Die Insel

Well, what a hectic week of not going to french this has been. As well as all the sleeping in and loafing around, there was also the fete de la musique last weekend, which involved lots of wandering around the town and listening to marching-type bands and this floaty sub-aquatic sounding rock, and all the jazz that came from the stage about 2 doors up from our place. Then there was the Aareschlucht and the strange meeting of Inverell and Switzerland, and then a rendezvous with my Switzerland-Australia exchange partners (by which I mean our Switzy friends who moved to Australia at approximately the same time as I moved here). And then yesterday, Reto and I spent half the afternoon sitting on a piece of artwork that's here as part of the Belluard Bollwerk International festival.

The artwork in question was this, an island that they've built near the main train station here (ie. smack dab in the middle of stuff), made of scaffolding and with a solid and grassy top, and you rent it for a few hours (for free!) and you climb up, pull the ladder up behind you and then loaf on the lawn and do whatever you like. As it turned out, what we liked was sitting around, doing some reading and some chatting and some lolling, having a bit of a cocktail hour (a thermos full of gin and tonic and various snacky items) and being stared at by passers by.


It was super. We really were an island. As it turns out, swanning about with a parasol on top of a grassy scaffolding island in the middle of town on a Friday afternoon makes you something of a target for starers and hecklers and lunatics, but it also lets you not care at all. We sat there in the normally-non-loitering-friendly centre of town (where it's all roads and train tracks and concrete and gaggles of congregating schoolkiddies) and we read our books and we drank our gin and we looked at stuff going by and felt totally disconnected from it all, and it was great. There was so much hustle and bustle all around us, and we loafed with our shoes off. I can't recommend it highly enough. And the best (/worst) part is that it doesn't seem to be very popular at all. Since we left the island last night, I haven't seen anyone else up there at all, in spite of the fact that it's available around the clock for all your loitering needs. I may well take advantage of its unpopularity to do some more top quality public loafing some time next week.

New Hair

Reto cut my hair and now he thinks he owns it. It looks perfectly normal, in fact better than I had imagined it would (although shorter than I asked for, but we all saw that coming). Now I catch him staring at me quite a bit, and while I always think for a moment "aww, he's gazing at me with love-struck adoration" (today it's four months since our wedding, in case you're interested) I soon realise he's staring at my hair, and he's staring at it critically. He always comments on how uneven he thinks it is, and this morning he said he thought it looked like a boy's haircut. Which is really a criticism of him and his hair-based skills, but I also can't help but hear him saying to me, his shiny new wife "you look like a boy". Grr.

It's Not Me, It's .. The New Me

Since I got back to Australia I have read my horoscope in about 4 different newspapers/magazines, and although I don't believe in these things at all it seems that now is apparently a super time for me to have a frenzy of organisation and planning. And judging by what I have achieved over the last few days, that is right righty right right.

I successfully drove all over the place (really, this is the first time in about a year and a half that I have driven anywhere, and all this Switzerland/Australia business really is making me confused about which side of the road I belong on). I found a nice dress to wear to my wedding (not yet bought because I am waiting for someone to order in my size, but it is super and just what I am after). I nagged Reto into liking a suit he found (he already mostly liked it but needed a bit of a nudge in the right direction). I largely avoided jet lag (although that being said it is currently 9.30pm and I am hopelessly tired and Reto is already asleep and hogging all the bed space). I saw some of my friends (quite the achievement given that I am a bit on the tired side by about 8pm). I sorted out all this moronic confusion with my flight back to Switzy in March (no small feat given that I have absolutely no faith in the desire of airlines to facilitate anything). The pièce de résistance, though, is the fact that today I went to the registry of births, deaths and marriages and I officially changed my name. Yes, I am no longer Robyn X, now I am Robyn Y (picking up my new birth certificate tomorrow, so maybe that's when I officially become Ms Y. Who knows). I'm sure there's a whole lot of psychological trauma attached to this but happily I feel like I am a bit too busy/tired at the moment to really notice. No doubt it will warrant a bit of a rant at some point in the near future.

Turning Into A Lizard

Apparently I have absolutely no powers of homeostasis.

Just a few days ago I was sittting on the couch having breakfast in the living room of where I live in Sydney when I realised that my toes had turned a numb-ish and deathly sort of grey from the cold (which is a shade never seen before. Interestingly, when I was young my extremities used to turn sort of purple and orange, then later it was more like blue, and now apparently my toes turn grey and my fingers turn white).

Fast forward a few days and I am back in Switzy where it has been something around 30-ish degrees for the last few days (ie. hot but not ridiculously so) and Reto complains every time I lay a finger on him because I am so ludicrously warm all the time. I had to put my feet under the cold tap the other night before I went to bed because otherwise I end up lying in bed feeling like they are about to spontaneously combust or something (which is not conducive to falling asleep, not even for someone just back from 30 hours of air-travel-based sleep deprivation). This whole cold-tap-foot thing is not new, but normally it is something I only had to do when I was visiting my parents in their former home in one of the more tropical parts of NSW, where Christmas day was known to be in the 40s.

Anyway, it seems I am turning into some sort of cold-blooded reptile type. Expect to see me lying on the roads in the winter months, trying to suck all the warmth I can find out of the bitumen.