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.

Birthday in 8 Parts

Well, Reto's birthday is finally over, and various points can be made.

1. I am an excellent and thoughtful girlfriend. I got him an excellent present (it's a board game, which is testament to my powers of patience and self-sacrifice, because I don't really like board games. Or are they called bored games? Hmm. Anyway, it seems quite a good one and I don't hate it yet, although it is only a day later and we have only played 3 times) and I made him a birthday cake. Which was both delicious and fairly childish (and as you can see I didn't make enough icing to cover all the sides. Note also that he did not turn 5. My boyfriend is a sensible age, but I didn't want to turn the cake into an angry echidna with all the candles we would have needed to make it numerically accurate. Actually, I don't think we would have had enough candles, hahaha).

2. Mountains are nice. We went bushwalking on some mountain near here and it was lovely. The weather was nice (sunny but a bit cloudy and with a bit of wind so it wasn't too hot), the view was super, the whole thing was invigorating and outdoorsy and wholesome.

3. Mountainy Switzerland looks a bit like mountainy Australia (if you squint a bit and don't pay too much attention to what the altitude is. It also helps if you are above the tree line in both countries). Sadly I don't have the photos of our trip to Mt Kosciuszko here to prove it, but I might look into adding some later. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it, unlikely though it seems.

4. The Swiss are very civilised. While up on this mountain (and we spent basically the whole day at a higher altitude than the highest point in Australia) we went to two restaurants. There was another that we could have gone to, but we couldn't be bothered walking the few hundred vertical metres to get to it, and so we missed out on another overpriced coffee and piece of cake or sausage or similar). It actually reminded me quite a lot of many of Reto's stories of being in the army ("We went for a 6 hour hike. Well, it was 3 hours to a restaurant on top of a mountain and then we had lunch for an hour and then we walked back. The next day we went to a water-slide park").

5. Orthodox Jewish people are funnier than you might imagine. They always seem to wear such sensible hats for not-getting-sunburnt purposes, but up on the mountain apparently baseball caps are the headwear of choice. As well as white sneakers (which was sensible), plus all the normal orthodox Jewish attire. Possibly there were some undercover orthodox Jews up there too, but they weren't as noticeable as the ones who only traded in the hats and shoes.

6. I have unfortunate skin. I embraced my usual "spending time in the sun" ensemble (which basically means an umbrella and long pants, as well as several generous slatherings of 30+ sunscreen. "Australian standard" according to the bottle)

and still ended up kind of red at the end of the day. Sigh.

7. Samedan is tiny

(which wasn't news, but it was reaffirmed with a semi-aerial view) but the airport is super. It's just over the river from the bulk of the town (as you can perhaps tell from the pic) and there aren't really any fences keeping you from wandering about in it. In fact, there is a walking path leading to it and a bench so that you can sit there and look at it. We watched a few planes take off and land there the other day (which is NOWHERE NEAR AS NERDY AS IT SOUNDS, because they were all small planes and gliders, which was unusual and wobbly and fraught with potential danger), which was a welcome change from the mini golf debacle.

8. And finally, Swiss cows are very shiny and clean. And apparently potentially dangerous.

Berlin, Grr

Well, we're back. And in my experience there's nothing more annoying than people ranting on their blogs about how great their holidays were, so I have decided to tell you all about The Edited Lowlights Of My Trip To Berlin:

1. My boyfriend forgot my birthday

Well, this isn't strictly true. He didn't actually forget it, he just didn't get me anything (except a card). He was planning to get me something while we were in Berlin, but since we spent the entire time together, in the end I found something I really liked (the world's most excellent umbrella, perfect for both sun and rain) and then he bought it for me. Which was nice and all, but it takes the excitement out of the whole birthday thing, frankly.

2. I mangled my feet

For some reason I didn't bring any summery shoes with me when I came to Switzerland. Apparently I was assuming that I would have broken up with Reto and moved back to Australia before the weather got too warm. As it turns out I was wrong, so I have been stumbling around in sneakers for the last month or so while it has been hot hot hot. In Berlin I bought some fairly excellent Birkenstocks, which look nice but seem to be intent on ripping my feet to shreds. In the end my feet were bandaided up like mummies.

3. It was stupidly hot

It wasn't so bad for the first few days, but the last few were relentlessly sunny and over 30 degrees. I hate summer. Thank god for my fantastic sonnenschirm (umbrella).

4. I was laughed at by bogans

In general the whole of Berlin loved my sonnenschirm (I'm calling it that because it seems less poxy than parasol, less ungainly than sun-umbrella and more truthful than umbrella). Within 10 minutes of buying it, someone had yelled at me from her car how excellent she thought it was. A man manning a book stall said he thought it was totally eccentric (which I took as a compliment). A woman at the zoo thought it was fantastic. I overheard heaps of people talking about it in complimentary terms. This came to a dramatic halt when we went to a distant suburb of Berlin, or possibly a separate town entirely (Oranienburg). Everyone there thought it was the stupidest thing ever. I was goggled at by pregnant teenagers, openly laughed at by some woman in a cafe, who (possibly to her credit) tried at least to stifle her guffawing until I had walked past (although she did not try very hard, and I was only about a step past her when she started bellowing like a wounded buffalo), and I was stared at by countless others. Is it really that startling?

5. We went to see Inland Empire

.. which is the latest David Lynch movie. As anyone who has ever seen any of his movies will know, they are always fairly incomprehensible, but this one really takes the cake, and even more so than you might imagine because all the bits of it that were in polish language were subtitled into german only (as you might expect in Germany, I guess). What a waste of three long hours of my life. Even Reto agrees, and he is David Lynch's biggest fan. The one good point was when a Daddo appeared briefly on the screen, which raised a snicker of surprise from me and also from one other person in the audience (undoubtedly another Australian).

6. We queued for ages to see a dirty bear

Yes, Knut the adorable eisbär (aka "ice bear", which is officially what I am calling polar bears lately because it's just so cute. Which is not a concept you usually associate with german, so you should make the most of it when you can). We went to the zoo because Reto has a bizarre fondness for them, and of course we had to go and see Knut while we were there, and foolishly, we joined the back of the queue like civilised people, instead of just pushing in like everyone else. What a waste of 45 minutes. He was adorably cute though, and much cleaner (as pictured) after he went for an adorably cute swim.

7. I was forced to drink horrible coffee all the time

Apparently Germans are really into putting a lot of milk into their coffee, to the point where it is so weak as to be almost unrecognisable as coffee (and the names of the types of coffee seem to mean different things from one cafe to the next. I never knew what I would get). And even worse, one day at the cafe where we were having brekky the coffee machine was broken so I couldn't have any at all!

8. We spent 20 hours on trains getting there and back

In a bid to be vaguely environmentally aware, we got the train there and back instead of flying. We caught the night train on the way up, which left Basel at 9pm-ish and arrived in Berlin at 7.30am-ish. I slept badly. The carriage we were in looked like some sort of 1980s idea of a prison on a space ship, where everyone in it is in some sort of suspended animation cryogenic deep freeze type thing, and then the ship is attacked by aliens or something and the only survivors are a small child and a wrongly-accused woman and the scariest murderer ever known and they have to work together, never quite trusting each other, in order to survive and get back to earth. And then in the end, just before they land back on earth, the psycho murderer guy brutally slaughters the woman and child, and makes it look like self defense. That's how grim this train was. The way back was slightly better, but there's still no denying it was another 9 hours on a train (half of which was spent travelling backwards).

All in all it was the most excellent holiday I have been on in ages, though. Berlin is fantastic.

Everyone's A Critic

You know how they occasionally make school kiddies participate in projects aimed at making the local area more "beautiful"? Yesterday Reto and I went to his sister's place, which is in the general vicinity of one of Reto's former schools. There is an unattractive tunnel near the train station that apparently Reto and his school colleagues were each allocated a section of to paint. Having seen the section that Reto painted, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that art might not be his one true talent, but I also think that the graffitist who wrote "Alles ist Scheisse" over the top of it was probably being a bit harsh.

Black Holes And Quark

It seems that the building where Reto and I live is just too good a place to leave. Ever.

Yesterday, as I was angrily doing some laundry, I was accosted by an aging neighbour. I like to discourage conversation in the laundry room because there's no escape, and it's inevitably confusing and scary and heavily garbled (because it's in german, people. Do try to keep up), but this woman would not take no for an answer (not that I actually said "no" at any point; I just looked like a startled bunny the whole time). Anyway, once the conversation progressed to the point where she realised I speak abysmal german and it was all going to be a huge struggle for us both (which incidentally was a very small distance from the initial "grüezi"), I had hoped she would leave me alone with my laundry and my silent solitude (god, how depressing) but no, her interest was piqued and suddenly she wanted to know all about me. This included where I am from, who I live with, what floor we live on, how many rooms we have and how long we have been living here. If she had been younger I might have suspected her of being some sort of undercover immigration officer there to grill me and throw me out of the country, but I think her point might have been that she wanted to tell me that she had been living in her flat (5th floor, 3 rooms) for 25 years. Which struck me as strange conversation. And also as a long time. Actually, I was surprised that the building was that old.

Later in the day I was in the lift with Reto when another elderly neighbour got in with us. Interestingly, but not relevantly, he was very, very short. Anyway, he and Reto made a bit of polite chitchat while I smiled inanely, and apparently (I later discovered) he told Reto that he has been living in his flat (10th floor, undisclosed number of rooms) for 40 years. Lordy.

Why do people keep telling me this stuff? Are they trying to warn me that we have inadvertently moved into some sort of bizarro vortex thing that we will never get out of? Am I going to live here forever? I mean, Aarau is okay, and our flat has some amount of charm, but 25 years? 40? Really?

Olivia - Wackily Endearing. Or Possibly Just Wacky

Reto and I headed to Montreux over the Easter long weekend, hoping for a relaxing time and some pleasant scenery. We stayed with my friend Olivia who I know from the bad old days in Australia when I was employed and therefore wasn't free to sleep in until lunch time every day, and then spend the afternoons wasting time on the internet.

As it turns out, Olivia's 'sensibly employed' Australian persona was all a bit of a con and in fact she is kind of bonkers. One of the first people we met (and I use that term loosely) was Foster the pig:

Foster isn't just some garden-variety Swiss pig. He was brought, deliberately, all the way from Australia as hand luggage. Admittedly he is extremely squashable, and Olivia likes to pretend that he doubles as a pillow on aeroplanes, but frankly I suspect that Fostie would never have to suffer the indignity of having a tired head smush him into the shoulder of a stranger in economy class. Actually, I think that Fostie is to Olivia what my parents' cat Sammy is to my parents. Sometime I think my parents treat Sammy better than they treat me (for example - no one ever gets me a birthday present any more, but Sammy routinely gets prawns on his birthday).

Fosty may be adorable but he is not particularly self sufficient, so one afternoon when Olivia was busy carousing around town, Reto and I forced her to let us babysit him (which I suspect she didn't really want us to do because she didn't think we would keep him out of trouble):

Apart from assorted Fosty-related fun and revelling in all the english-speaking with someone who is doing practically the same sort of stuff I am doing, we mainly spent the weekend walking around the shore of Lake Geneva and eating ice cream. Olivia and I had a brief adventure on a pedalo (a pedal-powered boaty thing) on the lake.We made a small attempt to go to the Olympic museum in Lausanne, which ended up only really involving walking around the gardens and the shop there and not actually going into the museum itself (I might like the Olympics, but really, I'm not that interested in sport that I am willing to pay to find out about it). We all ate a huge amount of scary looking easter eggs, we loafed around a lot, we slept in a lot, and we all managed to avoind being killed by the ceiling in Olivia's flat (which is kind of falling down). We were entertained by the excellent garden-based statues in Montreux (Montreux being home to the well known jazz festival, hence the musical garden sculpture theme). I made two attempts to steal books from youth hostels, only to be met with failure both times (there was nothing on offer at all in Vevey, and the best I could find in Montreux was christian propaganda about a Chinese communist who found Jesus, but not even at Easter was that particularly appealing).

All in all it was a really lovely weekend, but be warned, people. If you ever find yourself in possession of small children, think twice before you let Olivia be in charge of them because she may well entrust them to other (untrustworthy) people to look after, use them as pillows on planes, or coerce them into potentially dangerous (yet entertaining) photo opportunities.

(No animals were harmed during the making of this post. None that are actually alive, anyway. Fosty survived mostly unmangled)

Irrelevant

I was reading one of those crappy free newspapers that you get on trains yesterday and there was a small article about Australia's abysmal stance on climate change. The article featured a quote from Australia's prime minister, John Harvard. hee hee.

Not A Very Interesting Tale

Owing to overwhelming requests from my adoring public, I am bringing to you a non-comprehensive, and largely non-offensive, account of Being A Spectator At A Curling Match.

You turn up. As so often happens in Switzerland, there are eating opportunities aplenty. The curling hall place is basically a small ice rink thing and a restaurant that sells allegedly the most delicious apple pie ever, but I am not in a position to either confirm or deny that. Their coffee is perfectly acceptable, though, and there is also the endless entertainment of seeing what picture you will get on the lid thing of your coffee cream thing (I seem to be haunted endlessly by camels lately. I realise that this probably doesn't make any sense. Maybe I'll clear it all up on some other slow news day).

I was expecting that the ice rink would be a normal one, ie. big and oval with small children falling over on the peripheries. The rink here is small and rectangular, all marked up with curling lines and things, and is OBVIOUSLY NOT A RINK ON WHICH ANY SORT OF NON-CURLING ACTIVITIES WILL TAKE PLACE. Not to perpetuate any unfair and outdated stereotypes, but you should remember that this is Switzerland after all, home of not having fun and then tidying up after yourself.

Curling, as I have said before, is basically lawn bowls in warmer clothes. Not that I really know how to play lawn bowls either, nor do I know what the rules are (in spite of the fact that I chose it for school sport on more than one occasion. When I wasn't busy playing golf, the other slacker's choice of low-impact torment at school. Sadly I didn't go to one of those schools where "going to the beach" or "dancing in a nightclub" was considered an acceptable sport substitute, and I'm sure that that was not only because the closest beach to my school was hundreds of kilometres away, nor that there was only one nightclub in town and if you went there you were in danger of running into your maths teacher who was out drinking more than can be appropriate for a supposed role model type, blahblahblah). Anyway. Curling is the same as lawn bowls if lawn bowls is like this:

There are 4 people on a team. You try to bowl your bowls to the target area, which is marked on the grass. The people on the other team try to knock your bowls out of the way, or they try to get their bowls closer to the middle of the target (aka the kitty) than yours are. You get a point for each of your bowls that are both within the designated target area and closer than the closest of your opponents bowls to the kitty. The captain of the team stands at the target end and tells you where to aim for by pointing in a strangely effete manner with a rake (which seems a whole weird science of its own, what with the curly nature of the path of the bowl and the fact that blocking the path of your opponents is often a better strategy than just trying to get your bowls near the kitty), and the other two team members either enthusiastically rake the grass in front of your bowl, or they don't, depending on whether the bowl needs help to get to where it is trying to go or not. And then, when everyone has had a go and points have been won (or not), you start again from the other end. And then again and again, up to 10 times until you have (finally) finished a match.

Obviously to fully understand the above as curling the following substitutions must be made: ice for grass, rocks for bowls, button for kitty, house for target area, skip for captain, broom for rake, and sweep the ice for rake the grass.

So. You sit there with your coffee and your book and you watch people bowling bowls or throwing rocks (or whatever it's called) and sweeping and strategising, and one of the first things you notice is that the only reason there are 4 people on the team is so that there are enough people to do the sweeping. Basically, whatever the first two people do with their rocks is pretty irrelevant, because they have long been knocked out of the way by the end of the match. Even the third player is a bit peripheral to the outcome, frankly.

The next thing you notice is that curling is a sport that all ages can embrace. There is lots of bending of the knees involved, so possibly it wouldn't be the sport of choice for my mother (who has one gammy knee these days, as well as a fake hip) but it seems that anyone with functional knees and a reasonable sense of balance can embrace it. The chance of being injured seems minimal, too, although Reto did have a big horrible blistery thing on his thumb after playing last weekend (very similar to a wound I once got while tenpin bowling, actually). Anyway, in a heartwarming display of community or the universal appeal of slow, dull sports, the ice was dotted with oldies and youngies and the odd person in between. Not that I am implying that my boyfriend is particularly old or young or odd.

And then ... well, I'm not sure there is a whole lot more to it, actually. They play thousands of ends and then the winning team buys the losing team some drinks and it's all very jovial and friendly. Then you go home and your allegedly sporty boyfriend uses his pathetic thumb wound as an excuse not to do the washing up.

Incidentally, on the weekend, Reto's team was trounced in their first match, and then they did the trouncing in the second one. I don't remember the scores. I was too busy reading.

Veni, Vidi, Vici

In spite of what I am fairly sure was determination never to go and watch Reto curl again (never to watch Reto play curling? Never to watch Reto take part in a curling match? Never to watch Reto play some moronic sport involving gravel and ice and brooms? What is the correct terminology here?), I inadvertently went last weekend. And lived to tell the tale.

It's not a very interesting tale, and I suppose that last sentence is actually inaccurate because I have not told the tale and I have no intention of telling the tale (I can't imagine who would want to hear it), but I feel quite smug that I went, I saw, I conquered (conquered my fear of going there again, that is). I won't mention the fact that I was several hours late owing to a poorly (or perhaps not so poorly...) planned visit to the Lindt factory shop, nor that I was well armed with several books and the most expensive newspaper I have ever bought ($7!), nor that I once again didn't watch most of what went on, because that sort of information is frankly irrelevant, and might take some of the sheen off my remarkable feat of endurance.

Big City Life

Aarau's environmentally friendly alternative to traffic lights:

(although note that this high level of traffic control is only required at one of Aarau's intersections, and even then only at peak hours. Note also the fetching white gloves, which upon closer inspection, provide the whole scene with an air of Mickey Mouse)

Two Hours Of My Life I Will Never Get Back

Being the dedicated girlfriend that I have apparently become, I went to watch Reto compete in a curling match last night. I don't know what I was thinking.

Both playing and watching, I hate almost all forms of sport, and to the best of my knowledge I always have. I used to like to try to make myself feel more open-minded by trying to convince myself that I only hated team sports or ball sports or sports that had to be played on grass. Then I thought that perhaps I might not hate sports that are vaguely ludicrous and that can be played by anyone regardless of physical incapacity or drunkenness (and admittedly there are a few of these that I have some time for. Darts, for example, although it starts to wear thin unless you are in a pub with a beer in your hand, threatening the safety of people who sit too close to the board. Luge always seemed kind of nice too, involving, as it does, people doing a very, very small amount of running and then having a good lie-down).

Curling always seemed like it might be on my "tentatively approved" list as well, what with all the standing around punctuated by entertainingly frenzied bouts of sweeping, and the looks of grim determination usually only seen on the faces of ladies at the local bowling club. I now realise, however, that I was wrong.

Curling is the single most uninteresting sport on the planet*. I'd bore you with the details except I think I was too comatose from lack of anything much happening to remember any. Even if you the game holds some amount of novelty (because you have never actually seen it played before. And I am still willing to admit that the sweeping aspect is vaguely comical), even if you are going to support your beloved boyfriend, even if you have coffee and a book to help you through, it's still advisable to stay at home and watch McLeod's Daughters in italian and tear your own fingernails out than try to sit through a match.

I love you, Reto, but apparently not that much.




* Actually, this might just be hyperbole on my part. I'm sure it's no more uninteresting than any other sport (with the possible exception of luge or darts)

Can Anyone Give Me Wood?

Switzerland is apparently the home of board games, card games, any sort of distraction that is sociable but that means you don't have to make conversation. Reto's family is obsessed (well, possibly that is a bit harsh but they are definitely enthusiastic) with playing a boardgame called Die Siedler von Catan which is all about colonising a new country or something similar. The game involves building bridges and houses (or something) by trading cards representing things (such as brick and grains and wood and sheep) with the other players.

The other day I was listening to Reto and assorted others playing this game (I was taking part in the less sociable but more entertaining pasttime of reading my book because I am the sort of spoilsport party-pooper who can't stand board games or card games or any type of organised activity at all), and it seemed to me that every minute or so, someone would earnestly say "Does anyone have wood?", "Does anyone want to give me wood?", "I've got wood but I've got no stones". This was a largely ESL* crowd, and possibly they might not appreciate the humour in these statements, but I was quietly giggling to myself until I could take it no more. "What the hell is wrong with you people? Don't you realise how hilarious this is?" I yelled at them, and they stared at me blankly, before ignoring me and carrying on.

"I need some weed" said the next player, pronouncing "wheat" slightly strangely.

These foreigners are crazy.



* English as a Second Language

What The Swiss Believe In (part 2)

The more entertaining and simple statues of Aarau having been dealt with previously, we now move on to Statues 201. What can you assume about the nature of our Switzy friends from this:

I think the following should be considered:

• A fondness for weaponry and killing (as previously discussed), hence the sword;


• A fondness for leg-revealing dress-wearing (as previously discussed), hence the dress and legs;


• A fondness for precision, hence the scales. Who other than a nation of pedants would garner a reputation for their watchmaking abilities?;


• An unwillingness or inability to see reality, hence the blindfold and peep-toe sandals. With their neutrality and their choice not to join the EU, it's as though the Swiss choose not to acknowledge the world around them. Similarly, what sort of insane weather-denier would wear open-toed shoes in the depths of a Swiss winter (I realise that I shouldn't be casting such aspersions given the poor quality and inappropriateness of my shoe choices, but no one can actually see my toes so I retain the moral high ground)?; and


• A flair for efficiency. They are obviously packing as many stereotypes into the one statue as they possibly can.

The only other statue we will consider today is this one, and I think that it really speaks for itself:

It's obviously a declaration of proud sense of isolation that all Swiss people feel in their hearts. That they stand alone, quiet and dignfied, and they stoically bear (no pun intended) all that is thrust upon them. They don't need to hide behind details, and they have within themselves all that they need to defend their people and their nation. They might have a reputation for being a bit impenetrable and cranky, and maybe they would go so far as to climb a tree in order to swat you out of it and eat you to death, but then again maybe they are just furry and misunderstood.

Either that or Switzies just like bears, I guess.

When Art And Life Overlap (part one)

Shortly before I left Australia I was given a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson by a very dear friend. Now that I have read it (actually, I started it on Saturday night and I haven't finished it yet, thanks to my relentlessly annoying boyfriend and his apparent need for constant attention) I have some extremely interesting and relevant points to make about the unchanging nature of the Swiss psyche. Please bear in mind that the book was written in 1812.

1. The Swiss are a bunch of misogynistic bastards. This should come as no surprise to anyone who realises that WOMEN WEREN'T EVEN ALLOWED TO VOTE IN THIS COUNTRY UNTIL 1971. In 1812, our friend Frau Robinson, aka "the wife" or "the mother" (as in "The mother found the scene all too horrible, and hastened into the cave, trembling and distressed") is one-dimensional to say the least. Her only emotions seem to be negative ones. She is usually fearful, anxious, horrified, aghast. Rarely does she get the chance to speak in whole sentences, and when she does it is usually only to panic needlessly, or to say something that, as her husband kindly points out, is incorrect (after suggesting that her sons should not eat the snake they just killed, her husband corrects her. "Excuse me, my dear wife", he begins, before elaborating proudly on all the reasons why she was wrong to hamper her sons so). On the occasions when she manages to escape her husband's withering embrace and actually do something herself, she is patronised almost into a coma ("You have done far more than I could have expected, wife", "Did you not find the work too hard?"). She can never be left at their house alone without at least an 8 year old boy or a dog there to protect her. She cannot be trusted with a gun, even though everyone else, even the 8 year old, is armed to the teeth. Not to ruin the plot for you, towards the end of the book another person turns up, an English woman in her 20s. She has been self-sufficient after being shipwrecked some 3 years previously (and has achieved much, "the quarter of which would completely have appalled the generality of her sex", apparently), but as soon as the Swiss Family Robinson find her they can hardly wait to get her into a dress, leave her to wait with "the mother" whenever there is work to be done, and to insist that even inspecting all aspects of the house where TSFR live would "tire the poor girl out".
Compare this to Switzerland today, where, as mentioned, women have only recently begun to vote, they are vastly underrepresented in full time work, in parliament, in upper management type employment, where they earn significantly less than men in equivalent roles, where childcare places are scarce to the point of non-existence and where school hours are so variable that women have often little choice but to entirely leave the workforce when they have children. At least the wife Robinson was only the last of 6, not the last of 7 million.

2. The Swiss like weapons. In TSFR (as it shall henceforth be known) the menfolk are obsessed with running around the island and shooting everything in sight (obviously Mrs Robinson is at home cooking and cleaning and sewing new clothes for everyone, as befits a woman. Hopefully she finds time to have an affair with an impressionable young graduate, too, in between peeling kangaroos and being thoroughly patronised for managing to collect a few acorns). Every time the menfolk see a flock of flamingos wading in a marsh or a brace of penguins frolicking on the beach, little time is spared for wonderment at these scenes of natural beauty before someone whips out a gun, shoots everything they possibly can and then they all comment on how well they will eat tonight. Even better is the opportunity to slaughter some sort of animal that has never been either seen or killed before ("Franz was overjoyed to find that he had shot a 'new creature' "). Rarely does anyone walk more than a few metres without first arming themselves with at least one gun, usually more, as well as a bow and arrows and a lasso. Sticks are often flailed against the treacherous creatures they come across (such as the wildly dangerous angora bunnies), and they have no hesitation in throwing rocks at monkies, setting their dogs loose on porcupines, or harpooning tortoises.
Note the current fondness of the Swiss for being in the army and bearing weapons. Note their obligatory target practice twice a year (or however often it is). Note their souvenir of note, the Swiss Army Knife. Note my boyfriend's bayonet (no innuendo, please).

3. The Swiss like to eat dead things. See point number 2 with regard to killing everything they see. No animal is safe from being eaten by the Swiss Family Robinson.
I don't know about actual statistics or so-called evidence that the Switzies are a bunch of carnivores, but every time I go anywhere here I feel like someone is making me eat another rabbit or cow or mystery-meat product. You have no idea how happy the sight of a chick pea makes me these days.

What The Swiss Believe In (part 1)

It is a well known fact that the Swiss love their flag. Ditto that they are heavily involved in the military. It is less widely known that the men apparently like to wear very short dresses and dance with each other, but all these fascinating aspects of Swiss culture come together and are celebrated at the Aarau train station:

Similarly, the value of stretching is revered by the Swiss. Specifically, stretching while naked and elevated and in public. In some countries you might be arrested for such behaviour, but here you are more likely to be immortalised in bronze:

And once you are appropriately warmed up, why not try a spot of tai chi?:

I'm sure all these statues (and all the other ones that you are yet to see) commemorate worthy things (like soldiers and dead people and actual things that the Swiss do hold dear), but really. If you are going to make art, and you want it to have a serious meaning, why not try to make it a little bit less funny looking?

Abandoned By A (Potential) Psycho

My boyfriend owns a bayonet. Actually, I'm not sure if it's really his or if he is just borrowing it, but either way it makes me uncomfortable.

He has just left to spend 3 weeks in the army, and as I helped him lug all his army accessories to the train station, I noticed that he was surprisingly heavily armed. Having already discussed the gun in some detail, attention turned to the knife. "That's a very big knife you've got" I said, and had we been other people, or had he not been wearing cammos (which also make me uncomfortable), it might have turned into innuendo or a Crocodile Dundee type conversation ("That's not a knife.."), or maybe even a combination of the two (perhaps with reference to the small size of Swiss Army knives, too, if I had been feeling mean). "Actually, it's a bayonet" he said, and I had visions of him stabbing people visciously, or possibly being stabbed himself. After all, what else does one do with a bayonet? Open letters?

Wikipedia tells me that

"In a modern context, bayonets are known to be particularly good for controlling prisoners, poking an enemy to see whether he is dead and for when the fighter is out of ammunition or so close to the enemy that firing a round is impossible."

Reto is in the Swiss army and so is unlikely to find himself needing to control prisoners, having enemies or fighting anyone (unless it's over the last piece of army-issued chocolate), so really, why does he have a bayonet? And does he keep it in our flat?