I've been trying to explain Switzerland to my mother for seven years and haven't managed it yet. She thinks I live in a ski resort. She's not entirely wrong about the aesthetic but she's substantially wrong about the lived reality.
What I can tell you about working legally here is that the administration of it is extraordinary. I have a work registration. I pay tax. There's a category on the tax form. I fill it in every year and every year it's strange, and I've done it six times now, so I think the strangeness is permanent.
The clients here are different. Not completely different, men are broadly men, but there's a culture of punctuality that is not a cliche, it's a specific observable fact. I have never had a late client in Switzerland. Never. In Dublin I had one turn up forty minutes late and seem genuinely confused about why that was a problem.
What I didn't expect about legal work is that it comes with its own anxieties. I thought the legal status would feel protective. It is protective in the sense that I have proper recourse if something goes wrong, which is not nothing, it's genuinely significant. But being registered also means being visible in a way I hadn't fully thought through. I can be found. Not easily, but the information exists. That took some adjusting to.
I go back to Wicklow about twice a year. My mother makes dinners I don't eat enough of according to her and asks about Switzerland and I tell her about the trains being on time and the mountains and my flatmate who cooks very well. She seems satisfied with this version. In fairness it's all true. I've just left most things out.
The thing I miss most is the quality of Irish conversation. The way it wanders. The way you can spend an hour not getting to the point and that's fine, that's the point. Switzerland is wonderful and I don't regret coming. But people here get to the point quickly and seven years in I still miss the long way around sometimes.