Monday 24 March 2008

Super Things That Happened Over Easter*

1. It snowed a lot. While this may well be picturesque and adorable and just the sort of weather I like to say that I like, it might not actually be super. It was freezing, my coat is not very snow-proof, and my hands have a tendency to shut off the blood flow when it gets below about 5 degrees C. But it did look pretty, especially on all those trips to Zurich which involve catching the train up and over the hill, so you see it get snowier and snowier and then less and less snowy. Which is always entertaining for some reason.

2. After wandering around in the icy air at the local Easter markets this morning, my hands did their usual trick of turning numb then icy white and bloodless. Happily they stopped short of turning gangrenous and rotten, but it was fairly unpleasant nonetheless. Actually, who am I kidding? I love it when my fingers do this. I enjoy the horror/sympathy it evokes. Although sadly Reto is fairly immune to it these days and he is the main person whose sympathy I enjoy.

3. I learnt a bunch of stuff. On Friday we went to a friend's place for lunch (although I'm not really sure if it still counts as a lunch event if you don't leave until 10.30pm) and apart from all the excellent eating and drinking and chatting and loitering and showing of wedding photos, we also played the latest Australian edition of Trivial Pursuit. Although the three Australians in the room were at an obvious advantage (who else would know what rugby league team is represented by a sea eagle?), as it turns out a good trick in this particular game is, if you don't know the answer, just say either "Australia" or "Peter Carey" and you will probably be right anyway.

4. I saw a really large bank note, both in terms of size and monetary value. Today Reto and I bought ourselves some super-duper-go-everywhere-and-pay-a-fortune-for-the-privilege-but-never-buy-a-train-ticket-again train tickets (aka GAs, which I believe stands for General Abonnement and lets you go practically everywhere in Switzo), which we paid for up front. We decided to do this in cash, and so we went to the bank and so for the first time I saw a 1000 franc note, which was purple and enooormously long and had a picture of Jacob Burkhardt, the well known Swiss historian, on it. It's funny how many people are Swiss. Well, there aren't really that many of them, but I am often to surprised to learn that famous people are from Switzerland. Like Marat, the dude who was killed in the bath during the French revolution. Huh. I don't think he's on a bank note though.

5. I hung out with even more Australians. Apart from the ones mentioned in Number 3, I also went out for dinner one night with a really good Swiss friend and his Australian friend who is visiting. It's practicallylike I never left, if you just ignore all the foreign languages and snow and so on.

6. I caught a wacky temporary ferry. I have done a bit of this lately. Every time you see a river with a walking track and more than about 5 people on the track there seems to be some sort of volunteer-run, free-but-give-us-a-donation type ferry manned by people who want to paddle you the 10 metres or so to the other side (where there's always a cafe and an array of yummy icecreamy desserts awaiting your arrival). Today's was there especially for the easter markets and it was far more technologically advanced than the one we went on last weekend (this one was powered by an outboard motor, as opposed to last week's oarsmen) but it was still extremely charming. And freezing. And popular.

7. I failed to call my parents. Apparently the phone card thingie that I usually use has become completely pathetic and unreliable, and so I think I might toy with joining the Skype age. Finally. It seems ridiculous to have spent years in an international relationship and then years more living on the other side of the world from everyone and to never have even looked into using Skype. Any second now, though, I might give it a go.



* And possibly some not-so-super things

2 comments:

Ms Mac said...

Manly! What did I win? Here's a useless fact to learn and know about me. When I married my Aussie back in 1991, I spent the first couple of footie seasons following Manly around NSW watching them not get into the finals. It was the good old days of Matthew Ridge, Geoff Toovey and Ian Roberts....

Sigh....

Anyway, when I first moved, I found I couldn't win a game of Trivial Pursuit because it was the Australian Edition. When we moved back up to the Northern Hemisphere, I treated myself to a couple of British Trivial Pursuit games and suddenly found I couldn't win any of them either because I'd spent so bloody long in Australia and surprisingly, the UK had moved on without me. Bastards!

;-)

rswb said...

Hurrah! Sadly the only prize on offer is glory, and even that is likely to be pretty fleeting. Yep ... there it goes.

Want a chance for some more glory? What are the two novels that Peter Carey has won the Booker Prize for (no cheating and googling)?