Bad Timing

Arrested Development is on telly here every night! This must have started while we were in Berlin because they are only up to the 6th episode or so. It's such bad timing, though! Right when I am about to leave the country. Sigh. Not that it's such a disaster because I've seen it all anyway, but a refresher course is always nice.

In other bad news, apparently Twin Peaks is being shown on TV here as of next week. I never saw this at the time (because I lived in the country and we didn't get the TV station it was on), but I always thought it might be up my alley in spite of my general fatigue with all things David Lynch-related.

Left Is Wrong, Christmas Is Winter

I'm at that awkward stage in Being Foreign where nothing makes any sense at all. You know how at the beginning, people are driving on the wrong side of the road and you always look the wrong way to see if you are going to be run over when you go to cross the road? After a while you get used to this and you know which way you want to look but you force yourself to look the other way, because where you are now that is the right way to look. Eventually it becomes normal to look the wrong way (which is now the right way, of course), and then you find yourself wondering when you look the new right way if it is wrong because it doesn't feel wrong any more.

Similarly, the seasons are confusing me. Christmas is in summer. My birthday is in autumn. Now everything is topsy turvy and I spent my birthday sweltering in some 30 degree nightmare. I was just reading something in the paper that said "The biggest decision we made that spring was to ..", and so I put this event in the timeline of the story at the end of the year, but of course it's not the end of the year (because the bloke writing it was English, and in England), it's in April or something. Not that this isn't a problem I have come across before, but it's more immediate here because the backwards answer is always the right one.

No doubt all of this confusion is bound to intensify next week when, for those of you who don't already know, I am going back to Australia for a while. I don't really know for how long, actually, because I haven't bought my return ticket yet, but rest assured I will be there, revelling in the english-speaking background noise and having a movie-watching frenzy at the Sydney Film Festival (yay!). And when I'm standing in the gutter I'll be looking at the cars (and wondering which direction I'm going to be killed from).

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?

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.

Please Leave A Message After The Beep

We're off on a holiday to Berlin, so don't feel that I'm ignoring you or not replying to your emails or not publishing your comments*. I'm off gallivanting and having fun. I'll see you in a week when I return, older (bleh) and wiser.




* Incidentally, I cannot guarantee that I would be replying to your emails or publishing your comments if I were here. Just because I know you and possibly even like you doesn't mean I care for what you have to say. But while I'm on the subject, I always publish comments that you successfully leave. It's not my fault that sometimes they don't get submitted properly when you press the 'submit' button. Stoopid technology. We'll be sorry when life goes all "Terminator 3" and our laptops start shooting us or whatever it was that happened in that movie.

More Swiss Wildlife

Apparently Switzerland is the place to be if you are into religious public holidays. Today is ascension day, which you would think would make very little difference to my unemployed household, except that all the shops are shut. As it turned out I narrowly avoided having to go to church this morning (! Church! It would have been the first time since the early 90s when I stayed the night at a friend's place and her family made me go with them) when Reto and I failed to get out of bed early enough to get there on time. Instead we showed up for the raclette-athon that was on afterwards as some sort of fundraising event for the choir that Reto's mum is in. Which was delicious.

On the way home, our trip was delayed by a herd of cows that was being moved from one paddock to another. They dawdled up the road eating people's lawns, and we stood in the rain like morons waiting for them to pass. Welcome to my hectic lifestyle.

WET PAINT

Hmm. I'm toying with a new template and colours. Any thoughts?

...

Please note that I am not finished messing around with the colours etc yet, this is not the final draft, and I can't be bothered doing it any more just now. All criticism will be duly ignored.

Breakfast Is At 1pm Sharp(ish)

Today is Reto's last day at work. Tomorrow we are officially an unemployed household (well, that's not true. Tomorrow is some sort of religious public holiday, and then Reto has a week or so of leave, which we are using to go on a trip to Berlin, but as of the 1st of June we are officially an unemployed household).

Somehow, this isn't how I dreamed the declining years of my 20s would be. Sigh.

Red and Yellow and Pink and Green, Purple and Orange and Blue..

It rained this arvo and when it was over a rainbow appeared. Directly across the road from our flat. One end of it was vanishing into the house on the end of the block on the left, and the other end went into the trees over the road on the left. I tried to take a photo but the camera batteries were dead. This is not the first time this has happened, either (I mean about the rainbow, but the camera batteries too). It seems that every time it rains I should be out and burrowing around for a pot of gold in the neighbours' gardens.

(artist's impression)

Ouch

We have really, really sharp kitchen knives. I don't know how many times I have sliced the end of my thumb off while making dinner since I got here, but suffice to say that it is a lot, to the point that I don't think my thumb will ever again be the shape nature intended.

Last night was the latest in my rampage of self destruction. I was slicing onions (risotto, and the result was delicious, if slightly blood-soaked) but I got carried away and sliced some thumb too. Blood went everywhere. It was on the table, on the onions, in the sink, on the floor, drenching tissues. Everywhere but inside my thumb, really. It was all a bit reminiscent of the anime bit in the middle of Kill Bill (volume 1. It was on telly here last week), although with less death and paedophilia. Reto arrived home to find the whole apartment doused in blood. Perhaps it's time to get some blunter knives. Or some chain-mail gloves.

Don't Read This, Tina (not until monday, anyway)

Oh Serbia.

Yeah, sure, they were good (and those red sash things that the backing singers were wearing were excellent. Were they supposed to be reminiscent of beauty pageant entrants? Or did they have a faintly Princess Mary tinge about them?), but what does that matter at Eurovision? Exhibit A, last year's winners, a bunch of Finnish nutcases dressed as monsters, ludicrously over-the-top, so bad it's good crap entertainment. Exhibit B, that woman in the pink dress who was plucked from anonymity (allegedly) to fulfill her life's dream of hosting Eurovision. She was ridiculous. If Eurovision was at all concerned with talent and good taste, then she would not have been there. Therefore Serbia should not have won. France should have won, because they were hilarious and excellent and completely ludicrous. Especially the guy who ran around a lot and seemed to be wearing a cat (which is sadly absent from this video, as are their excellent pink costumes, but it seems there is no youtube version of the actual performance yet. Sigh). Or I would have been happy with Sweden (also ludicrous).

We Was Robbed

Everyone knows, I think, about the dubious pleasures of Eurovision. The reliably abysmal English entry, the heavily choreographed boy bands, the strange fondness lately for wearing white and gold, the bands who seem to have been transported to the stage directly from 10 years ago (without so much as an outfit change or a trip to the hairdressers in between), the girls with those excellent dresses where the skirt can be whisked off to create an entirely new (and Eurovision-appropriately skimpy) dress, only to be whisked away again to reveal an identical skimpy dress in another colour, the people singing about peace, love and HIV awareness while dressed in traditional national costume, the fake musicians on stage, the odd group of lunatics dressed as monsters/pirates and so on. Sadly this year, though, we the viewing public are going to miss out on the chance to hear Switzerland's own DJ Bobo spreading the message about the everpresent danger of being attacked by vampires, because in an abysmal travesty of musical justice, we the voting public failed to help him get past the semi finals. And by "we the voting public", I mean people in Europe but not in Switzerland (who could have voted for him but apparently didn't). By which I mean you, Annette, because you are the only person I can think of at the moment who actually reads my blog and lives in Europe but not Switzerland.

Personally I think we (by which I mean Switzerland) was robbed. The vampire song wasn't that bad. It was catchy. It was ludicrous (because they were all dressed as the undead. Maybe if they had been able to recruit Mark Selby they would have been more successful). People have at least heard of DJ Bobo (didn't he have some song that was famous in the early 90s? Possibly some idiotic joke type song, but that's better than nothing). The song was in english, which I think is always a good thing in Eurovision. There was an enormous scary blonde woman and a dude with a huge mohawk on stage. I think DJ Bobo might have worn fangs at some point, although apparently not actually during the semi-finals. There had even been scandal and drama about the song before Eurovision was on (some bunch of conservative types in Switz got a petition up to have the song banned because apparently vampires aren't really alive, and only satan would say that they are, or something like that. Plus the song was used on telly here to advertise dairy-based beverages, which was entertainingly ironic, a bunch of doofuses dressed as vampires singing about how they just "have to survive" while happily scoffing strawberry milk. It's better than the blood of virgins, people! Apparently DJ Bobo has some longstanding thing as an advertiser of dairy products). Surely all of these are good enough reasons to vote for him? Apparently not.

Reto kept me awake for some time after the semifinals ended as he muttered darkly about eastern European conspiracies not to vote for any non-eastern European countries and how no one likes Switzerland (he also said no one likes Norway either, which I thought was mean because I like Norway and I was hoping they would get into the finals too, even though their song was pretty atrocious (the singer had the excellent change-o dress thing going on though). Apparently Reto was right, though, because no one voted for them either). All of which I suspect may contain some grain of truth, because entertainment definitely wasn't the winner last night. The songs that were the funnest (which surely should be the sole criterion on which you base a vote for a Eurovision song?) were not, in my opinion, the ones that got into the finals.

Still, that doesn't mean I won't be watching the finals. It just means I'll be sure and have a nice glass of gin and tonic in my hand when I do. And possibly a mean-spirited determination not to vote for any of the countries that got to the finals by beating Switzerland (and Norway) in the semi-finals. He he.

#%^*%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.

I ♥ The Losing Team

Mark Selby lost. Although he did make a ludicrously valiant effort in winning 8 of the 12 frames played on the second day of the final. And he still gets his £110,000 in prize money. So it's not all doom and gloom.

Pool Party

A rainy weekend meant that I spent a lot of it sitting on the couch reading and watching Reto channel-surf. Personally my televisual preferences in this country run mainly to stuff in english, which means that I spend an embarrassing amount of time watching abysmal shows on Mtv (although I have to say that Flavor of Love, where trashy morons compete for the heart of the formerly well-known singer or something, Flavor Flav, is not abysmal or embarrassing at all. In fact, it's the best tv show I have watched since I left Australia and stopped watching things that allowed me to retain some semblance of self respect).

Anwyay, Reto has an inexplicable fondness for sport, so there was a lot of ice hockey to be seen and ignored over the weekend, and a lot of snooker, which I ignored slightly less because the commentating was in english and because the competitors were wearing such unattractive waistcoats (horribly shiny and with these awful pink-themed tartanny patterns on the back). As it turns out, this snooker thing is a competition which has been going on for something like a week, the horrible-waistcoated people didn't seem to make it past the early rounds, and it's actually kind of interesting. Well, not actually interesting, in the sense that it's not that much fun to watch, but interesting in the sense that I have a favourite player now and I want him to win. He is Mark Selby, and he looks kind of like a vampire or a victim of consumption or something. He is quite the youngster, too (only 24) and apparently last time he was in this competition he was eliminated in the second round. And everyone likes an underdog, especially an undead* newcomer underdog.

I first got interested in him during the semi finals, which dragged on and on and on forever on Saturday evening. He was playing against Sean Murphy, who I don't like at all (and he sounds like a complete dork from his wikipedia profile. Apparently he and Mark are good friends though. There's no accounting for taste), and it was the best of 33 frames (and considering that a frame takes something like half an hour or so, you can imagine that 33 of them takes what seems like a lifetime) . Happily I didn't watch most of it, but in the end it came down to the last frame, they were totally even at 16 frames each, and then against all my expectations, Mark won. By the time it was over he looked like he was on the brink of death, all pale and sweaty and grim looking, which didn't leave me too optimistic for the finals, which started the next day (Sunday).

My pessimism was well founded, it seems. The finals are half over, and the other bloke, someone called Higgins, is giving poor Mark a bit of a trouncing. It's 9-3 or so at the moment, and the rest is apparently on tonight, but I think Mr. Selby is just going to have to make do with second prize (which is something like £110,000 . Poor thing).



* although according to DJ Bobo, vampires are in fact alive, and may well be responsible for Switzerland trouncing the competition at Eurovision next weekend. Assuming he gets into the finals, anyway,and assuming that the voting public is insane enough to want him to win. Which is quite an ask, frankly.

Lists Are For Morons

Kim has this thing on her blog about the Angus & Robertson top 100 books list, apparently the most popular books as voted for by the generic Australian public. I read a fair bit and I am the proud owner of an Arts degree, so you'd think maybe I had read a few of them, but apparently not. My total has not changed since last time I looked at this list, which was some time last year (in fact I think the last time I read any of them was one afternoon in 2004 when I was at a loose end in Oslo and I read The Five People You Meet In Heaven while standing up and trying to look inconspicuous in a bookshop). I have read 24 of them.

"Well", I thought to myself, "that result is hopeless. Perhaps emigration is the solution", and so I found a list of the top 100 books as voted for by the staff of Waterstones, the well-known UK bookshop (or at least, it's in the UK. I don't know if it's from there, or confined to there, but whatever). As it turns out I have only read 20 of them, so maybe moving there is not the solution I was after (thank god, frankly. I'm not a big fan of the UK)*.

Then, while googling idly to find out if I am American or not, I discovered a list of the 10 books most often borrowed from Scottish libraries, from which I have to assume I am not Scottish either, or if I am I am illiterate because I have only read one of them and it was a kiddy book.

And so the only possible (acceptable) explanations are the following: people that vote for these lists/work in bookshops/borrow library books are all philistines. Or possibly I don't feel like I need to chase after the bestseller lists to decide what to read because I have an eclectic and interesting taste of my own. Or possibly it's that I often read what I find, none of which is particularly new or popular. Or maybe all those lists were hijacked by people with various axes to grind, and in fact they are not representative of the most popular books at all.

After all, it can't possibly be that I haven't read anything. After all, I can almost guarantee I have read everything on my own top 100 list.


* As it turns out I am quite English in terms of the things I haven't finished reading, though, with 6 of their list of 10 books most often abandoned mid-way through unfinished by me (and only one of the remaining 4 successfully started and finished)

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.

Strewth

Reto and I were at the pub playing darts last weekend (I'd like to say I was winning, but I wasn't. There seems to be a time between half and one glass of beer when I am really, really bad at darts, and Reto is really quite good. Happily, though, due to the bizarre and annoying rules we play by, we switched scores at the last minute and then I won) and the bartender came and said hello to us. We made a bit of small talk, and he asked us where we were from (this is the english pub, so it was all in the lingua franca, aka english). I said I was from Australia and then we had a short and peculiar conversation about cricket (I don't think I or the bartender knew what we were talking about). Then the bartender asked Reto if he was Australian too. Reto said that he was from Switzerland. The bartender suggested that maybe he (Reto) has just been spending too much time with me.

Call me biased, but Reto doesn't sound Australian at all. When we first met I thought he sounded like he had a bit of an American accent when he spoke english (as did numerous other Australians who met him subsequently), but I would never have thought he was a native english speaker (he has too many weird ways of expressing himself in english to pass himself off as a non-ESL person). On several occasions over the last few years, though, people have assumed he is Australian after having a conversation with him. Probably because I am Australian, yes, but really. In my opinion, it only takes about 2 seconds of listening to him to realise that he has some bizarre European accent, and this is made all the more obvious when he tries to be an Australian. I tried to teach him to say "ya flamin' galah" the other day, with endearing and predictably bad results.

Don't Read This, Downesly!

My god, how excellent am I?

My friend Ange is having a baby, and I thought I would make her a baby blanket thing as a present. I started and somehow it all went kind of wrong, so I was googling around for other things I could make instead, and look what I came across!

Finger puppets! In case you are a complete philistine, they are (from left to right) a bull, a chicken, a dragon and a dog (most of which I admit it's completely impossible to see in the photo. Especially the bull and the dog).

I guess tiny tiny babies have no interest in finger puppets, but I think they are excellent, so that's what the tiny tiny unborn (as yet) baby is getting. So there.

Ich Verstehe Sie Nicht

Being a bit of a non-speaker is quite handy at times

Today I was accosted by some sort of Proselytising Christian. I was out for my morning walk when I saw a man walking towards me. He was dressed in a dorky sort of fashion, with brown pants, an apricot coloured shirt and a red tie that was far shorter than a tie should be. I think it might have been the tie that gave him away, because I started thinking about door-to-door religious salesmen, and all those mormons who you see travelling in packs with their name tags and their short sleeved shirts (possibly they don't always wear short sleeved shirts. Possibly this is just something they do in the temperate climes of Sydney. I think the short tie made me think of short sleeved shirts, though, and that led easily enough to being pestered about my religious beliefs or lack thereof). Anyway, as we got closer to each other he started trying to catch my eye. I thought he might just want to ask directions or something, so I slowed down and the next thing I knew he was forcing some aging magazine (it looked as though it might have been printed in the 70s) with a picture of a mid-crucifixion Jesus on it at me. "I don't speak much german" I said, and he asked what language I do speak. English, I told him, and he said "aaah, english". I thought for a worrying moment tht he might also have a sales pitch in english, but happily no, he told me he doesn't speak english and off we all went.

As it turns out, this is a really convenient excuse every time someone wants to pester you to find a new god, get a new phone provider, join greenpeace, whatever. Who would have thought that having the language skills of a small child would be a good thing?

Evil Heather's Prescient Post

A rough and heavily abridged guide to what I did yesterday:

I read my friend Evil Heather's blog. Please note that for you to fully appreciate the relevance of this, you might have to go and read it too. Note particularly the reference to not putting parts of yourself in the water in your toilet bowl.

Later, I decided to go to bed. I brushed my teeth. As I was closing the bathroom cupboard, I bumped a container of moisturiser. It fell out of the cupboard. It fell into the sink, which is a really smooth bowl sort of shape. My moisturiser followed the smooth bowl shape of the sink and went flying out of the sink on the other side. When my moisturiser ran out of sink, it did as gravity told it to and fell again. Into the toilet. I had to fish it out. Fortunately the toilet had recently been flushed, but still.

To think that just hours earlier I had been silently agreeing with Evil Heather about the unlikeliness of having to be told to avoid contact with the contents of the toilet. Sigh.

Lunch

I have discovered the best pizza in the whole world. There's this dude with a van and he turns up sometimes and parks in the middle of town, and suddenly his van thing is transformed into a pizza shop. He has all his toppings and his pre-made dough there, and he takes orders from customers (up to 10 or so at a time, which is all his oven and table space allows), and you watch him make the pizzas there in front of you. He shapes the dough out into pizza shapes, and he puts all the ingredients on all the different pizzas, and he puts all the pizzas in his oven, and he cooks them all to perfection, and he takes everyone's money, and he cleans up his table space ready for the next lot, and he takes all the pizzas out of the oven and garnishes them up and slices them and distributes them, and it all happens in the space of 10 minutes or so. And he never has to confirm anything or ask people again what they have ordered, and really, the end result is fantastically delicious.

Aah, pizza man, how I love you.

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.

Maybe I'll Just Grow It Instead

I really need a haircut. Happily, Aarau is the town for this, because with a population of something like 15 000, it has a grand total of 52 (!) hairdressing salons! So really the only thing standing in my way is how to say "yeah, just kind of shorter and less messy, but not too short, and really low maintenance so I don't have to do anything much to it, and ... oh, whatever" in german.

Sandwich Conspiracy

From time to time I go out for lunch with Reto. We usually meet at 12.30pm. If it's a nice day and we decide to have a sandwich in the park, by the time we get there (which is about 5 minutes later) it's almost impossible to actually find a shop that still has any sandwiches left (except the dodgy looking mystery-salami ones which no one in their right mind would eat). What is going on? Does everyone have lunch at noon or something? Isn't this ridiculously early?

Back in the olden days when I was a usefully employed member of society I used to have lunch at about 1.30pm, if not later. I was having breakfast by about 7am, and dinner probably at about 7pm, so lunch at 1ish made sense, and even later made even more sense because it made the afternoon seem that much shorter. What is going on with all these crazy Swiss, then? Do they start work that early (my poll of one, Reto, says no. He usually manages to get there by 8am, but even then he doesn't ever have breakfast before 7am)? Do they not eat breakfast at all (poll of one says no again)? Is it some sort of race to get the best sandwiches? Do organised people sneak out at morning tea time and buy up all the delicious ones, and then sensibly go to the park to eat them at 1.30pm when the crowds have thinned?

Cheers

In an effort to combine the admirable features of being a little bit more civilised and of drinking more, Reto and I have added the excellent feature of cocktail hour to our household. After a few practice runs on the previous weekend, we had our official inaugural drinking frenzy, I mean civilised drink on the balcony, last Friday evening. We had excellent heavy glasses, we had gin, we had tonic, as had slices of lemon, we had ice cubes (no small thing in this country, where as it turns out it’s hard to buy an ice cube tray. After a long and fruitless search of Aarau for this very thing though, I got home and realised we already had one, in the freezer, full of ice). Not only this, we had the pleasantly setting afternoon sun, we had the strains of the accordion as played by the woman over the road who seems to like to sit in her garden and practice (which might seem as though it should be horrible, but I really enjoy it. Think more Amelie soundtrack than lunatics and Germans), and we had blini with smoked salmon, crème fraiche and dill.

It was all ridiculously upmarket and fancy until we got a bit carried away, finished half the bottle of gin and ended up sprawled all over the place like a couple of drunks. Aah, the fun of being a sporadic drinker.

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.

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.

Spring Has Sprung

These crazy sun-starved Europeans are really into summery weather. I first noticed this in Norway, when it seemed the entire population would leave work in the afternoon, go to parks, take most of their clothes off and then lie around in the sun until it went away (which in the height of summer was never. Which may go some way towards explaining why Norwegians have such serious tans). One of the more wackily appealing traits of Norwegies is that they are really into these little portable barbeque things, and so they would all be there in parks in the summer, semi-naked and eating sausages until the small hours. Interestingly, I once read somewhere that Norwegians eat more hot dogs than anyone else in the world, which doesn't seem at all surprising when you stroll around Frogner Park on a summer's evening. And apparently It's Canadians who eat all the doughnuts.

Anyway, spring has sprung and even though there is a dearth of Scandies with sausages, it is really noticeable that winter has gone. There are flowers galore (and I do mean galore), and I keep getting sunburnt, and people are wearing sandals and shorts and no coats (actually, today I went outside without a jacket for the first time since I arrived here), and all the restaurants and cafes in Aarau have now got their outdoor seating in full swing. Actually, it's quite nice because the streets in the main part of town are car-free and so there are tables in the streets and flowerpots and people dawdling around, and it's all really summery and pleasant.

All of this outdoor loveliness means that you can't walk through the town at busy times without running into someone you know (which is really something, considering I hardly know anyone here), and everyone seems somehow friendlier. Every time I go out for lunch with Reto we spot at least a handful of his colleagues, all smiling and waving and wishing us en guete, and people are sharing park benches and throwing bits of their sandwiches to the birds that flock around and so on. Even the waitress in the cafe that we usually have coffee at has become far friendlier in the last week or so.

More interesting is that whenever I am wandering around town without Reto, stray men inevitably flirt with me. I suspect this might be weather-related, because it didn't happened so much before last week. The charm of it all is that because they are always speaking in german or swiss german or whatever, I have no idea what is going on and can therefore convince myself that it is something charming and witty and excellent, instead of being sadly shown that they are oiks yelling "oi love, show us yer tits then", as oiks so often do.

Of course maybe I am just flattering myself and they are not flirting with me at all. Maybe they are smiling and winking suggestively, but yelling "get out of our country, you messy-haired, laundry-rule-flouting foreigner". Hmm.

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?

Catch Of The Day

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, my sunburn is receding and I am sick.

Somehow, it seems, all the (semi-)relentless holidaying I have done for the last 2 weeks has left me weak and vulnerable, and now I am getting my revolting revenge on Reto for making me put up with his recent-ish bout of incessant coughing and spluttering and nose-blowing. Yes, I have a cold, and now I am the one creating seas of snotty tissues, I am the one waking up in the night to cough and snort and whinge, I am the one who lolls in bed all day and is waited on hand and foot.

Possibly surprisingly, Reto is doing quite a good job of the nurse-maiding. He came home especially at lunch time yesterday to drop off an emergency delivery of Vicks, he made chicken noodle soup last night (admittedly from a packet, but whatever), he has been force-feeding me oranges, and aside from the odd bout of yawning, he hardly complains at all about the constant interruptions to his sleep that come from me waking up every half hour or so to blow my nose and cough up phlegm. What a sweetheart.

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)

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.

We Couldn't Be Heroes

When Reto and I were in Nice we saw a woman have her handbag stolen. Well, we didn't actually see it, but we saw her thief for the evening running down the street towards us (and also towards his getaway accomplice lurking on an idling motorbike just behind us), and then we saw her running after him yelling "Stop him! He's got my handbag!".

Reto and I stood and goggled.

The woman whose handbag it was (elderly-ish English tourist and female friend of similar age) caught up in time to see the motorbike sputter off, and to make stiff-upper-lip type comments within our hearing about how it was only money. She and her friend walked off and Reto and I were left to contemplate.

I've always thought of myself as the useful type who would stick a leg out or give a well-timed shove at the crucial moment and trip the thief/assailant, thus preventing his getaway and saving the day (I'm sure in this little scene there are always other useful types around who can then restrain said assailant and save me from having to rely on my own strength or agility), but apparently I am not that type after all. I'm sure we have all the usual excuses of how quickly it all happened, and how it took a moment to realise what was going on and by then it was too late, and those are legitimate excuses, but I still felt a bit crap about my total lack of assistance.

The strap of the handbag was flailing out to the side as he ran, and I was close enough that I could have easily reached it. The thief himself was within arm's reach of me. I could have easily done something, and the fact that I am not really sure what that might have been, nor what the consequences of that might have been, is not really much consolation.

Contemplating on what could have happened differently occupied most of our conversation for the rest of the night. We both felt bad for not doing anything. Was the woman disappointed that we didn't help? Was she surprised? Would she have been more annoyed or less if we had apologised for not helping (maybe she excused our inaction because she thought we didn't understand what she was yelling)? Why didn't we do anything? What could we have done? Would the thief's interests have been more in fighting back and keeping the bag (if we had tried to grab it back from him) or in getting away? Would he have retaliated against us if we had have done anything? What was he stealing it for anyway? How would we have felt if we were the ones robbed (Reto had already lost his credit card by that point so he would have had less to lose than me, grr)? Would it have made it worse if two able-bodied bystanders had stood around watching and not helping?

I don't know what any of the answers are, but I did give my handbag more thought after that. I just hope I don't one day turn into one of those people who wears a money belt.

[Insert Moronic "Nice" Pun Here]

Reto and I spent the last four days on holiday in Nice. We were planning to go somewhere, and, after much arguing, we decided to go to wherever we could get the cheapest flight. Nice won with a ludicrously low price, but we were both secretly disappointed that we didn't get to go to Madrid instead.

Nice was nice, though. Assorted high/low/interesting points follow, in no particular order, illustrated with photos of dubious relevance:

• Owing to a very early flight on Saturday morning we stayed with my friend Cecile in Basel on Friday night. This involved, among other things, eating lots of excellent raclette, which is always entertaining. Aah, cheese;
  
  
• I was the only person on the entire flight who had any difficulty at the airport! I had to fill in customs forms and then re-queue and be asked questions and be quizzed on whether I live in Norway or not! Damn those Australian passports;
  


• Reto lost his bank card thing within about half an hour of getting off the plane in France. Really, it was a Saturday morning and the bank in question apparently didn't open again until Tuesday morning, the day we were coming home, so guess who had to pay for everything? It all seems a little bit too convenient, if you ask me;
  


• We had bad luck with buses. We missed them, we caught the wrong ones, we were kidnapped by an angry bus driver with an ipod who wouldn't let us out until we got to the airport (which was about 15 minutes past where we wanted to go). On the up side, I suppose we saw more stuff than we would have otherwise, and without the bother of having to walk too far;

• I was verbally assaulted by mean waiters. Sigh;

• The whole of Nice seems to be currently under construction. Around every corner was more scaffolding, more machinery, more noise of digging and building and destruction, more of whatever noise putting down new tram tracks makes, more repaving and painting and so on. All of which made for a lot of noise and a lot of piles of dirt and a lot of taking of detours;
  


• Nice and surrounding areas seem to be the other home of Australian flora. I haven't seen so many gum trees in ages;


• I discovered that I have less moral fortitude than I imagined (see another post, possibly tomorrow's), or possibly just that I am a bit of a wimp;
  


• Monaco is excellent. There is really something to be said for these ludicrously rich tax-haven countries in terms of the loveliness of the surroundings. The beaches there have a far better quality of stones on them (not sand, but not the enormous rocks that you find in boring downmarket Nice either. In Monaco it's more like gravel, but pleasant rounded wave-worn gravel). The streets are pleasantly free of dog poo (also in contrast to downmarket Nice). The boats and the cars are ludicrously fancy (I don't care at all, but even I was happy to stand around gawking. It was also interesting to see how many smart cars and minis there were among the ferraris and lamborghinis outside the casino, which I suppose may have been a stab at environmental friendliness, or possibly people admitting that it's impossible to keep up with the Monaco Jonses).People who don't seem to be working wear suits, or at least blazers and nice shoes with their jeans*. I didn't witness any crime in Monaco, and no one yelled at me. Sadly I got sunburnt there, and kind of exhausted from walking up and down all the ridiculously steep hills, and worn out from following all the rules (don't walk on the grass! Don't have picnics! Don't litter! Don't touch anything!) but it was sooo much fancier than Nice. Kind of like Switzerland, actually, but in a far better way, hahah;
  
  
• I saw Australians for the first time in months. They (we) were everywhere, although not as much as English people were;
  


• I ate some unbearably delicious food. The description of which is hardly likely to do it justice, so you can just take my word for it; and
  


• Also interesting was my discovery that apparently salade niçoise isn't supposed to have boiled potatoes in it. Weird, because I have never before seen it without them. Also, apparently it has celery in it.

* This "blazers with jeans" look was endearingly reminiscent of my former boss who, on many occasions when he has to dress up, favours the nautical blazer look. You'd fit right in in Monaco, Bob!

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.

Coffee Crisis

I have a terrible confession to make: I kind of want to go to Starbucks.

I really don't like Starbucks. Actually, I've never really given them much thought, but I'm sure they are evil in some way. I think I mainly dislike them because my friend Lidia used to always complain about them (she is Canadian and I think she secretly thought they might one day take over from Tim Hortons, coffee chain beloved of Canadians), and also because they seem to exclusively serve horrible coffee in idiotically large sizes.

The Starbucks in Aarau is pretty, though. It is in a nice location next to a park (although admittedly half the park is taken up with a kiddy playground. There are never really any kids in it, though, possibly because the ground is covered in gravel and if you fell over you would probably lose all your skin as a consequence) and the seats they have in the shop look really comfy and there is a huge outdoor section where there is always sun shining on at least some of the tables. The tables are big and people seem to sit there for half the day with their books and newspapers and laptops and sunglasses (although perhaps only because it would take half a day to drink such an idiotically large coffee).

When Reto and I walk past we often make lame, predictable jokes about going there and ordering a grande komodo-dragon half-caf skim soy americano caramello-hazelnut frappuccino (or something equally idiotic. These jokes were funny when LA Story came out; they aren't any more). It's sad because this is what it probably would be like if we actually went there (we would order idiotic things that came in cups the size of buckets and sit there drinking them until we became lactose intolerant or died of disappointment), but it would be nice because it would be in the sun, in those comfy-looking seats.

There is a coffee shop in Aarau that I really like. It's called Gossip and it's all dark and weird (the other day they had polystyrene rabbits as decoration in one corner of the room. Bizarrely, the rabbits were facing the corner of the room as though they were being punished for being naughty. Or possibly it was supposed to be reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. This might be more likely, actually, because the next day they had mysteriously vanished. Possibly they had been hideously killed and dismembered, not necessarily in that order. Then again, maybe they had just finished being naughty. Or maybe they were just polystyrene rabbits and I wasn't supposed to take any sort of message from them). Gossip is really cosy and nice and they always give me interesting coffee cream things with wacky pictures of camels on them (I am going to explain that one day. Suffice to say that in Switzerland it is not uncommon to whiten your coffee using very small portions of cream that come in little containers like you used to get long-life milk in) and they have recently made one side of it a non-smoking side.

I intend to resist the evil lure of Starbucks. After all, their coffee is truly hideous, and I don't like being in the sun anyway. I should try to remember that.

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.

Stealing Is My Hobby

I was reading an article in the paper a while ago about books that people never get around to finishing reading. I haven't really thought about it that much, but I can't think of many books that I have started and then abandoned. The last book I read (The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion) was annoying but I kept going. The book I read before that (Freakonomics, by two people, one of whom might be called Steven) seemed kind of patronising but I kept going (although admittedly not through all the appended articles at the back). Maybe this says more about the sort of books I read than my fondness for endurance and masochism, but maybe not.

This post could now go one of two ways. My initial thinking was that it would turn into me waffling about how I generally don't abandon things half way through (which is why I had the same job for seven years, and also why I have two vaguely useless undergraduate degrees), but then I thought of several million examples of why that is wrong wroong rong, and they are all a bit depressing to reflect on, so I am not choosing that option.

Instead, this is turning into a post about my favoured method of reading. Or rather, my favoured method of choosing books to read. I like to steal them. Only from youth hostels, mind you, so it's probably not actually stealing, but it seems that little bit more exciting when you think about it that way.

Youth hostels, for those of you too old or with hygiene standards too high to know, tend to have bookshelves full of crappy books that other scummy backpackers have abandoned. Usually the selection is ridiculously small, and half comprised of things in pesky other languages that can conveniently be instantly dismissed. This is why youth hostel bookshelves are better than libraries - you have far less choice and so you are forced to read things that you perhaps wouldn't otherwise have chosen. Anyway, you choose the least offensive book you can find, you read it, you abandon it at some other youth hostel.

I started doing this in earnest in Norway, where the selection of Mills & Boone-style romance novels is remarkable. Never have I come across so many recently-bereaved widows who had married the lovely but unexciting best friend of the man they truly loved, nor so many lovingly detailed descriptions of lingerie in all my life. Sadly this isn't the case in Switzerland. Over the last few weeks I have visited about five hostels (this is part of the charm, too, wandering in and trying to look as though you are staying there and not like some scumbag who has only popped in to nick the best books then leave) and of the 5 or so books that I have taken, only one has been really good (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which was super). Sadly, though, it doesn't mean I haven't read them all. Which strikes me as a bit of a waste of time.

Maybe the answer is to save time by giving up on more things half wa ...

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.

Recommencement Of The Endless Winter

And again, this morning!Although that was a few hours ago, and now it's almost all gone again...

Beginning Of The Endless Winter?

In the spirit of being less of a slacker, I have decided to resurrect my blog a bit and start posting posts again.

It snowed this morning! Not very much, as you can see, but enough to make me kind of excited. This is remarkable in that it's actually only about the second time it has snowed in Aarau since I got here, the first time being in January or so when I was off in Stuttgart visiting my friend Annette and so I didn't even notice. It snowed in Stuttgart at the time too, and all those wacky Germans were surprisingly entertaining with their endless* enthusiasm for shovelling, but it just wasn't the same as seeing the streets of my own adopted home being covered in coldness.

The snow's appearance is less remarkable in that the weather forecasts have been telling me that it would snow this week, but I seem to have embraced the meteorological scepticism of my friend Dave who refuses to believe that weather forecasting has any scientific validity at all. According to him, the weather report is to the news as homoeopathy is to modern medicine. It's also less remarkable in that today is the last day of winter (these wacky Europeans who not only have Christmas in winter and speak unintelligible garble, they also change their seasons on all manner of peculiar dates!), and obviously nature is having one last stab at some cool weather before global warming kicks in that little bit more.

Being the weather forecast sceptic that I apparently am, I spent the morning imagining that this might be the beginning of some sort of quasi ice-age, The Day After Tomorrow-style, and I became vaguely concerned about all the flowers that have been blooming lately (this in spite of the fact that Reto, who apparently has much more experience with European winters than I do, said this morning while he was eating breakfast and I was being giddy with delight, "it'll all be gone by lunch time"). It has been ludicrously summery here for the last week or so (so much so that I have even at times reverted to my "summer weight" coat and scarf, and once Reto and I ate lunch outside and even got annoyed by the glariness and warmth of the sun) and there are cherry blossoms and daffodils and assorted other unidentifiable flowers galore all over the place. I consequently spent this morning walking around town kicking snow off said daffodils, thinking that if they were not bowed down under the weight of it all they might survive that little bit longer and continue to bring joy and colour into what will undoubtedly turn into some sort of endless winter and possibly the end of life as we know it. Z For Zachariah-style, perhaps (not that there were any daffodils in that as far as I can remember, but I think the general vibe of post-apocalyptic destruction and death is what I am thinking of).

Anyway, by lunch time all the snow was gone. Sigh.

* I was only there for a few days, so possibly "endless" is an unreasonable exaggeration

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)

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.

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)