Thats fantastic Dave. In fact you can see I found your site earlier on in the thread, which made me a lot cheerier about the prospect of moving there. I hope we can hook up one day and you can show a NooB the ropes
The next question is, where the hell do we live? I weirdly met a Swiss couple who live in Winterthur when I was guiding the other weekend. They say live there and work in Zurich to save on costs! Its hard to know where, hopefully the company will help out a bit.
The where to live thing is personal preferance. You get a lot more for your money if you live outside of the city and with public transport the way it is it's often quicker to get into Zurich from the suburbs by train than to cross the city by tram! Winterthur has a very regular train connection to Zurich and has the advantage of being a decent size town in it's own right too. It's a bit further away from the mountains though.
I've lived in Uster which is about 15mins by train from the city centre for 5 years. Regular train connections (every 15mins) and a decent enough town to be able to do your weekly shopping and go out for a meal in without any problems. It's not the prettiest place in the world but we enjoyed it.
Right now we live near a place called Hinwil. It's 25mins from the city centre by train but only has a connection every 30minutes. The nearby train station of Wetzikon does have 15min connections to Zurich though. The advantage of Hinwil is it's at the foot of a hill called Bachtel (1100m) which has a top to bottom vertical distance of 600m and more trails on it than you can shake a quite large stick at. The town is a bit industrial but it's got everything you'd need. The closes ski/bike resorts are only 45mins away and within two hours you've got over half of Switzerland plus surrounding countries.
Other places worth considering if you want to live out of town are Rapperswil which is about 10mins from Hinwil. It's a decent sized town right on the lake with a really nice old town section and some nice cafe's, bars and restaurants right on the lake. Train connections are better than every 15mins to Zurich and it will take between 25 and 35mins to the city centre depending on which route you use. Rents might be a bit more expensive here but it is quite a nice town.
Pfaffikon SZ (Not to be confused with Pfaffikon ZH) is right accross the lake at one of it's only crossing points from Rapperswil. It has it's own train hub too so there are also very regular connections to Zurich by train the town itself doesn't have the charm that Rapperswil has but is in a lower tax area as it's actually in Kanton Schwyz rather than Kanton Zurich. Pfaffikon is directly on the A3 which will get you to Graubunden for biking/skiing in no time. It's also got regular train services to Landquart and Chur which will get you to any ski resorts in Graubunden quick and painfree.
Essentially there are hundreds of small towns all on railway lines and with easy access to motorways too. I've chosen to live on the eastern side of the city because it's pretty easy to get in if I need to and I've got some great biking on my doorstep and really easy access to some incredible riding if I want. If you are a bit further west or north of the city riding is a bit more XCish and it can take longer to get to the mouontains (longer is relative in Switzerland, the country is small!). Having said that there is a guy who posts on here occasionally who lives in Aargau and he gets a lot of riding in, in his neck of the woods. He might be along shortly too.
Basically if you like to enjoy yourself and are willing to go look for it you'll find plenty to do here. It's a great place to live. I'll be organising rides again on a fairly regular basis probably starting next month (snow dependent) and continuing into the summer and autumn.
Sorry for the hijack Flamejob but there's some sweeping generalist rubbish right there in that statement above, which I can't let lie
Beanum, are you implying that German-Speaking Switzerland voted to keep guns, whereas the French-Speaking voted to give them back? If yes then... you're not really right.
If you look in detail at the commune by commune stuff, it's generally the cities that voted to give them back (more leftists) and the countryside peeps that voted to keep them (more rightists). Hence why Basel-Stadt (where I live) was a clear "yes" to the initiative, even though it's in the German part.
In fact, Basel-Stadt "beat" e.g. Vaud quite considerably. There were parts of Vaud which were as low as 30-odd percent "yes" (e.g. la Broye), and it was only the weight of Lausanne city which brought the overall cantonal vote to just over 50% for VD.
In fact, IIRC, Basel was only "beaten" by Geneva (Geneva had about 60% "yes" but I'm not sure what to make of that because only about 10 Swiss people live there ;-))
Ash, that really did make me giggle. Hit the nail on the head.