Being Unpatriotic

Things that are better in Switzerland:

Television. Not really, but television ads are definitely a step in the right direction. I don't know exactly what the rules are, but if the show's less than an hour and a half or so long, you won't see any ads in it. Hurrah.

Food you buy at outdoor events. Pluto pups and other revolting versions of things on sticks. Hot chips, fairy floss, meat pies and sausage rolls. Versus raclette, a sausage with a really nice bun and mustard, älplermagronen (or whatever the spelling is. pasta and potato and a cheesy sauce with onions and apple sauce. mmmm, perfect when you're on top of a mountain and it's freezing) and käsekuchen (a savoury quichey thing, not to be confused with its literal translation, cheesecake, which is not even remotely the same thing), not to mention all those deep-fried desserty things, like apple rings with vanilla sauce (aka custard). Switzerland definitely wins here (although I would never say no to a nice warm cinnamon doughnut from the Lions Club vans of my youth).

Cheese. There's nothing worse than suddenly finding yourself in the mood for some interesting cheese on the way home when you're in Australia, and finding that all that's on offer in Coles is 8000 types of cheddar and a splash of feta. Not that there's anything wrong with cheddar or feta, but a bit more readily-available variety never hurt anyone.

Christmas. I feel bad for saying that, and actually I'm not sure that it's even true, but I really do enjoy the wintery build-up to christmas here, the glühwein and christmas biscuits (even if I don't associate them at all with christmas myself), all the indoor eating-based activity. Not to mention the christmas lights and candles and decorations that all look so much more charming in the grim wintery weather. Actually, what I think I might be saying here is that traditional christmas things are much better in Switzerland than they are in Australia, and that it goes without saying that an Australian christmas should not try to confuse itself with a European christmas, because it's in no way the same thing.

That is all.

I Didn't Vote ..

.. but fortunately they're not going to fine me*. Even though it's all my own fault.

Apparently I enrolled as an overseas voter in 2007 (for the last federal election), but apparently I forgot that and apparently the AEC website don't tell you that sort of thing when you look up your enrolment details, and so when I eventually got around to sending in my forms to apply for a postal vote, I got an email telling me that they had already sent the forms to the wrong address and that now my only chance left to vote is to go to Geneva and do it there (at the permanent mission or whatever it is). Which I had no intention of doing, not only because about a day or two before I got that email I had been to the mission in Geneva to get some stuff certified to make the No into a tiny Australian and I wasn't about to make that annoying journey again.

Even if they had sent the voting forms to the right address it still would have been extremely annoying. To complete the forms, you have to get another Australian (one who is enrolled to vote, I suppose) to sign your voting forms. I have a grand total of one Australian friend in this country (hello Sarah!) and she is inconveniently located in Zurich. So in many ways, not voting is much more convenient for me, but you can all rest assured that if Tony Abbott is the next PM, I will feel very very guilty.





* There's a federal election on today in Australia, in case you didn't know, and voting is compulsory, in case you didn't know, in the sense that they fine you if you don't vote, but apparently not if you misinform them about your address and thus scupper your chance of voting. And apparently it's not really compulsory if you don't live in Australia, and after you've been away for 5 years or something it might be not so much compulsory to vote as forbidden. Nice (that was sarcastic, by the way. I find it outrageous that they apparently want to deny me my chance to vote in my own country, even if I don't live in it).

So Furry

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

When my parents were here in December, we all went to Rouen and visited the grave of my great grandfather, who died near there during WW1. On telling my mother-in-law about it some time later, she expressed surprise that any Australians had been killed in the war because she didn't realise we were involved. We were all surprised that she didn't know.

The other day I was telling my french teacher about the trip, and she asked "But why did he die there?". "Errmmm, because he was a soldier" I said, and she also was SHOCKED to hear that Australia had been involved. Apparently she must have thought he was on holidays or something. I was surprised that she didn't know (and then I gave her a big tedious lecture on Australia's continuing links with England and the fact that so many Australians signed up to be soldiers because of the desire to travel and have an adventure, which I imagine was fairly different from the motivation of french soldiers. Which I quite enjoyed).

It always comes as a surprise to find that the rest of the world thinks of us so little (except to say how much they want to go to Aus on holidays and how they think it must be some sort of paradise and "Why are you living in Switzerland when you could be living in Australia? What's wrong with you??"). Are we really so irrelevant?

(the military part of the cemetary in Rouen. Some of it, anyway)

I Am My Mother

I've turned into my mother, and not in a good way.

During my youth, it was always my mother who was responsible for getting rid of bugs in the house. Unfortunately my mother has a "live and let live" policy towards creepy crawlies, so my sister and I were instilled with the belief that you really have to catch the stupid spider or whatever and throw it outside instead of just spraying it with something horrible and toxic and moving on. Anyway, my mother is a real expert at throwing bugs outside. She shows no fear whatsoever, even in the face of the biggest spiders you can imagine.

After we left home, my sister and I lived together in Sydney for ages, and we both became a bit more proactive about bug catching (although I'm willing to admit I was always more wimpy about it than she was). We may even have had a brief flirtation with Mortein (only against cockroaches!), and I definitely went through a long phase of denial (one of the rooms in our house was a particular haven for huntsman spiders, which are so enormous and horrible that my main strategy against them was to close the door to that room and not go in there again for as many months as I could manage).

Now, in the brave new world of married life, I've somehow become Bug Catcher Number One. Not that this is even remotely surprising, since Reto has a pathological fear of everything that's not human (that's a complete overexaggeration, but he has a major bee phobia, which is funny because a) he is frequently spotted cowering away from something that you can't see, which is odd, and b) his dad is a bit of an apiarist and as such his garden is chockers full of bees all the time). Anyway, Reto's a big wimp and I have to be all tough in the face of danger (and bees). Happily, this isn't at all hard in Switzerland where, in spite of the non-existence of fly screens (which is ridiculous, by the way), there's rarely a bug in sight. The other night, though, I was brushing my teeth and there was a pitiful cry from Reto in the other room and upon investigation I found that he was scared of some incredibly small, possibly wounded, bug that had taken refuge on the wall. While I was off getting a plastic container so I could throw it out the window, it vanished mysteriously. And that's about as exciting/(scary) as it gets.

A huntsman spider. Hopefully we'll never see one of these in Switzerland.

It'sTrueThatISpeakTooQuickly

Yesterday I had lunch in an Indian restaurant in Lausanne with a friend. We were chatting to the waiter and he asked me if I was English. "No", I said, "I'm Australian" and he said "Aah, that's why you sound like Ricky Ponting". As it turned out, what he meant was that I speak incomprehensibly quickly, not that I talk about cricket a lot.

Happy Australia Day!

Happy Australia day! We haven't really done anything to mark the occasion, but Reto did make his own little public holiday (ie. took the day off work) and I'm not at french, so that's in the right spirit.

Being Australian

On Friday we celebrated Switzerland Day in a pleasantly Australian fashion, by going to a pub and eating crappy (excellent) pub food and drinking heaps of beer. Then we sat around for ages waiting for the fireworks to start, which also felt pleasantly familiar. Less normal was the hysteria of people letting their own fireworks off (what with that sort of thing being legal here) and seeing all the insanely gigantic bonfires around the place*.

In other Australia-heavy news, yesterday I bought a bottle brush! Sadly since we are apartment-bound types and we don't even have a balcony, it will have to survive in a tiny wee pot on our tiny wee window sill, but it still makes me feel outrageously patriotic or something.

(note the capsicums looking more accurately tiny in this photo than they did in the other one. Note also the tiny garden gnome Reto gave me for my birthday. Odd.)

* The first time I was in Switz on Switzo Day, a few years ago, I went to some sort of celebration in Reto's home town and they had the WORLD'S BIGGEST BONFIRE just near the carpark of the local town hall or something. We were all standing there and squillions of cars were parked there and about 3 metres away was this enormous blazing inferno. Odd.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Urm .... am I really watching some crappy German quiz show about Australia that seems to be implying that couples therapy involves drinking beer (helps with letting the emotions out, it seems), that Australians eat tinned cheeseburgers, that dehydrated wine is normal (you can take it camping!) and that thongs have bottle openers in the soles? They seem to be serious .. although happily they did just admit that the beer therapy thing was a lie, and DJ Bobo is one of the contestants (and surely no one can possibly take him seriously?).

Not In Kansas .. Or Are We?

That concert that we went to on Friday night (which was super, by the way) was part of the jazz festival that was has been on here for the last fortnight or so, and look at their logo thingie:

Weird. Even better was the backdrop thingie on the stage:

Giganto instrument-wielding kangaroos. Odd.

Memory Lane

I went to ikea this morning, hoping to have a bit of a consumerist frenzy and use up this $100 voucher that we have had since we bought our couch there earlier this year, and which is on the brink of expiring. As it turned out, it wasn't particularly frenzied at all, it was more a depressing wander around tons of crap that I don't really want and then an atrocious amount of confusion at the cash register (which went from the cashier woman saying that I couldn't use my voucher thingie unless I had two receipts proving I had bought a couch (instead of just the one that I had brought, which I thought was outrageously diligent of me), to her saying that I could use it but they wouldn't give me any change, to me saying "fine, I don't care about the change", to her saying "but it's $20!" and then letting me use the voucher and giving me a gift voucher thing for the extra $20. Mostly in german, too, mind you, which is a language I have been doing my darned tooting-est to forget lately. Not that that's a sensible strategy at all, but it's one I am fond of. I don't like german).

Anyway, as is obligatory at ikea, I went to the cafe and ate some hideous meatballs and some wacky Swedish soft drink and then I had a coffee. As attentive readers, and coffee drinkers in Switzo at the moment will know, the coffee cream container thingies are going through an Australia phase lately. The coffee thing I had today had this picture on it:

Which, if you look closely, looks an awful lot like this.

Which is the town hall in the wee, miles-from-everywhere, unremarkable little town I grew up in! There are no touristy attractions there, there is no reason why the town or the town hall there should be commemorated in coffee accessories on the other side of the world. And yet it has been! It's so wacky and excellent. And also extremely impressive that I recognised it.

We're Number One!

Go Team Australia, apparently we're the biggest nation of fatties there is.

Oi, Oi, Oi!

The potatoes have had their day, look who coffee is celebrating now!

Switzerland Versus Australia

Our first flight to get back to The Land Of Calc was with Qantas, which you will all no doubt recognise as an Australian airline, and the second was with Swiss. And so, to sum up finally whose country is better than whose ...

On our Qantas flight we had a spare seat between the two of us. You might uncharitably suggest that this is because no one is foolish enough to fly Qantas, hence the empty seats, or you might just recognise that gift horses' mouths are not made to be looked in.

On our Swiss flight, not only did we have far less leg room and noticeably narrower seats, but we somehow managed to be wedged into the middle two seats of a row of four, which is obviously the worst possible seating luck.

WINNER: Australia.

On our Qantas flight we didn't have individual screens! I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't have even thought such a lack of technology was still possible these days had my sister not recently told me that the same thing happened to her on a United flight to America a few months ago. Happily one of the movies they showed on this flight was Michael Clayton (which I had been meaning to see and really enjoyed watching), but the other one which I embarrassingly endured most of was some tosh with Nicole Kidman and space aliens. Happily for Our Nicole, she had to spend much of the movie pretending to be a soulless, emotionless zombie type, which suits her acting style down to the ground. I have never seen her so convincing.

On the Swiss flight we had sensible individual screens and shows on demand, as it should be. Funnily enough, I watched another Nicole Kidman flick, this time Margot At The Wedding, which was far better than the Qantas one, but still kind of awful. I also watched a fairly excellent and peculiar Canadian movie without Nicole Kidman in it, called Lars and The Real Girl, which was bizarro and comes highly recommended (by me).

WINNER: Switzerland

The Qantas blankets were all soft and fluffy, and the cushions had surprisingly endearing little ruffle things around the edge.

The Swiss blankets seemed as though they had previously been used on horses and made me itchy. The pillows were fine but had no endearing qualities.

WINNER: Australia

The food on the Qantas flight was okay. I scoffed every skerrick of my first meal (and some of Reto's. This possibly says more about my hunger than the fact that the food was great, but it was certainly edible. It was an asian-themed pork thing). The second meal was worse (pasta with an extremely mushy cheesy sauce, allegedly gruyere but I would be very surprised) but still not bad. In between meals they gave you fruit, semi-upmarket 2-minute noodles (of the Suimin variety, if that means anything to you), hot chocolate and peppermint or jasmine tea. Oh, and one of the cold drinks you could get was Ribena!

On Swiss, the first meal was okay but not super (Some sort of unidentifiable chicken and rice number. Possibly I ruined it for myself by having a fantastic bowl of ramen at the airport in Hong Kong), and the second meal was atrocious. Reto disagrees with me vehemently on this point - it was breakfast, a bread roll, a croissant, strawberry jam, butter and strawberry yoghurt. Oh, and a banana, orange juice and a piece of gruyere. In my opinion, this isn't a meal so much as a bunch of assorted undesirable food items placed in close proximity to each other. The cheese was nice, and the banana would have been had it not been pre-frozen, but that's about all I can say for it. Reto, on the other hand, thinks this is his ideal breakfast (or something like it) and always goes on about how he likes the breakfasts on Swiss.

All the wine I drank on both the flights was Australian, so we're all even there, but on the Swiss flight no one offered me anything at all to drink for a stretch of about 6 hours. Possibly this is because I was asleep a lot of the time (and I suppose it's polite not to force beverages on people who are in no fit state of consciousness to drink them. Or even hold them), but there was also a lot of time there that I was awake and so dehydrated that my mouth felt like it had been chewing on the horse-blanket for the last few hours.

WINNER: Australia. Although Reto would disagree.

The Qantas flight had a landing gear (or whatever it is that makes the wheels go up and down) that sounded so scarily loud and crunchy that I was sure we were all going to die. Coupled with the alleged flickering of the cabin lights just after take-off (coinciding with the up-crunching of the wheels), the fact that the down-crunching seemed to need 3 goes to work properly, and the fact that it was a mere 12 hours or so since we had seen footage of that flight that failed to land in Hamburg, I was convinced we were going to die. Then again, I usually am.

On the Swiss flight - no crunching, no more than the usual mild-to-moderate anticipation of death during take-off and landing.

WINNER: Switzerland



Actually, in general both the flights were okay, but it would have been better if they were the other way around. On the first flight, which was shorter (9 hours vs 12 or so) we were not tired (we left at 3pm) but we had plenty of space for comfy sleeping and no real chance to watch movies (which is my favourite thing about flying). On the longer flight we were trapped in tiny claustrophobia-inducing seats with entertainment galore and hardly even the ability to stay awake for dinner, let alone a movie. It sort of goes with my theory about life here being all backwards and topsy turvy. Sigh.

Things I Am Fed Up With

1. Packing. It's boring, and having to constantly panic about the weight limit is incredibly annoying.

2. Wondering on which side of the world my life is. I suppose it would be foolish to think at the moment that it is this side of the world, since I am leaving tomorrow and not coming back in the foreseeable future (how depressing), but do I really need to try to wedge all my pretty dresses/skirts/tops/jewellery that is still over here into the suitcase? Will I ever wear any of it? But then again, what's the point in leaving it all behind (apart from the fact that they won't really fit into my allocated 20kg), thus ensuring that it will all remain unworn?

3. The attitude of assorted foreign (Swiss) people towards Australian food. No, it's not the same, and yes, some things are nicer in your country, but please appreciate the fact that I don't agree with you about almost everything that you have to say, and I could do without hearing you denigrate everything constantly. Perhaps it says more about your fussiness than it does about the inedibility of everything that this entire continent has to offer.

4. No, that's about it for the moment. Now I'm off to the pub for some trivia and a beer.

Chatting

This morning I had an unreasonably long conversation with a loopy dude in the bank.

I went in and took a number and since there was no more seat space I stood up. Some old chap moved along the seat and said "here, you can sit down, there's plenty of room" and, not wanting to hustle the oldies along, I said "oh no, no, it's not necessary.." etc and he insisted and I demurred and eventually he barked at me "oh, just sit down!". Urmmm ... okay, so I sat down, and he proceeded to engage me in conversation. We talked about the exact opening hours of all the local banks (and compared them favourably to the opening hours of other banks, which apparently close at 2pm which is completely insane and quite possibly untrue. I haven't actually been in a bank branch for years, so I couldn't really comment), we chatted about what "NSW" stands for, we talked about the recent refusal by the PM to accept a pay raise and it was all went on and on and on. Happily he eventually left, and when he did every other person in the room smiled at me in a kindly way as if to say "thanks for being the one who saved me from that".

It was the happiest anyone is ever likely to be in a bank.

Yay For The Weather!

Well, depending on whose opinion you listen to, it's either not summer any more (yay! That's my opinion), or it's still winter (also yay! That's Reto). And then on Thursday, when we're back in Switzy, it will still be winter/not summer! Yay!

Yum!

Lordy. We went to Tetsuya's last night, a wedding present from my sister and her boyfriend, and we ate and ate and ate. And then we ate a lot more too, as is required when you're eating 13 courses over the space of four and a half hours, or however many it was. My recent semi-hospitalisation/illness may have left me with less of an appetite than is ideal for such an even, but bravely I struggled through ...

... and it was totally super. My favourite course was the Tetsuya's signature dish, a confit of trout with fantastically yummy stuff (daikon and konbu, apparently, and some really great salt) on top. Mmmmm...

The rest of the menu was very seafoody, ocean trout and caviar and scallops and crab and more crab and some really amazing barramundi, and then we moved on to the meaty courses (quail and then veal) and the sole vegetarian course (lentils. Unless you count the sweet corn soup at the beginning, but of course it wasn't really a course) and then about a zillion types of dessert. There was a lovely summer berry pudding and a chocolate thing of some sort which was sooooo very chocolatey and some excellent petit fours. I also had a really scary espresso in the most excellent little cup, which happily failed to keep me awake for hours after the meal was over.

Oh, and apart from the food, there was also the controversy of the art on the walls in the toilets. There was nothing particularly noteworthy in the women's, but apparently the walls of the men's toilet were adorned with lots of semi-nudity (of the female kind) and possibly a metaphorical picture of a clitoris. Sadly I can't be more specific here, because the conversation was kind of vague, and I don't think it was the kind of establishment where one pops into the men's toilet to clarify things. Although my sister did try, but somehow she failed to see the picture in question.

Trapped!

Eek! I opened the door to go out to the back yard this morning and a bloody great spider fell down from above and landed on the screen door and now it seems to have taken up residence. I shut the door and have been peering nervously out from time to time, but the spidey really isn't moving. One of his legs seems to have fallen off (it's on the ground next to the door) and I don't know if that is likely to make Mr Spider less scary (he can't chase me as quickly) or more scary (he might be full of leg-losing anger). Either way, I don't like it and I might never go outside again.

Sorry

Well, finally, after years of hoo-haa, backwarding and forwarding and outright refusal, the Australian government has officially apologised to the "stolen generation" (aboriginal people taken from their parents up until 1970 or so, with the aim of raising them in white society, so that they would be "better off" than they were with their aboriginal families. Needless to say this resulted in an awful lot of alienation and misery and disconnection, not to mention all the sexual abuse and the psychological issues that arise from this, and from being forcibly removed from your family as a wee young thing anyway, even without subsequent abuse. Not that it was necessarily entirely negative for everyone, of course, but for a bunch of people it was, and in an arguably very forseeable way). This apology comes with the new government (voted in a few months ago), after the last government (all 11 years of them) refused to say sorry because they were scared of paying financial compensation or because they thought it would admit personal responsibility on the part of people involved in carrying out governmental policy or because they were a bunch of amoral bastards with no sense of sympathy or empathy or humanity, or something similar.

Anyway. Hurrah, I say, and so say a bunch of other people too.