In Switzerland you can make $53,000 working at McDonalds. Not bad for flipping burgers. The salaries are high here. The minimum wage is $23/hr. The salaries have to be high here because it's so expensive to live in Switzerland.
You find that out real quick. Early on, I went to Starbucks, not paying attention, order a small(tall) mocha. It was 8.50! No Starbucks mocha is worth that much. You might as well say that everything here is twice as much as it would be in the U.S.
Whats weird is that our Airbnb was relatively cheap. We are in a 2 bedroom condo with two balconies overlooking Lake Geneva and two sets of mountains. Lausanne lies between the Jura mountains and the Swiss Alps. I'm sure this condo is worth a couple mill.
We are up the hill in Lausanne in Renes. To get down to Lausanne we take a train for 5 minutes. Sounds weird but otherwise it's a 52 minute walk down there. You would not want to walk back up. Just walking from the Renes train station up the hill to the air bnb is a challenge.
This entire city is on 3 hills. From the shore of Lake Geneva to where we are is straight uphill. It's amazing. I see people biking up the hills and I can't believe it. Lots of practice I guess.
It makes for beautiful views.
I get the feeling that Lausanne is made up of the rich and everybody else. The average house price here is just under 2,500,000. Obviously the vast majority live in apartments. The average house price in the whole of Switzerland is 1,092,000.
Switzerland has one of the highest standards of living in Europe. Great schools, public transportation, environmentally progressive, absolutely beautiful. College for bachelors and masters is $400- 3700 a year. BTW, everything is closed on Sunday.
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