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.

Not a Man

As I may have mentioned, I subscribed to french National Geographic a while ago, in a vague effort to inspire myself to read things in french more, and to look at all the pretty pictures. Getting them to send the first edition to me was a nightmare, because after about 6 weeks of nothing in the letterbox and several annoying-to-write emails (because they were in french) from me, followed by several annoying-to-receive emails (because they kept telling me that my address doesn't exist and the magazine is therefore undeliverable) from them, several editions turned up at once, and since then they've arrived regularly each month and there are no more dramas.

Unless you count the fact that they've suddenly become confused about who I am. The first 4 magazines that I got were addressed to Madame Robyn Surname. The most recent one was addressed to Monsieur Surname Robyn. Why? Why would they suddenly decide to change my name and my gender for me? Why? Why? I used to find this whole gender confusion thing that all these idiots over here have with my name funny and inoffensive. Not any more. NOW IT IS RELENTLESSLY ANNOYING. Just stop it, people. Grr.

Rude

Today we went to the zoo in Basel. As I may have mentioned, Reto is quite the zoo fan, and since I have known him I think I might have visited more zoos than I did in the other 20-something years of my life. Anyway, off we went and it was really nice, apart from all the rain. We saw lions and tiger and bears (no tigers, actually, but two types of bears and a snow leopard so that's surely enough to add up to a tiger as well), we ate an excellent cherry danish thing and a second-rate piece of lemon cake, we saw heaps of animals that I didn't know the names of (going to zoos where the animal names are only up in Foreign Languages really makes me realise how atrocious my animal knowledge is. The names were also in english in this zoo, but I didn't realise for quite a while). We also saw kookaburras, kangaroos, blue tongue lizards and various Australian snakes and spiders and fish that I feel no emotional attachment to. A mysterious old man held my hand and told me all about some iguana or something in some incomprehensible language (at least that's what I assume was going on. He said something incomprehensible to me, then grabbed my hand, made a gesture that made me think he was going to bite it, and then pointed at the mystery-reptile and said something else).

All that was very charming, and then I, in a frenzy of goodwill and politeness, held the door to the monkey house open for some man with a pram. There were two sets of doors and he seemed to be struggling a bit to get through the first door while simultaneously opening the second one and preventing his child (not in the pram) from being crushed by the first. I am generally nice, and have even been known to open doors in a professional capacity from time to time, and so I stood in the rain and held the second door open for him. Actually, I had an umbrella and I wouldn't have been able to get past him to go the other way through the doors anyway, so it wasn't actually very arduous for me, but it was still a nice gesture, and not one that anyone else was making (and there were plently of other people around who could have). And did the man with the pram acknowledge me in any way at all? Did he say thankyou? Did he so much as look at me and smile? Hah. No he bloody didn't.

Later I held another door open for another pram-driver (another man) and he didn't say thanks either. Honestly, people with prams are so annoying (taking up tons of space, having noisy and annoying children, dawdling, often travelling in packs, and worse still, packs several-abreast ie. taking up the whole footpath) that in my opinion they should be pathetically grateful when other people treat them with any amount of kindness*. In general they are, too, at least in my experience of helping people lug their prams up and down stairs in train stations (usually women and usually in Australia if that means anything, which I secretly suspect it might. As in, women are more likely to be the ones to know how annoying children and prams and unhelpful strangers are, and Australians are generally nicer than Switzies), but these two men completely failed to show any appreciation. And neither of them had the excuse of being actually too harried or harrassed to notice or to have the time to acknowledge me, they just didn't. They just dawdled through the door and ignored me.

Rude.






* Please note that some of my dearest friends are people with prams, and in general I don't really mean what I say in that sentence. Although I also sort of do.

Morons!

All my best intentions of sleeping in were thwarted this morning, not only by my mock-insomnia, but also by the band (as in group of people with uniforms and instruments) of morons (as in people who go wandering the street at 7am making a racket) marching down our street and making a racket! Morons!

Just Say No To Cleanliness

Guess what I did earlier today? I steam-cleaned all the tiled floor in the house. Although it wasn't really so arduous (no more so than vacuuming) and it really does seem to have the power to make things quite clean, I hope I never ever do it ever again in my whole life. Why? Because I disapprove of that level of cleanliness. I don't care if I live in a bit of filth, and indeed I would even go so far as to say I prefer it. I don't like the constant pressure that having everything spotlessly clean creates to keep everything spotlessly clean. I may not have the busiest life ever, but I would much rather spend my spare time doing whatever it is I enjoy doing than spend it steam cleaning things I stand on and breathing in the offensive fumes of genocide-strength antibacterial surface spray.

My Two Cents

I've decided to get on the wagon that was quite popular a little while ago among foreign people in Switz with blogs (and which is now becoming more popular in the international press) and complain about politics. I realise that this is really repetitive and behind the times for everyone in Switz, but I think that basically everyone who reads my blog is Australian (plus you, Danish Nick, but you may perhaps consider yourself Australian for the purposes of this post), so prepare yourself for something shiny and new and unheard-of.

The SVP is a popular right-wing political party here (they hold more seats than any other party in the lower house of parliament, apparently. I don't know how it all works here though, so I can't really tell you what that means except that lots of people vote for them. Although not really that many. Apparently about 25% of voters vote for the SVP). Earlier in the year they caused a bit of a brouhaha when they, along with some other party here, tried to have minarets banned, apparently on the grounds that building them diminished people's freedom of religion. Hmm. So perhaps it should not have come as too much of a shock when, a month or two ago, the SVP posted out a pamphlet with this image on it:

and a blurb about how foreigners in Switzerland who commit crimes (like murder, rape, drug-related crime, ripping off the social security system etc) should be kicked out of the country (which on its own doesn't seem entirely unreasonable), and if they are under 18 then any family members of theirs who live in Switz should be given the boot too (!).

In case these ideas are too complex or boring for you to bother thinking about, or if you don't like to vote on something before you have had a chance to really absorb the details via the medium of computer gaming, the SVP has a website that helps you to understand the heart of the issue. Yes, why not play a game where you (Zottel the slightly deranged-looking goat who is apparently the mascot of the SVP) have to simultaneously catch the Swiss passports before they fall into the wrong (=foreign) hands, kick the pesky judge out of the way when he appears (because his evil aim is apparently to make all the dastardly foreigners Swiss) and headbutt the loopy greenie who is just throwing passports out willy-nilly out of the way? Not so much to your taste? Well why not try the one where you have to headbutt the black sheep that are trying to sneak across the border (aided once again by the greens, as you will note from the writing on the buses) back to whatever Loser Country they came from? Fun for the whole family!

Happily it seems that this campaign has been poorly recieved by just about everyone, and whenever you see one of these posters they have usually been heavily defaced

(which says something along the lines of "nazis choose the SVP"). A vegetarian restaurant in Zurich also apparently made an alteration to their menu (in cartoon form only, but it's the thought that counts. And that is Zottel the SVP goat, in case you are confused)
More recently I saw this poster

in the train station in Aarau (it's a campaign poster for some local SVP candidate). Happily it was also graffitied into illegibility and then taken down (and is apparently now the subject of an investigation into the possible breach of anti-racism laws).

So there you go. Switzerland. It's not just cows and watches and idyllic countryside.

The Funny Side Of Fanaticism

Apparently it seems to be something of a tradition for Swiss neo-nazis to invade the Switzerland Day celebrations at Rütli meadow and be all racist and fanatical. This year apparently they weren't all as organised as they could have been, and some of them intending to get there by boat turned up and found that there were no more places available on the ferry, and so they tried to make their way across the lake in inflatable rafts ("Gummibooten", hee hee), but they were impeded by water police who squirted them with high pressure hoses. Which is all kind of wacky and funny and entertaining, a pleasant difference from the things you normally associate with right wing extremists.

Like Clockwork

I met Reto for lunch today. The plan was to rendezvous outside the library at 1pm ish, and since Aarau is so tiny I knew I would only take a few minutes to get there. I didn't want to have to lurk around and wait for too long, so I checked my watch before I left. It said it was 12.51pm. I checked our alarm clock. It said 12.58pm. The non-alarm clock said 12.54. The CD player said 12.56. The TV said 12.48. My computer said 12.49. My phone said 12.54. When I checked later with Reto's watch it said the same time as mine, so if we were both being punctual it would have been fine, but still.

And so, in a remarkable display of Swissiness, I have synched everything up to match the TV time (since that is the only one I can't change). The alternative really was driving me cuckoo.

Semi-Coherent Pre-Sleep Ramble (aka Hello From Sydney)

Well, I'm back. The flight was as arduous as you might imagine 26 hours in the air(ports) would be, but I had 2 seats to myself on both flights, and an exit aisle on the first (shorter) one, so that made things a bit better. I watched thousands of abysmal movies and my luggage was hardly destroyed at all (just slightly squashed), so quite successful all round, really.

It's peculiar being back, although less so now that I have had a nap. I had my hair cut this afternoon and the hairdresser and I had a lengthy chat about how strange Switzerland is with it's shops being closed on Sundays and ... urm .. people speaking foreign languages and all. Actually, I don't really know what we talked about. I am tired. I'm not too sure about my new hair, either. It's quite short.

I have discovered that my blog looks horrible on my sister's computer. On her screen the background looks sort of yellow and horrible. On my screen it's sort of salmony-beige and pleasant. It's disappointing. Perhaps you all have the wrong idea of me.

I'm starting to understand why Reto always used to be such a complainer when he came to Australia. Our tap water is kind of horrible (although I'm sure I'll get used to it soon enough, and the tap water in Aarau is undoubtedly worse) and it's absolutely freezing inside our house (more so than it is outside. It's actually kind of pleasantly cool outside). I now understand the pleasant aspects of indoor heating.

Grr, Part Zwei

I thought of something else annoying that happened when we were in Berlin:

We got to the first place we were staying at. I walked over to the reception man and started to say "Hi. I made a booking for a room for the next few nights. It's under the name Robyn", but before I could get all those words out the reception man said to me "Just one moment", turned to look at Reto (who was kind of around a corner and not trying to get reception man's attention in any way) and said "Are you Robin?".

Sigh.

"No, I'm Robyn", I said. "It's a girls' name in Australia", I said. I'm fed up with having this conversation.

Actually, I secretly kind of enjoy it. When I was a kid I used to watch A Country Practice and there was a character on there for a while whose name was Stephanie, but she was a bit of a tomboy and was commonly known as Steve (I'm not implying that she was transgender in any way, just that she shortened her girly name into a boy-ish one). My sister's name is also Stephanie, and I remember thinking at the time that it was cool that my sister practically had a boy's name. And now, 17 years later, my sister is generally known as Steph and everyone thinks I'm a man. Sigh.

Kissing Conundrum

There's too much kissing (of the peck-on-the-cheek-in-greeting variety) in this country. I have no problem with kissing people hello and/or goodbye, but I would prefer to choose who I kiss and not feel obliged to kiss everyone (or it seems like everyone) all the time out of a sense of obligation. And do we really have to kiss so many times? Once is fine, twice seems kind of affected (because in Australia it would probably be thought so, and I can't really be expected to have shaken all the old prejudices) and three times (which is the way to go here) is completely over the top. I can happily fake my way through a single kiss of greeting, but if I don't really want to kiss someone hello it's hard to maintain the "it's so nice to see you again!" look for the time it takes to do the obligatory three kisses.

And everyone who doesn't want to kiss you wants to shake your hand! Lordy. So it seems the only options are overly friendly or overly businesslike. Whatever happened to saying "hi" and smiling in a non-committal manner?

Ve Haff Vays Off Making You Talk

Last night we went out for dinner with Reto's entire family. We went to a restaurant, and dinner involved cooking meat ourselves on a thing that looked like some sort of medieval torture item but is apparently called a Tatarenhut, or rather a Tatar's Hat (since presumably there is no reason for it to be named in german). It was weird, and ridiculously meat-heavy.

There was bacon (and incidentally, bacon here is not like what I would call bacon at all. It's more like proscuitto or something, and seems to be comprised far more of fat than of meat. And it tastes really, really meaty), there was veal, there was pork, there was chicken, there was beef. As well as all that meaty abundance, there were hot chips, thousands of mayonnaisey sauces, and assorted types of tinned fruit (lychees, peaches etc). Strange.

The idea was that you hook your chosen meat item onto one of the confession-inducing spikes (there are fires lit beneath) and cook it to your liking. All the fat and whatever that comes out of the meat while it is cooking falls down into the brim of the hat, which is like a little moat filled with vegetables and stock, and when you have finished with the meat the staff there offer to serve up the remaining stock/veggies/meat residue as a soup. We didn't have the soup, but I did eat some of the vegetables, and they were the meatiest vegetables I have ever tasted.

I like the way that Switzies seem to be so into communal activity type meals, like fondue and raclette, where everyone is doing something as they eat and there's a sort of jovial sense of shared food fate (because everyone is eating the same swimming pool of cheese, or because everyone is uncoordinated and dropping meat in the vegetable moat). I like the way that there is something else to focus on if you have run out of conversation. What I don't like is the way these meals generally rely so heavily on one particular ingredient (cheese, meat. And before you say that 'meat' is not one ingredient, I refuse to acknowledge that). Why couldn't I have tortured some slabs of capsicum or asparagus or onion on the Hat of Pain as well?

#%^*%ing Laundry

There's something wrong with the @&*%#ing washing machines in this building. They keep stopping, for no good reason, and then the power vanishes (it is still switched on everywhere it should be, but there is no evidence of this) and nothing happens and then I panic that all my clothes will be trapped forever in the stoopid machine (because you can't even open the %$#$ing doors if the power is absent). Then I get all carried away in some sort of impotent rage (because what can I do??) and I sporadically check on the laundry over the next few hours, and if I am lucky the machine will have miraculously started again of its own volition half a day after it decided to have a bit of a pause. And so I spend the ENTIRE day doing one ^*&$#ing load of laundry.

I'm sure there's some deeply misogynistic subtext hidden in all of this.

It's Like Living In Lucas Heights

It's raining today, so we sat around for ages wondering what we could do that didn't involve being rained on. As it turns out, when Reto moved to Aarau he was given an envelope full of junk (including local information and free tickets to things and so on) by the local council. We went through it all, looking for fun things that might be free, and I pounced when I found a piece of paper with something written on it in english (it's nice to be able to understand things, frankly, without having to stare at words for ages and then dredge the silty lake that is my memory, only to come up with ... well, silt, and maybe some dead fish). Anyway, on this piece of paper was information about the potassium iodide tablets that the local council had kindly provided, and how it is essential to keep them around in case the local nuclear power plant (which is about 10 kilometres away) has some kind of disaster. Apparently if there is a "serious nuclear power plant accident where the safety tank fails" (whatever that means), our only hope of survival, or something like that*, is to take these potassium iodide tablets. But since I am not really living here, I didn't get any! Which means Reto lives but I get a radioactive thyroid and die**! That doesn't seem very fair! (incidentally, I could just go to the chemist and buy some more tablets, but where's the possibility of complaining then? Although I'm sure that even if I was well stocked with life-saving potassium iodide tablets, I would still find things to whinge about in the event of a local nuclear disaster)



* Apparently if this nuclear disaster happens, the potassium iodide will stop radioactive iodine from being absorbed by your thyroid gland. If you don't take the tablets, your newly radioactive thyroid will presumably make you turn into a teenage mutant ninja turtle or spiderman or something, and then you'll die. No doubt hideously.

** Or get turned into spiderman/a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Or possibly a twenty-something mutant ninja turtle, as long as it happens relatively soon.

UnHappy Hour

The other night Reto and I went to the pub. Typically, this would involve getting there in time for happy hour, fighting to find a seat, doing abysmally badly at the quiz, complaining about all the smoke and then going home. This time it was slightly different.

We got there and I went to the bar. I ordered two beers. The bartender gave them to me, and he said "that'll be 17.40". I said "but isn't it happy hour?", and he said "no, it's been cancelled". And so I handed over a 20, he gave me 2 francs back and I was outraged. I mean, I know how much beer costs here, but I was expecting it to be half that price, and for him to assume the rest of my change was a tip without even giving me the option of handing it back to him after he had handed it back to me seems a bit presumptuous. And for those of you who don't know, 18 francs over here equals about $18 over there, give or take. And for those of you who have no grip on reality whatsoever, that's a lot for two beers. And how can happy hour be cancelled??

Happily, though, no happy hour meant fewer patrons, which mean that the dart board was free, which meant that Reto and I had the chance to try to play a game of Round The World With Morten Dingstad (a ridiculously confusing version of "round the world" that Reto and I invented a few years ago, and have consequently kind of forgotten the finer details of. Incidentally, wikipedia tells me that "round the world" is actually called "round the clock". Hmm). It also meant that we had fewer people to beat in trivia, but sadly we failed to win that when Reto let us down abysmally in the sport round (as if I can be expected to know who won some mysterious Swiss soccer competition last year, or where some hockey thing is being held next year. As if I even know to assume that "hockey" means ice hockey).

I would end on a high note and say "better luck next time" or something to that effect, but apparently trivia is a seasonal sport here, and it's not coming back until autumn. Weirdos.

Good (Boring) Friday

Who would have thought that Boring Wednesday would be so controversial? As it turns out I was persuaded by the enthusiasm of everyone's comments to look into it myself (through minimal google-based research), with the outcome that I have decided to thumb my nose at this European snobbery for washing clothes in warm water. Frankly, the only advantages of that method that I can see are that germs might be killed if the water is hot enough (which it won't be, and really, as if I care about germs anyway. As if I haven't survived, nay flourished, for almost 30 years swaddled daily in apparently germ-coated clothes), that greasy stains are more readily removed in hot water, and that your clothes might all shrink and fade and generally be ruined (which might be an advantage if you want to make space in your closet for a bunch of new clothes. Since I'm an unemployed quasi-shop-a-phobic, I can't see how this might be an advantage for me).

And so I have decided to henceforth re-dedicate myself to the cold water approach. It's more environmentally friendly, apparently no worse in terms of making your clothes clean or getting the stains out (as long as you haven't been rolling around in grease or butter, which as far as I am aware I haven't), and it doesn't make anything fade or the colours run.

The only thing that stands in my way now is the fact that apparently the washing machines here won't let me fulfill my laundering dreams of environmental consciousness. It seems that on a normal wash, the lowest temperature I can get is 30 degrees. Sigh.

Boring Wednesday - laundry

I've been wasting my time reading all sorts of other people's blogs lately, and since I can't think of much else to talk about here lately, I am going to blatantly steal ideas from other people and introduce Boring Wednesday, although since that has no alliterative charm at all, I am going to call it Monotonous Mittwoch (which is wednesday, people!) and talk about something uninteresting (not to be confused with recent posts).

Laundry here is confusing. The only school of laundry thought that I am familiar with is the one where you wash basically everything together in cold water. I am willing to wash some stuff on the gentle cycle, and I am even willing to do a very small amount of hand washing occasionally, but that's about it, frankly. Not here, though. Here the washing machines are covered in all sorts of stupid buttons that do all sorts of unfathomable things (I spent aaages the other day reading the manual for a weird old-fangled washing machine, trying to work out which buttons made it work properly and which were there just to confuse me. Which doesn't sound so arduous, except that the manual was in german/french/italian and frankly, I don't know any foreign words for any laundry-related terms), and Reto has some obsessive compulsive disorder about washing different things at different temperatures and with different types of laundry liquid. Which is all well and good if he wants to do the laundry, but as I am more often than not the only one doing it, I'm not sure I'm willing to play by his rules. I'm not really sure that I see the point.

Does washing stuff in warm water make any difference? As far as I can tell, the only difference is that it kills my socks more quickly. And what's the point of separating different coloured clothes? Is it to protect them from the clothes-ruining effects of washing them in warm water? Because that sounds a lot like making trouble for yourself.

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.

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.