Take That!

Well, as it turns out my baby sign antipathy has moved on a bit. As you will all recall (no doubt), I'm not a big fan of these signs, and complained a bit when someone gave us one when the No was born. Nonetheless, we dutifully hung it from our balcony (and never gave it another thought. We can't see it, after all. We will be taking it down next week when the No turns one, though. Next week! One! Already!).

The shoe was on the other foot when Reto became the godfather of someone, and we embraced our (his) duty to provide the geburtstafel and made (showing surprising drawing/sawing/painting skills we never knew we had) a completely excellent sign ourselves.

And now, such is our enthusiasm for all that DIY, that completely unbidden, without godparental duties or any sort of decent excuse, we made this completely fantastic sign for some friends who just had a baby. I think they might be baby-sign non-embracers too, but they did their best (hah!) to look pleased when we gave it to them, and now they really have no choice but to bung it in their front garden for all the world to see. And yes, we will be checking to make sure they do.

I must say, this is one gift that I'm really happy to be on the giving end of rather than the receiving end, but I really think that Reto and I did a great job with that dingo (it's a dingo, in case you couldn't tell. No, not really an animal that is associated with babies in a good way, but isn't it cute?). Any other baby-havers here in Switzerland who are friends of mine and unlikely to get a geburtstafel from anyone else .. watch out!

How Good Are We?

We went to visit our tiny new nephew the other day, and because R is the godfather it was his responsibility to bring the geburtstafel (baby name sign thing that sits in the garden for the next year or so). Poncy and ridiculous as I think these signs are, we dragged out all our DIY skills (minimal, I thought) and made the best sign ever.

Pretty good, hey?

Attacked By A Bear

Last Saturday we spent a pleasant afternoon in Bern, going to a museum, dawdling around and seeing the recently-opened bear park, the much less offensive replacement for the horrible bear pit. If we'd gone this week instead, it may have been kinda less pleasant.

Some lunatic climbed over the bear park's fence this afternoon and got into the enclosure of one of the bears. Unsurprisingly, he was attacked by the bear. A policeman shot the bear. The bear and the man are both alive but understandably injured.

Idiot.

How Complicated Is A Teapot?

More than you'd imagine, apparently.

At our Excellent Breakfast Frenzy at our Swanky Anniversary Hotel, there were about 12 different types of tea on offer, all loose leaf. There was a plethora of teapots,

(sort of like this)

some of them with tea leaf straining thingies inside them,

(pretty much exactly like this, but inside the teapots)

some without, and there were a bunch of tea strainers like this

(but less fancy. With the strainer and the thing you rest it in, though)

next to the teapots as well.

I've never really noticed people here drinking much tea at all, but people were going for it very enthusiastically at breakfast and in a variety of confusing ways. Basically, everyone wanted to use the outside-the-teapot strainers as inside-the-teapot leaf holders (which they were all wrong for and it meant you couldn't get the lid on your teapot and it unbalanced the whole thing). People were taking their inside-the-teapot strainers out and replacing them (inside the teapot!) with outside-the teapot strainers. I saw one woman put an outside-the-teapot strainer into her teapot then fill the teapot with water and put the lid on it and walk away. With no tea in her tea! I mean, drinking hot water is an odd but acceptable habit (hello, Mum!) but does it really require a teapot and strainer?

I thought everyone ws being weird and misinformed until later when I had a cup of tea from a cafe place there (ie. staffed by hot beverage professionls who should know how these things work), and the waiter brought me my teapot with an outside-the-pot tea strainer in it. Which has led me to wonder if I'm suffering from some ridiculous cultural confusion where all these loony Europeans do things ridiculously. By which I mean differently. By which I secretly still do mean ridiculously.

Anyone have any ideas?

Here's A Tip

We were talking about tipping people in french this morning, and apart from the obvious ones of waiters, taxi drivers etc, everyone seemed to think it is normal to tip hairdressers and nurses. Am I really so out of the loop? Really?

Next Time I'm In Charge

Late-ish this afternoon (a bit after 5) I said to Reto "do you want to go for a walk?" and he sort of said no, and then he said yes, and so I envisaged us going on a half-hearted wander around the town and then coming home and having dinner. Since Reto knows the area here much better than I do, he chose the route we took, and .....

.. an hour and a half later we were still off wandering through fields in the middle of nowhere, no end in sight. I was wearing an extremely inappropriate skirt and extremely inappropriate boots, and we were sloshing through mud, wandering in forests and mysterious gorges and being sort of lost. Had I been more appropriately dressed, and not hungry and thirsty it might have been really excellent, but I wasn't (and I was and I was, respectively) and so it wasn't. Although, as you can imagine, I did enjoy the complaining.

Tater Update

... and in a record blog-posting frenzy, here's the update on the Year Of The Potato. I knew they were versatile (chips, salads, other chips, mash! Will it never end?) but this adds a whole new dimension!

Mysterious Occurrences At The HOT

Something strange is afoot. The other day while having a shower I noticed that ... I was not alone. In what I imagine is a display of total unSwitziness (for I have never seen an unauthorised creature in anyone's home here. Which seems remarkable given this nation's abhorrence of fly screens), there seems to be a spider living in the shower here at the HOT. Although not such a fan of spiders myself, this one looks mostly harmless and so I have decided not to tell anyone in case they decide to kill it.

Strange thing number two happened a few days ago. A big box of Lindt balls turned up on the doorstep. No one knows who put it there or why, but it was in pristine condition (ie. unopened and apparently untampered with) and so after a few days of hemming and hawing we decided to throw caution/paranoia to the wind and scoff the lot. No adverse reactions so far, but if I mysteriously don't write anything here in the next week or so, you'll know I've most likely been poisoned.

Please note that the photo above is not an accurate portrayal of reality. The real packet of chocolates was bigger, redder, less empty (indeed unopened), and the daffodils at the back weren't in bloom. I like daffodils.

Recycling - Fun For The Whole Family

Something sort of excellent that we have discovered here in our new home is the way in which PET bottles are recycled. You take them to your local supermarket (as we did in Aarau) and put them in this hole in the wall, but the novelty of the recycling method here is that the holes in the wall for the different types of containers are surrounded by paintings of alieny type monster-people, and the recycling holes are the mouths of said people. Anyway, you put your plastic bottle in the monster mouth and then something in there shreds the bottle, making this entertaining mechanical munching sound as though the monster is eating the bottle.

It's not much, but it's what we've got.


UPDATE: I have just been to Migros again and as it turns out the bulk of what I wrote up there is a total lie. The alien-monster-people are actually kids and plastic bottles (not even morphed into hideous bottle children, just normal kids and bottles), and the kids faces aren't painted around the holes to make them into mouths. The shredder thing still exists though, and it's wacky.

Pickles: Useful and Nutritious

Because we are on the brink of leaving our flat, and because this is Switzerland, land of hard, hard water and consequent calc deposits, this is what our bath tap currently looks like:

I mangled a container, Reto filled it with pickle-bottle vinegar* and then he sticky-taped it to the tap. Apparently that's what he always does when he finds himself needing to clean the calc off taps. Weird.


UPDATE: Our flat is more shiny than you could possibly believe. Thanks mainly to a no doubt heavily toxic cleaning product, the excellently named but poorly pronounced "Cillit Bang" (pronounced with a soft C, as in "sill-it"). And I have dishpan hands (aka scrubbing-the-bathroom-walls-because-of-the-stoopid-calc hands). Sigh.





* Incidentally, I love pickles. I never realised until I came to this country, but all year I have been eating them like a fiend. We bought a tiny jar to last us this final week in Aarau and already it's empty

More Laundry Stories

Today I decided to wash the sheets (for the first time in weeks and weeks. We sort of live in our own filth). I went to the laundry room, I marvelled at the fact that no one else was washing (which is unheard of), I put the washing on*, and as I was leaving I decided to have a quick look at the laundry rules (which up until now, 3 weeks before we leave forever, I have failed to do).

Yes, as we could have all guessed, you're not allowed to do your laundry on Sundays. This, while being completely insane (if the problem is noise, the laundry room is a whole 2 floors below the closest actual residential bit in the building and there is no way anyone would hear it from that distance. I can hardly hear the machines when the laundry room door is shut) is not at all unusual in Switzerland. Although I have never really done any laundry at all on weekends before (except maybe on one other Sunday, when I also noted the remarkable availability of washing machines) I've heard a zillion other people (foreigners) complain about how insane the rules in their apartment blocks are.

Anyway, I went back upstairs and told Reto about my terrible unSwissy behaviour, and he looked at me as though I was insane and then made some unkind comment about how I had probably misunderstood the rules (which were obviously written in german). He then gave it some more thought, and decided that I was still wrong, because this is a Protestant town and apparently Protestants have no regard for Sundays. Anyway, I made him go back down there to hang it out when the washing was finished (just in case we have vigilant rule-followers in the building who like to stand around and yell at surreptitious launderers) and he apparently ran into someone else who was doing their laundry too. Oh, and he checked the rules and found (shock horror) that I had read them correctly.

These Switzies are crazy.


* 40C if you are interested, which is as low as the temperature options go.