite international probably because of the two big pharmaceutical companies here, lots of German and French people and of course Swiss as well. I'm thankful that God has again given me such a friendly work environment, all my coworkers are extremely nice. My mentor has started a 6 months training program for me -- even though I'm just a contractor and my contract period is only 6 months..

I'm going to see more of the city during the weekend and I will update more photos. Thank God again that He has prepared my way here, He will never let me be alone. I'm already making friends here and I haven't even been to church yet! A friend is coming from Germany to visit me tomorrow (yes already!) and I'm planning to take her to church on Sunday morning. I haven't decided which church to go though, not many choices of English-speaking international churches here and they are small. But I trust God will give me guidence, as He has never failed to do so.

Missing you all,

YSIC, mindy