Adventures in Menu Translations

Pigtail of iridescent shark. Huh?

I got my annual letter the other day to go and renew my B permit (as in my Swiss residency permit). Normally it's pretty straightforward - turn up, give them a photo and the filled-in renewal form, pay the fee and a new permit gets posted out to me. This year they're making me give them my fingerprints and they want to take my photo themselves, and so the process has involved going to the foreigner office to hand in a form, being sent another form telling me to go to the post office to pay for the new permit and then going to the passport office to have all the biometric stuff done. 3 separate trips to places? Including no doubt having to queue for about 25 years at the passport office because it always seems to be chockers? Sigh.

Where Do I Live Again?

Out one window,

and out the other.

Disappointing

I saw a cheese at Coop today called "Moron du Jura" and I was going to buy it for the sole purpose of putting a picture of it on here, but then I didn't.

Seasonal Confusion

Apparently the supermarkets here are in denial about it still being summer. My local Migros started selling the "autumn" themed yoghurts weeks ago, and yesterday in Coop I saw some Christmas biscuits. Specifically, I found pfeffernusse, which I love and have stupidly missed out on for the last few years because shops seem to sell them briefly in October (or September, I now discover) and I think "ooh, it's too early for that" and then they vanish forever. Anyway, there they were yesterday, sitting on the shelves and giving me the eye, so I bought them and now I seem to have scoffed the lot.

They're not really as good as I remember, actually.

Ways In Which I Will Never Be Swiss

1. Answering the phone by saying my name instead of by saying "hello". Some junk mail caller got all stroppy at me the other day because I wouldn't tell him my name. He didn't seem to know how to proceed if he couldn't call me Madame whoever.

2. Writing 1s, 7s and 9s with all their extra tails and lines.

Is It Something In The Water?

Last night as I was making some rice to have with dinner it occurred to me, as it frequently does, that these Swiss are crazy. They recommended cooking time for rice here seems to be 45-60 minutes for brown (which is what we were eating last night) and about half that for white rice*. Really? It's been a while since I cooked rice in what I like to annoy Reto by referring to as The Sensible Continent (=Australia, obviously. And then we have an argument about whether it actually is a continent or not, which Reto obviously always loses because he is wrong and foolish), but I'm sure brown rice cooks there in something like 25 minutes, and white rice in about half that time. And my (many many many) rice-cooking experiments in this country lead me to think that Australian estimates are far closer to the truth than Swiss ones.

Which reminds me of a conversation that I eavesdropped on some time ago, where my mother-in-law and brother-in-law were discussing corn on the cob, and whether we were, at the time, eating the fresh variety or the pre-cooked variety. There was some confusion for a while, and eventually my mother-in-law said "no, it's the fresh stuff; I boiled it for half an hour". I assumed she was joking and sort of laughed a bit, and then when I told them that I was under the impression that corn on the cob needs to be boiled for about 5 minutes it became clear that everyone thinks I have no idea about anything, can't cook and am probably feeding my family on nothing but hay and raw potatoes.

So what's going on? Why do we apparently need to cook everything forever in this wacky country? And why is the corn on the cob still so gristly and tough even after it's been tormented for all that time?






* I mean normal uncooked rice, not that horrible parboiled stuff which looks, tastes and smells weird and also doesn't really seem to even take much less time to cook anyway. I did read somewhere once that parboiled rice retains more of its nutritional value, but that doesn't convince me that it's worth eating.

Things I Could Have Blogged About Lately ..

.. but didn't.

As it turns out, babies aren't to be trusted at all. Just when I think she's getting in the habit of something, she changes her mind and does things completely differently. Which is bad when her non-habit has been sleeping for 6 hours a night, good when it's crying and crying and crying every time I have the audacity not to hold her constantly.

If only I had a phone with a camera (as opposed to one with no features at all, which is what I do have. Still, it's capable of sending SMSes, so it's far superior to my previous phone) I could have taken all sorts of pictures of interesting things lately. Especially mysterious horse parades through Bern (I think they were protesting about something. I've never seen so many foals and shetland ponies at a protest) and the adorable baby bears, who are still very cute and are much more adept at tree climbing than they used to be.

Reusable nappies are far better than I anticipated. They always seemed like a good choice from an environmental smugness perspective, but I heard so many negative things about them (usually stories involving poo explosions) that my hopes were pretty low. As it turns out, the ones we got (Bambinex, in case you're interested. Which we chose because they were about the only ones we could find in Switzerland) have been perfectly good so far. The main negative aspect that we've discovered is that by the time we've folded them down to their smallest size and then velcroed them up and put on the waterproof top layer, No's bottom half is so enormous that she really can't fit into the clothes she normally wears.

Reto will be abandoning me to single parenthood quite a lot in the coming weeks. There's a practice run where he goes away for work for a night, and then the extended version where he spends a few weeks gallivanting around and playing with guns/bayonets in the army. Of course I won't have time to worry about my abandonment issues or looking after No on my own, because I'll be too busy packing up all our belongings so that we can move into our new flat a few days after R gets back. Great.

Silly Things.

Apparently my pulse is ridiculously slow. A midwife measured it while I was half way through a fairly half-hearted contraction and it was 47. "Are you particularly sporty?" she asked, and I said no. As anyone who has ever met me will agree.

I`ve lost 10kg this week. Obviously a lot of that is baby and placenta and things, but .. well, it seems like there`s still a lot that`s unaccounted for. Still plenty more to go before I`m back where I started, though, so I`m not too concerned. In other news, it`s nice to have buttoned up my jeans for the first time in months.

In Australia (and in the UK, based on the pregnancy books I bought when I found out I was pregnant, which was when we were on holidays in Scotland last year), they tell you to put cabbage leaves in your bra if your breasts get too engorged and milk-packed and painful. Here, I was told to put quark on them.

In all my books they tell you various home-methods of inducing labour (like having sex or eating pineapple or drinking various herbal teas). In Switzerland the list of things is similar, but you can add "wash your windows" to the list. Aah the Swiss.

Pregnancy Report

I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could talk about, like how adorable the furry new bear babies in Bern are (now that the weather is nicer and they've come out of their cave to frolic clumsily and fall down hills and attack each other in an incompetently adorable way), or how nice it is now that it's not completely freezing every day (even though everything still looks pretty grey and grim and dead). But I'm not going to.

Every time I want to open a tin (that doesn't have a ring pull thing on it, which is most of the tins in my life) I have to get Reto to do it for me. Our tin opener is in a Swiss army knife (an actual one that the Swiss army gave to Reto, funnily enough) and apparently my vampire baby has leached me of sufficient fingernail strength that I would now starve if I was forced to exist on a diet of nothing but tinned corn and chickpeas. Or if I didn't have Reto to open tins for me. Or if I didn't have the means to go and buy a tin opener that I can use.

I almost fainted the other weekend. Sitting down outside in the fresh air made me feel better again, but unfortunately, a few days later at an antenatal class where we were a much larger group than normal, being given a talk by a gynaecologist and an anaesthetist, I started to feel similarly weak and fainty. I went outside and felt better again after a few minutes on the balcony, but then the second time it happened that evening everyone paid a bit more attention to me coming and going, and all of a sudden I had a midwife and the gynaecologist fussing over me in a riot of different languages (which was kind of confusing). They made me come and have my blood pressure checked after the talk was over, found it to be surprisingly high and had a bit of a panic. They insisted I go and see my doctor the next day and have everything checked, so I did, and I was fine. Avoiding poorly ventilated, overly heated rooms seems to be the solution, which should be easy but the Swiss seem to like nothing more that heating their rooms too much and never opening the windows.

People stare at me a lot. It seems to be a common complaint of non-Swiss people living here that the Swiss have an enthusiasm for staring for no apparent reason, something I've never really noticed apart from during the last few weeks. My tummy is really not that big by pregnancy standards (it's far more annoying how often people goggle sceptically at me when I tell them I only have a few weeks to go, as though they think I am lying or deluded or have a pillow shoved down my top and am not pregnant at all, or they start grilling me on my eating habits and whether Reto is a midget or something), but in the last few weeks I have been openly stared and pointed at by squillions of passers-by. One person even stopped as we were passing him and turned to gawk at my stomach. I would wonder if I was being paranoid and if people were just looking in my general direction, but the pointing is really pretty unmistakeable.

Suburban Mystery

Something funny is going on with our letter box. When we moved in we made a little sign with our names on it and stuck it on the letterbox, along with a "no junk mail" sign. I don't really remember what happened with the first name tag, but it fell off after about a year and a half and we made another one to replace it. About a month after we put it up, someone peeled off the second name tag (all these signs are paper stuck on with sticky tape) and re-stuck it onto the top left corner of the letter box. The sticky tape clearly didn't appreciate being made to unstick and restick, but it clung pathetically there for some number of months and we didn't give it much thought. At the same time as the second tag was moved, our "no junk mail" sign (which was in german) was taken away and replaced with a french one, as were most of the other non-matching junk mail stickers on our neighbours' letterboxes.

The other week we got no mail. Eventually we realised that this was because the name tag had fallen off the letter box (and there are no apartment numbers here - if your name isn't on the letter box you don't get any mail) so we made another tag and stuck it on. Two days later we saw that someone had unstuck the third name tag and restuck it in the top left corner again. There are 6 letter boxes for our building, and of those 5 have their name tags in the top left corner, and 4 have matching "no junk mail" stickers (another one has an unmatching one and the last has none). No one has ever said anything to us about the importance of name tag placement.

Who is moving our stickers? And why? I am extremely sceptical that it would be our landlords, because they're not really concerned with anything much (I'm sure that if the appearance of the letter boxes was at the forefront of their daily thoughts, they wouldn't have painted them hideous lime green nor let us make crappy paper-and-sticky-tape name tags instead of buying those matching metal name plates that seem to be the norm here. Plus maybe they'd be more concerned about fixing our crumbling walls and they might have made us pay a bond when we moved in. I really like their lack of concern). Is it the people from the post office? Does the misalignment of our name tag cause them so much difficulty in their work? Is it so hard (in this bilingual canton) to read "no junk mail" in german as well as in french? And why didn't whoever moved our name tag move the one remaining misaligned name tag on our building's collection of letter boxes as well?

Strange.

Slobs

Reto went crazy at a book sale the other day and came home with a huge collection of crappy books that no one else wanted to give a home to. I'm reading one of them at the moment, Microtrends, about small but significant behaviour patterns (in the USA) that one might be surprised at. One of these is the prevalence of people who describe themselves as slobs (and "America has always fancied itself a country that values neatness", apparently) which is something like 10% of the population. According to their statistics,

"Fewer than 1 in 4 make their beds as part of a daily routine. More than 1 in 3 will leave their dishes in the sink more than a day. About 15% will even leave dirty dishes in their den, living room, or bedroom longer than a day. When they get undressed at night, almost 4 in 10 drop their clothes on the floor. One in 3 lets kitchen countertop clutter go uncleaned for more
than a week, if not indefinitely."

Hmm. So I guess that puts Reto and I, as well as practically everyone I know, firmly in Slobville. The big difference being that I don't actually consider myself a slob.

Enjoying The Dread

The other day we sprayed our squeaky bathroom door hinges (and front door hinges, although they were much less squeaky than the bathroom ones) with some WD-40 and now they are silent. My quality of life has improved enormously. The squeak had been getting worse for the last few months, and reached a frenzy of Psycho-ish, high-pitched, fingernail-down-a-blackboardyness last week that finally drove us to action.

Nowadays, when I am about to open the bathroom door I am usually swept up by a sense of dread ("nooo, not the noise!"), and the subsequent happiness I feel at not hearing the squeal is out of all proportion. It really makes my day, which is especially nice since trips to the toilet are becoming ever more frequent.

Bad Cheese

Having been reasonably diligent for the last 6 and a half months at avoiding booze and rare meat and oysters and all the other yummy things they tell you to avoid when you're pregnant, today as I was eating a piece of emmental cheese I happened to look at the packet and notice it was made from raw milk (which is another thing on the list of foods to avoid). "Oops", I thought, then cut myself a piece of gruyère. And as I was eating it, I noticed it is also made from raw milk. Hmm. I would say I've eaten these two cheeses (as in these particular brands of them) on average every single day that I've been pregnant (clearly that's an exaggeration, but only because I spent some time out of the country).

That being said, Reto's just done a bit of research and found that apparently hard cheeses are fine even if they are made from raw milk.

Guessing Game

Reto stopped at a bakery and bought some bread on the way home last night. He also brought me a present.

Me: Ooh, is it from the bakery?
Him: Yes
Is it bread?
No
Is it cake?
No
Is it a biscuit?
No
Is it a pastry?
No
Is it fruity?
No
Is it custardy?
No
Is it chocolatey?
No
Is it savoury?
No
Is it really from the bakery?
Yes
Is it ...

[hours later]
Is it an incomprehensibly Swiss occasion-specific specialty that I will never ever guess?
Um .. no
Did you really get me a present from the bakery?
Yes

And eventually I gave up. Apparently the correct guess would have been "is it something like a madeleine but in the shape of a bear?". Which I would say actually counts as a cake.

Who?

I'm often concerned that I won't recognise Reto when I have arranged to meet him somewhere crowded, and instead of looking for his face I look for the clothes he's wearing or for the bag he has carried pretty much every day for the last 7 years. Clearly this is ridiculous and obviously I am pretty familiar with what he looks like, but I remember being worried the first time he came to Australia that I wouldn't recognise him at the airport (I hadn't seen him for 6 months or so) and my concern doesn't seem to have abated much since then.

*

Yesterday we went out and bought Reto a new bag for Christmas. I had bought him a different new bag for Christmas, after he had spent forever going on about how his old bag was on its last legs and he needed a new one. He decided he didn't like the bag I gave him (fair enough; it was deceptively small and not super terrific) but it wasn't a complete loss because it provided the impetus to end the complaining and actually go and buy a new one. And so we did, and although the new bag is the same make and brand as the old bag (Freitag. Apparently I'm not Swiss enough to understand why everyone here loves them so much) it's a different colour and he looks completely different carrying it than he looked with the old one.

*

I can't button up my normal winter coat any more. This problem was clearly getting closer and closer before our Christmassy sojourn in Australia, and now that we've got back and it's so freezing all the time I've been forced to retire the old green one (which I've been wearing constantly for the last 2 and a half winters) and embrace a less charming but more spacious brown one that I found in the cupboard. Yesterday as we were walking through a crowded train station, Reto and I were slightly separated (by no more than a metre) by people walking in the other direction. The crowd thinned and I was moving back over towards Reto when I noticed him looking distractedly out past me into the crowd. Had he seen someone he knew? No, he was looking for me. He didn't recognise me because I wasn't wearing my green coat. This (I hope) also explains why I saw him making a move to hold the hand of a stranger the other day during a similar crowd-separation situation.

So Furry

Adorably cute kangaroos, as seen from my parents' garden.

Getting Things Done

Jet lag makes us efficient.

Which isn't actually true at all, but it does mean that we had woken up, lounged around in bed, had a leisurely breakfast, called my parents, been indecisive about what to do today, done some googling and made a decision, organised ourselves, left the house and caught a bus by 8am (that was after waking up at 4am, so really it took us ages). We went to a thermal pool in Charmey, a nearby-ish town, and it was great. We arrived in time to have a coffee and a croissant (normally I loathe croissants and only eat them if I'm starving but this one was actually ... edible. If not slightly enjoyable) before the pool even opened and still be practically the first ones there. Unusually, the entry price (which was relatively cheap) included all the novelty pools (by which I mean saunas in various styles and temperatures, and a coldcoldcold pool and a foot bath too, I think, none of which I used because apparently these things are verboten during pregnancy. Well, not the foot bath but the rest of it). The main pools (one indoor, one outdoor) had a few of the bubbly/jetty things that are always fun at a thermal pool place, but not so many that the whole thing would be a magnet for little kids who like to frolic mindlessly and kick you as they don't watch where they're going. There were pretty mountains around to look at. The walls and floors were all covered in really nice green mosaic-y tiles. On the down side, we caught a very inconvenient bus to get home again and spent an hour and a half following some tortuous route through the smaller towns of canton Fribourg, but I guess you can't win them all.

And then we had a fondue as a very early dinner, and now I'm wondering how early I can possibly go to bed. I suppose I should try to stay awake and get rid of the jet lag, but bed seems very enticing.

Parenthood - Sort Of Imminent

For me, being frequently nudged in the tummy by Unborn Baby is the biggest spur to realising that parenthood is coming. For Reto, ikea-ing together the crib we bought the other day (and then lugged home on the train, which was not as inconvenient as it could have been but still, grr) was his kick in the stomach.

Sicko

Reto might have swine flu. That's a home diagnosis, but he's kind of flu-ey, quite feverish (although it's hard to tell how much because our thermometer seems to be pathetic, but he's reliably about 2.5 degrees warmer than me) and spends all his time loafing around in bed, overdressed and complaining about being cold. Fortunately my doctor went a bit hysterical about how he thought it was a good idea for me to have the vaccination (unlike the previous time I asked him about it, which was 6 weeks or so before, when he suggested it was a bit of a waste of time. I take the fact that he changed his mind as a good thing) and so I did have it a few weeks ago. I'd better not get sick.

Update: he seems to be much better today. His temperature is now the same as mine and his conversation is much better than it has been for days.