seven minutes from you ..

"I am pretty close to you. I should be reaching there in 7 minutes" "four minutes walk from the university .. " .. these are expressions I never heard before coming to Swiss Italian part. Being from India I picked up the local sense of Indian punctuality. Back in India, a modest error bar on the given time is on the order of 30 minutes. Most of the times the excuse for someone not showing up on time is that there will be no one else on time !! Nice all great minds think alike. Coming to the US, things were pretty punctual. Every thing is within couple of minutes from you. When I first arrived in the US, I naively believed that couple of minutes is 2 minutes. But anything upto 10 minutes can easily be considered couple of minutes. But, here in Switzerland, the land that sets the time with its precision watches, people are precise to the very minute. Of course, needless to say trains/public transport everything runs exactly on time. Such a perfect society !! In every street corner where there is a city-bus stop, there is a big clock just on the other side of the street displaying the exact time. These clocks do not have a seconds hand, but as far as I can see with my cell phone clock, all of the time are exact to the Central European Time.

In that sense the Italians are more open minded. They think more than just about themselves. You probably would have walked into one of the banks/courier services/hotel or infact any business that cares about time in other parts of the world. They have these wonderful array of clocks displaying time in N.Y., Tokyo, New Delhi .. .. I was in Rome last week and each of the bus stops in the city had a time of its own. For a moment I was even confused that they Romans were trying to make the tourists feel at home by displaying their time. Apparently these clocks are all out of order.

The trains are so much on time in Switzerland, that recently someone wrote a program to show the predicted position of the train in the country at a given point in time. And unless there is a natural disaster, which I do not wish for Switzerland, is the same as tracking the train positions in real time !!! Nice standards .. setting the time for itself and for the rest of the world .. !!

and as I understand from others, this punctuality in the Swiss Italian side is nothing compared to that in the Swiss German side !!