DOES IT HELP IF I SPEAK LOUDER?

In an effort to show my parents a little bit more foreign strangeness before they left, I decided to buy one of those couronne des rois things at the bakery today (bready item being sold in order to celebrate epiphany. The idea is that everyone takes a bit of the cake/bread/whatever it is, and whoever is lucky enough to get the bit with the wee metal king in it (and possibly break their teeth) gets to be the king for the day. Although I suspect it might be rigged towards those with very small heads, because the wee cardboard crown they gave us was very, very small).

I went to the bakery. It went something like this (but all in french):
Me: Can I please have a couronne des rois?
Her: Pardon?
Me: The bread thing being sold specially today? A couronne des rois [note that I wasn't actually sure what the things were called, but this bakery had a big sign outside saying "couronne des rois", so I was going with that]?
Her: I'm sorry, I can't understand you at all. You're making no sense to me.
Me: The special bread thing because today's the 6th of January ...
Her (to colleague): Can you understand what she is saying? I can't understand anything she says.
Me: You know, like a crown [gesturing at my head] ... for kings .... [petering off]

And then someone else helped me. Who miraculously understood me. Really, I'm not that incomprehensible. It was annoying.

As it turned out there were 2 kings in our galette des rois (it was more like a collection of cinnamon snails than anything properly bready. And one of the kings seemed to be a lady). I got one of them, but the crown didn't fit. Sigh.

Carrot Wonderland

Today is the day of the much-anticipated Aarau Rüeblimärt, aka carrot festival, aka the day the town turns into a carrot wonderland. Try as I sort of did to keep my hopes realistically low, I was quite excited about the whole thing, and I'm not even such a fan of carrots (although I do like them, but only really raw. Or in juice form. Cooked carrots leave me cold. And in a slightly-related story, I used to have a friend who once ate so many carrots that she turned kinda orange. Which was funny).

Anyway, carrot wonderland. Reto and I wandered off to the main drag (or near enough) where the carrot market (because that's all that a carrot wonderland consists of, apparently) was being held. I had a checklist of things I was expecting from the carrot fest, and the only thing I was disappointed by was the absence of a person dressed as a bunny. There were carrots galore (obviously, but also in a veritable rainbow of colours and shapes. Who knew that carrots came in other shapes?), all manner of baked carrot products (carrot cakes, carrot muffins, carrot bread etc), carrot soup, carrot jam, carrot cheese (ergh), carrot pizza (again), carrot art, fake carrot decorative items, real carrot decorative items, and, possibly best of all (and definitely better than a person dressed as a bunny), a stallholder dressed as a carrot.

Sadly we both somehow forgot to take any money with us, and so none of this wealth of carroty goodness could be ours, but at least we are rich in memories. Or something.

UPDATE: We went back to the market and bought a bunch of carrots. Which are delicious, but they were a total ripoff (4CHF, aka about $4 for that crappy bunch!). In other news, the main drag (not the same one as the carrot wonderland one, but the actual main drag that actual traffic drives along) was plunged into some sort of chemical hazard disaster situation. The road has been totally blocked off for a few hours (and still with no signs of being opened to traffic again in the near future when we last saw it) with firetrucks galore, some sort of chemical hazard people, lots of floodlights and all sorts of pipes and hoses everywhere. It all seems to involve some chemical-transporting vehicle. We are keeping an eye on the local news.

SchwingMania

Aarau is working itself into a bit of a frenzy about the upcoming SchwingFest. Here is a small selection of the window displays put up in shops around town in anticipation of the event (sorry about all the reflections in the pictures, but they were taken through windows). Don't ask me what any of it means, though. I'm as clueless about traditional Swiss wrestling in hessian sumo pants with milk churns and cows as the next person.

Switzerland Day

Reto and I went to his sister and brother-in-law's new (and I mean brand new; they picked up the keys that day) house for a Switzerland Day barbeque, which was great. The house, in proper Swiss style, has a bunker to save them all (and 2 of the neighbours, apparently) when the revolution comes (although recent slackening of the rules re having to keep a year's supply of tinned peaches and cervelat (seemingly indestructible sausages) or whatever in your bunker means, I suppose, that if the revolution does come they will all have to survive on vast quantites of wine (because everyone uses their bunker as a cellar) and then they will have to resort to cannibalism. Which I guess would be less confronting if you were drunk, but still. They really should make sure they have a little camping stove or something, because I'm sure it would be much nicer to eat a cooked person than a raw one. Maybe some herbs and spices would be good, too).

Anyway, the party was super. The garden of the new house is full of fruit trees, so I spent a lot of time picking and scoffing blackberries and raspberries, wondering about making wine out of all the grapes, trying to talk the new owners out of chopping down the plum and cherry trees, and wondering what "holunderbeere" is in english (elderberry, apparently, but since I have no idea what they look or taste like, I couldn't tell at the time). As it turns out, though, no one else is as interested in the edible parts of the garden, so I left with vast quantites of blackberries and raspberries that were too ripe to leave on the bushes (yay!).

The other highlight of the night (apart from the fruit) was the fireworks. As I have mentioned, people buy their own fireworks and let them off whenever they want to, but there are also organised firework events in the towns. From where we were we had a huge view over lots of different towns, and so from about 9pm onwards (when it was sort of dark-ish, or at least enough so that people were starting to set off their firecrackers in earnest, and to light their insanely ginormous bonfires) we had a 180 degree view of pyromania at its prettiest. The best aspects of which, in my opinion, were the massive bonfire in a field nearby (too far away to really appreciate, but it definitely brought back the memories of last year on Switzerland Day, when I had just arrived here for a holiday and I was taken, all jet-lagged and bedraggled, to see this HUGE fire that the town was putting on, that was ENORMOUS and HOT and only about 10m away from where a bunch of cars were parked. No one else, apart from the other token foreigner, seemed to think this was strange), the official fireworks display of the closest town (which was pretty and organised and much grander than all the individual efforts), the huge fires that were burning on big mountains in the distance (because of all the smoky haze you couldn't actually see the mountains any more, so it looked as though there were fires suspended in the sky), and the fireworks that someone had brought to the party, that were let off in the backyard (especially the last one which seemed to be sort of broken and kept flaring a bit then sputtering and half dying before flaring a bit again, and ended up as a few pathetic (but still kind of enormous) tongues of flame shooting up a metre or so then sort of collapsing on the lawn. Fortunately nothing got set on fire that shouldn't have).

Play It Again, Sam

I just saw a one man band marauding the streets of Aarau. He had one of those drums that people in marching bands wear, and he was wandering and drumming all over the place. He had a bit of paper stuck on his back (in the manner of people in running races or something) that said today's date. He was being followed by a man in strangely anachronistic clothes (ie. tweedy and bedraggled) who was filming him on a strangely anachronistic (ie. enormous) camcorder thing.

I wonder what it was all in aid of.

A Grisly Hello To Summer

Yesterday, in an abysmal display of apathy and hopelessness, I failed to go to Zürich to watch a snowman be set on fire.

Yes, it's sechseläuten time of year, which means that Zürich goes on holiday, there is much parading and dressing up, and then a snowman effigy is set alight and watched eagerly until his head explodes. This snowman bit is the focal point of it all, and it involves a huge bonfire, a pretend snowman (called the böögg, and described in Wikipedia as a "rag doll", but it seems a lot more slow-burning than that) perched atop the bonfire and stuffed full of explosives, and a stopwatch. The idea is that the time from when the böögg's pyre is lit and when his head explodes is taken as some indication of what the coming summer will be like (a quick time means a long, hot, dry summer, a long time means a rainy short summer).

Happily, for slackers such as myself, it's all shown on telly. It took 12 minutes or so for the böögg's head to explode, which apparently bodes an average sort of summer (although Reto tells me that he read something recently which said that research shows there is no correlation between the time taken for the head to explode and the quality of the summer, which is too bad, because I like a nice ordinary, non-hot summer).

My impression of it all, possibly because I was in a bad sort of mood while I was watching it, is that it was a bit much like some sort of public burning-at-the-stake for my liking (although apparently a fairly historically inaccurate attempt). The crowd of people gathered around, the smoke and flames creeping ever higher, the enthusiasm with which we all watched and waited for the grisly end. If only I had brought some knitting.

Time For A Cup Of Tea And A Nice Lie Down

Last Monday morning, Reto and I became some sort of old age pensioners. We got out of bed ridiculously early, made a thermos of tea, then went and fell asleep on a train. Well, something like that, anyway.

We got up at 1.30am. We did make a thermos of tea (although we had been planning on a thermos of glühwein, but as it turns out "buy the cheapest wine you can find" is not a wise first step. Being the seasoned expert that I now am, I would advise paying more than $1.95 a litre). We got onto a train, and I did my best to fall asleep, but sadly failed.

We went to Basel for the beginning of Fasnacht. Inconveniently, the beginning of Fasnacht is at 4am, and so there we were, huddled together with thousands of other people in the centre of Basel, yawning, eating bratwurst and hoping not to be rained on. At precisely 4am all the lights went off and everyone went "oooh!" and then it all began.

I didn't really know what to expect. Reto had explained it all to me a bit, but somehow I never really listened properly, and I had tried to read about it on the internet but that never really sank in either. I knew that what we were going for was a parade of people playing piccolos and drums and dressed up in wacky costumes, and someone had told me that it was really loud, but that was about it.

Anyway, at the click of 4am ("click" being the sound of the lights being turned off, I imagine) we were suddenly surrounded by the sound of piccolos and drums, and all these people who were standing opposite me suddenly flung themselves to the side. Not some strange sort of audience participation, as it turned out, but the paraders making space for their parade. That was kind of unexpected, because there were clear paths left everywhere that I assumed the paraders would follow, and this being Switzerland, I imagined that no one was standing where they shouldn't be. Apparently some people were, though, but not to worry, because they were flung efficiently aside by a bunch of people dressed in wacky masks and costumes, with lights on their heads and carrying paper lanterns of all shapes and sizes.

The lanterns were not really lanterns, I suppose, but big illuminated things that were decorated by each group (for the paraders travel in packs) and apparently made fun of local politics and the like. It seems, for example, that it was proposed that a "polarium" be built in Basel and that it be packed full of penguins. Apparently this was a popular plan, but it was abandoned for financial reasons, and so pictures of sad penguins abounded.

In order to actually understand what it was all about I'm sure that you'd have to be a local, or at least a person with a far better grasp of their bizarro spelling than I am, but even with my total absence of knowledge it was still pretty entertaining, and spectacular to see in the 4am darkness.

Anyway. Each group of paraders played their own tune with their piccolos and drums, and had their own themed lanterns and paraded around in an orderly (ish) fashion. After a while it got kind of cold, so Reto and I went into a cafe for a bowl of soup and some warm air. As it turns out, groups of paraders apparently decide that they want to have breaks whenever they want to too, and so stepping indoors was kind of like stepping into a hell populated by freakish dismembered heads (and drums).

By the time we had had our soup and gone back outside the whole tone of the thing had kind of changed. It was all a lot more disorganised. The parade had spread out, it seemed, and groups of paraders were no longer following other groups. One minute you (as a bystander) would be standing in the street watching paraders parade by, and the next minute you would be either mown down or flung aside by a group of paraders who decided that they liked the look of your piece of road and weren't going to let you stand in their way. It was impossible to move, really because you never knew when some troop of ghouls and crazies would leap out at you with their piccolos blaring (all of which made rendezvousing with my recently-Australianised friend Ingrid impossible, which was a pity for various reasons, not the least of which was that I was going to get her to sign my postal vote form for me).

Anyway, that's basically Fasnacht for you. Or at least the first bit, for this goes on for three days in various forms. It's loud and cold and a surprising combination of heavily organised (you have to be one of them to be in it, and you stick with your group's rules about costumes and subjects and tunes and so on) and heavily disorganised (you stop when you want to, you go where you want to, you wake up the neighbours at unreasonable hours, which I gather is as un-Swiss as throwing rubbish (or confetti) in the streets, which is also done with abandon during Fasnacht). I had an excellent time, though, and then, tragically (to get back to the old-age-pensioner/thermos-carrying theme) I also really enjoyed going home again and having a nice warm bath and a nap. Sigh.