Ali – On the 15th of May we had to hand the keys to our fancy Zurich sublet back. We knew it was coming. Our central Zurich, 3 bedroom 3 bath flat was a fortuitous find on Sabbatical Homes.com where roving academics can exchange or rent houses for weird periods of time around the world. 
We rented the place site unseen from a couple doing a 2 year fellowship in Toronto for 4100 CHF per month including utilities. Now if you are like me, 4100 CHF sounds like a horrendous amount of cash. But go ahead and puruse the listings on a housing website and you quickly find out that this is standard…for like a studio apartment. The problem in Zurich is that there is relatively little stock to satisfy the large number of folk trying to rent. We heard horror stories about folk having to provide full financial statements and letters of reference in order to rent a place. One rental finder service I emailed told me to call a day before arriving and then they would get started.
That’s right. They wouldn’t deal with us prior to our immediate need for a place….mind you this was a service that we were going to pay thousands of dollars to for the assistance. Many folk told us it was so difficult to find housing that they recommended a relocation service. Become Local was one such service and for only 3600 CHF they would haul our butts around Zurich for 3 days to find a rental and settle into it.
However, we got lucky and instead simply had a nice Skype chat with the couple in Toronto and it was pretty much a done deal.
Another interesting thing to note about roving academics is they leave all their stuff behind. So we just moved into this couple’s fully furnished place and used all their stuff. Meanwhile, back in Baltimore, a lovely couple from California moved into our place (also found through Sabbatical homes.com) and is enjoying all our stuff. It’s an interesting process of letting go of your attachment to your stuff.
But alas now we are in subsidized university housing in a 2 bedroom, one bathroom flat with a shared laundry for $1800 CHF. It’s not bad but certainly screams ‘university housing!’ 
The university rents housing to visiting academics on a temporary basis because of the challenge of finding permanent housing. It solves the problem of “call the day before you arrive and we’ll see what we can do”. But we have had to share the apartment with a few thousand ants that have no sense of personal space.
The other thing we have learned while here is that you really don’t need a lot of stuff to live. When we moved, we reduced our lives to about 10 boxes worth of stuff and have since found that we could have done without at least half of it….. particlary when we had to haul it by foot the 10 minutes up hill to the new appartment. Joe has worn two pairs of pants the whole year as far as I have observed. So the plan for our return is to ditch almost everything. I’m looking forward to a little purging when we get back to the states as well. I really find my life it much better when I only have 5 pairs of pants to choose from in the morning.