Ah, Look At All The Crazy People...

The good thing of being in a new city (or country) is that as well as the annoying things such as not knowing where anything is, not knowing which tram to take where to and not being used to the currency, you also get some really good views.
And I don't mean you get to see new things such as mountains or amazingly beautiful lakes or buildings (ugly or not), which you do, but I mean people. If you travel to work or school in the same place for a while, you get to know some of the people quite well. There's the guy on the tram who hasn't quite woken up yet, the grumpy old man with a newspaper, the girl applying the finishing touches of her make-up, and the little child traveling to school with his/her nanny/mother/father (the latter seems to happen quite often here).
I have now been traveling to and back from work in the same tram for three weeks and as yet I have not been able to identify the same people twice. I sit in roughly the same spot every day and, especially in the mornings, travel at the same time, but there are always different people traveling with me. Some people stand out though, and even if I will never see them again, they are very hard to forget.
The only person I have seen more than once (twice, in fact) while going to or from work is the man who practices in his car. One of my offices (I have two, because I work for two companies) is in the same street as an opera house, and the man who practices in his car sits there with his window open, sheet music in the seat next to him (he sits with his back to the window), CD on very loud, and then he practices. He is a percussion man because he has those drumsticks with soft ends, and he just sits there practicing his music. When I told my family my father thought he was just trying to look interesting, but he really cheered me up when I saw him being so dedicated.
One person who did not cheer me up but rather made me feel really sad and slightly disgusted was the man who was in the tram with me yesterday morning. He was an old man (in his 70s or late 60s I think) and he was balding. Instead of just letting himself be bald and grey, this man had painted, with some sort of black face paint, sideburns, eyebrows and even a moustache on his head. He had also extended his hairline with the paint, and he looked, well, sad. I couldn't imagine him looking in the mirror in the morning and thinking: 'I look amazing.' Or even: 'Hm, this looks slightly better than if I'd just let people see what my head really looks like.' I felt so sorry for him, but I was also slightly disgusted, because the paint was really thick and somehow made me want to scrub the man's head really hard.
But the highlight of my tramming experience was the man wearing jeans shorts, a red t-shirt, pink nailpolish and make-up with his hair in a shoulderlength middle-aged-woman style. It was one of those moments where you have to do a double-take to be sure because the clothes he wore and his general build were very old-builder type, but the rest of him was so attempt-at-lady-like. It was a very strange combo and I don't think he was a serious transsexual trying to get used to walking around like a woman, but just a crazy person expressing himself.
All in all, the views of Zurich are very entertaining.