Z is for Zürich

Happy Zürich. Photo by me

Bern may technically be the capital of Switzerland, but Zürich is the largest city. It is 2000 years old this year but was called Turicum back then. It's the wealthiest city in Europe and has been rated the city with the best quality of life in the world in several surveys (this in addition to Switzerland being named the happiest country in the world last week; so Zürich is the most pleasant city in the happiest country - - and full of banks.) Zürich was the capital back on and off throughout Swiss history (ever-changing throughout those wars that I wrote about in previous posts.)
Zürich's parliament has been majority left for the past few years. Our mayor is a member of the social democrat party and she's been leading the city for 6 years. It's one of the leading cities in protecting the climate, as of a 2008 referendum that promises to reduce the carbon footprint of each resident by one tonne by 2050. This will be achieved with new hospital policies, new bike-only areas, research projects on renewable energy and an ever-evolving public transport system.
Zürich's official language is (Swiss) German and as of 2008, the first language taught in schools after German is no longer French (one of the country's four languages) but English. As an native-English speaking immigrant, I'm not so thrilled about this. This might be because I currently teach english to all those adults who learned French and / or Italian at school, but also because I love that Switzerland is multilingual and am always mildly disappointed when I hear people from different linguistic areas of Switzerland reverting to speaking English with one another.