The Great Outdoors, Indoors

As I mentioned when we moved in, our new flat is kind of endearingly ramshackle. Every now and then the landlord pops in and fixes something, like hiding away all our exposed wiring or boarding up the crumbling bits of the walls. On Friday he came over, and since I was the only one at home and since he doesn't speak any english at all, we had a partially incomprehensible conversation in french, he took half of one of our living room windows (the one with the great big crack in the glass) off its hinges, I think he said he would bring it back that day or maybe on Saturday, and then he and the window left.

Now it's Sunday and we still don't have a window. We have a metal shutter thing that we can roll down, which is sort of helpful in terms of keeping bugs out, keeping light out and keeping noise out, but frankly, not really. If we want to watch TV, listen to music or have a conversation, we have to turn the volume up pretty high (thanks to the charming racket of main-drag living, which really is charming, but apparently only when you can shut it out with your efficient double-glazed type windows). At least our bedroom is down the other end of a long long hallway.

Anyway, since it's Sunday there's little hope of getting the window back today. Tomorrow Reto is off to the army and I am going to be out for the bulk of the day. So when will we get our window back? Never, at this rate (or possibly Tuesday, I suppose).

(not a window, but I realise it's hard to tell)

Die Insel

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

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


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

Memory Lane

I went to ikea this morning, hoping to have a bit of a consumerist frenzy and use up this $100 voucher that we have had since we bought our couch there earlier this year, and which is on the brink of expiring. As it turned out, it wasn't particularly frenzied at all, it was more a depressing wander around tons of crap that I don't really want and then an atrocious amount of confusion at the cash register (which went from the cashier woman saying that I couldn't use my voucher thingie unless I had two receipts proving I had bought a couch (instead of just the one that I had brought, which I thought was outrageously diligent of me), to her saying that I could use it but they wouldn't give me any change, to me saying "fine, I don't care about the change", to her saying "but it's $20!" and then letting me use the voucher and giving me a gift voucher thing for the extra $20. Mostly in german, too, mind you, which is a language I have been doing my darned tooting-est to forget lately. Not that that's a sensible strategy at all, but it's one I am fond of. I don't like german).

Anyway, as is obligatory at ikea, I went to the cafe and ate some hideous meatballs and some wacky Swedish soft drink and then I had a coffee. As attentive readers, and coffee drinkers in Switzo at the moment will know, the coffee cream container thingies are going through an Australia phase lately. The coffee thing I had today had this picture on it:

Which, if you look closely, looks an awful lot like this.

Which is the town hall in the wee, miles-from-everywhere, unremarkable little town I grew up in! There are no touristy attractions there, there is no reason why the town or the town hall there should be commemorated in coffee accessories on the other side of the world. And yet it has been! It's so wacky and excellent. And also extremely impressive that I recognised it.

Cool

Sunday mornings at our place are normally a pleasant non-frenzy of watching 3 solid hours of old episodes of Top Gear on BBC somethingorother, and of getting absolutely all the food out of our kitchen, eating half of it, and putting the rest of it back. This week, though, we pulled ourselves together surprisingly early (I am fed up with eating cheese and gherkins for breakfast, which are usually the Sunday-morning brekky staples. Remind me to rant about the Switzy idea of brunch later. And the second episode of Top Gear was one that was on last weekend) and we went and wandered around some gorge instead.

Summer seems to have appeared all of a sudden. I mean, as well as having officially appeared (it started yesterday or something. Possibly the day before. Or even the day after, I don't know any more. What's wrong with starting seasons on the first of the month, like in sensible countries, I say?), it also manifested itself by bringing some actual hot weather, a change from the relentless weeks of rain and temperatures in the teens that we've had lately, not necessarily in a good way. Anyway, we decided to go and do something cool (obviously I mean literally cool, as in with lower temperatures, not cool like "cool, man" because we're not really like that) and we ended up at the Aareschlucht, which is this gorge thing that the Aare (river. As in Aarau, as eagle-eyed readers might recognise as my former home or something) goes through, in the general vicinity of Meiringen, where the nerdier of you will know that Sherlock Holmes would have met his watery end had he not not really existed.

Anyway, it was super! And cool! It was a good 10 degrees* cooler in that gorge thingie than it was out of it. It basically involved walking along this walkway thing that had been built on the side of a rockface, and occasionally through rock, by the river. Which looked very cold. Sadly, nothing very interesting happened, so I'm just going to bung up a few photos and leave it at that.

* total guess

We're Number One!

Go Team Australia, apparently we're the biggest nation of fatties there is.

Ornithology 101

When we went to the zoo the other day, we saw pink pelicans.

Huh. Who knew they existed? And look at their delicate (yet enormous, as is appropriate) pink feet! Much more adorable than the (enormous) grey gumboots that pelicans normally wear (as illustrated below).

The Price Of Presents

My dear friend in Australia sent me a present. It arrived. A week later I got a letter in the mail saying I have to now pay tax on the present because it was worth more than 100 chf.

My dear friend in Australia (the same one) had a birthday the other week and I sent her a present. Today it didn't arrive (3 weeks after I posted it!) but its packaging did, and a nice letter from the quarantine people saying that the present has been detained because it contains "plant items of unknown origin"* and that she can either pay for them to gamma irradiate it then send it on to her, pay for them to post it back to me (funnily enough the postage costs exactly the same as the gamma irradiation, and also about twice as much as the postage from here), or they will kindly destroy it for her (I'm not sure if there's a price tag on that).

The unrelenting joy of getting a present: 0. Rage-inducing bureaucracy: 2.



* Actually of dried yellow pea origin. Given my many encounters with customs in Australia (not that I smuggle stuff in, just that it always makes me idiotically nervous when I arrive in Australia and have to wrack my brains about when my shoes may have last encountered rural dirt, or whether I have anything wooden in my bag. And I dread the day when they decide to open my suitcase and rootle through it to check I'm not hiding any eggs or iguanas or anything in it. Plus I've seen that TV show about customs people at the airport, where they reduce innocent-looking international students to tears for failing to declare the $20 000 in cash and the 18 bags of dried chicken gizzards they are bringing into the country.) you'd think I would have anticipated this and would have left the peas out or replaced them with non-plant matter. But no, apparently not.

What Do I Read?

The other day in french we were talking about the fact that I read a lot, and the teacher asked me what sort of books I read. "Urrrmmmmm..." I said (only in french, obviously), and I wondered what the answer might be. "Fiction", I eventually said (only in french, obviously. Actually, in english because I didn't know how to say "fiction" in french. I do now), and he said "what sort of fiction?" and I said "urrrrmmmm..." again and he suggested crime, and I said no. Then he suggested romance and I said no. He suggested mystery and I said no. He suggested science fiction and I said no. Someone else who apparently hadn't been listening suggested non-fiction and I said no.

What do I read? I don't really know how to classify it in english, let alone any other language. The last five fiction books I read were The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, The Wave (I don't know who that one was by, although obviously I do now that I have googled it and put in a link. I found it on Reto's bookshelf in his childhood home. Apparently he read it in high school, and it really did hit you over the head with its message in a patronising kind of way as though you were some sort of teenaged moron. Apparently blindly following a leader and oppressing people who don't agree with you is bad, kids), White Teeth by Zadie Smith and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. What would you call this lot?

I gave it some thought on my own and didn't come up with much. A quick zip over to the Dymocks website suggests to me that "popular fiction" is the answer, Angus and Robertson tells me to go with "general fiction", and Waterstones in the UK says "modern fiction", or possibly "general and literary fiction".

I doubt very much whether I would actually use any of these terms to explain what I usually read. They all sound a bit forced and vague. Does anyone have any better ideas, though?

New Hair

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

A Slow And Cheesy Death

In other news from today, my cheese tolerance has gone up enormously. On the train on the way home from the zoo we were wondering what we would have for dinner and Reto said "let's have a fondue!". What with it being rainy and freezing and horrible today, and all our feet being all cold and pruney from having been rained on all afternoon, we both thought this was a super idea (and it's summer next week for crying out loud), so we bought all the cheese and wine and stuff, went home and scoffed the lot.

Back in my more inexperienced days of fondue, Reto and I used to struggle to get through a 2 person fondue (which is 400g of cheese). Today we were practically licking the caquelon*, and talking about what we could have for dessert**.

No doubt my arteries won't forgive me anywhere near as easily as my stomach has.




* Fondue pot thingie
** chocolate, as it turned out. Talk about Swissification.

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.

Here's A Tip

We were talking about tipping people in french this morning, and apart from the obvious ones of waiters, taxi drivers etc, everyone seemed to think it is normal to tip hairdressers and nurses. Am I really so out of the loop? Really?

Shut Up! Or Don't ....

How seriously do we take the silent compartment* in trains?

Yesterday I sat in one for the first time in a long time. Two nuns went in just ahead of me, and they were chatting as they went in. They continued chatting (in a quiet and nun-appropriate sort of way, but still) and after a few moments the girl in the seat next to them told them to shut the hell up (or politer words to that effect). They complied in a nun-appropriate way.

Today I sat in another compartimento del silenzio (or whatever it is), and some dude spoke LOUDLY on his mobile phone. He was sitting opposite a stranger, and the stranger tried to encourage him to speak more quietly or to go somewhere else and have his conversation or to wait until later, but the man was adamant that he HAD TO HAVE THE CONVERSATION NOW AND IT WOULD ONLY TAKE A MOMENT. While he was on the phone I was wondering if I should tell him to shut the hell up, but then someone else's phone rang, and then someone else's, and so all of a sudden me and the cranky old man adjacent to me were the only ones not on the phone. Everyone hung up after a while, and it was silent again, but then the original phone man ended up having another 2 phone calls in the space of the 45 minute train trip, the last one of which he put on speaker phone (!!) because apparently the reception was so bad he couldn't hear anything any other way.

In general I don't particularly care, but this man was so blatant in his non-silence. Is this because he is a general flouter of rules (and therefore likely to react badly to being told what to do), or because he didn't know it was a silent compartment (and therefore likely to slink off with his tail between his legs when yelled at)? Should I have asked him to shut up? Should someone else? Since I was apparently unwilling to get into any sort of argument with a stranger in a language not my own, I didn't say anything. And nor did anyone else. And I don't know if I approve or not**.





* Some bits of some trains are designated silent, and there small, quiet signs everywhere telling you this in 4 languages and pictograms. In general, people seem to take the silence thing quite seriously, so you never normally have to think about whether you should try to enforce it or not.
** The very fact that I have even considered telling strangers to shut up makes me worry that I am embracing the least endearing aspects of Switziness far too much. Sigh.

You're Perfectly Normal

People are constantly talking about the soccer in my french class. Everyone seems to be very well informed about who's going to win, who should win, which teams were robbed, when we can all expect to be kept awake by victory-addled fans driving around and honking their car horns (and which fans it will be doing the honking) etc. Me and one other girl in the class aren't interested in all the sporty talk, and the teacher seems to find it necessary to constantly reassure us that it's okay to not like soccer, that even though everyone else obviously does, that it doesn't imply anything weird about us at all that we don't like it, that we're still people in spite of this hideous defect and that everyone else should still treat us just as they did before even though we have really asked for the opposite treatment by OUTING OURSELVES AS A PAIR OF MUTANT FREAKS.

I have no problem with not liking sport. I have been a non-fan of sport in a sporty, sporty nation for a good many years, but I can't remember when my disinterest was last made such a big deal of.

Today

What a charming day today has been. Reto's parents came over to visit our new flat (well, to visit us and to see our new flat, which isn't actually new any more, obviously, but it's the first time they have been here. Apart from when his dad helped us to move in, but that doesn't really count) and we had a pleasantly boozy lunch. By some unexpected stroke of good fortune it didn't rain in the afternoon and so we went for a wander around the town and I harrassed (ie. patted) a few cats I saw sitting on window sills. We went to a cafe and had a delicious strawberry-based dessert item (and a coffee, obviously) and watched the world's nicest looking dog be tied to a post by his owner while the owner went into some shop. The dog was very well behaved while his owner was within sight but as soon as the coast was clear the dog went into a tizzy of tangling three of his legs up in his leash and looking pitiful. Some kindly bystander tried to help the dog, by the dog didn't seem to note the kindly intentions and went a bit mental trying to leap at the kindly bystander and bite him. Happily for the kindly bystander the dog's intentions were thwarted by his short and tangly leash, which yoinked him back down to the ground quick smart.

Our street is also in the midst of some art thing. I'm not really sure what it is, but there are people huddled under awnings (ie. out of the rain) all up and down the street painting pictures of whatever's around. I think it might be some sort of competition, so I'll have to keep an eye out for when the paintings might all be on display, because some of the ones I've seen so far have been really great.

The day has so far only been marred by the fact that mean people in Sydney keep telling me what a great time they've been having at the Film Fest. I really can't express how sad it is that I'm not there.

Happy Birthday Deonie!

Happy birthday Deonie!

I'm so pleased to have all these friends who are older than me and make me look all youthful and charming. Not that I'm not.

Poor Poorly Rogy

In other sporty news (who would have thought I had this much sporty news?? Or any at all, frankly), apparently little Rogy Federer may have all this world-class sport person stuff going on, but that doesn't mean he's medically fit for military service. Or so his german wikipedia entry tells me. That bit is mysteriously omitted from the english version.

Oh SFF, How I Pine For Thee

Oh, and in other sad news, the Sydney Film Festival is on and I'm not there. For the first time since last century I'll be missing the festival, and I won't be spending a good solid 2 weeks in the dark watching movie after movie after movie. Instead, I'll be over here with all the sport nuts. Sigh.

Throwing Tanties

Much as I don't mind living here (feel the enthusiasm!), I also frequently kind of don't like it. Unfortunately I'm not going to be less vague about that, mainly because the reasons come and go and it's hard to work up the rage/enthusiasm when they are forgotten. Suffice to say that the way I seem to be coping with my general dissatisfaction lately is by throwing things. Happily I am a practical person and so my throwing usually only involves softish and unbreakable items. To illustrate, lately I have thrown:

clothes (Reto's, which were either annoying me by being all over the place on the floor or annoying me by expecting me to wash them);
shoes (again Reto's, which were in my way. Mine were also in the way but I moved them more delicately out of the way);
a bottle (plastic, which didn't actually annoy me at all, it was just handily located); and
a lettuce (which was too big to fit in the fridge. Note that that is not because it was the World's Biggest Lettuce, but because our fridge is the World's Smallest Fridge. Except that it's probably not, because tiny fridges seems to be the go here. It is bar fridge sized, though, as in, if I cut my leg off at the knee and then took out all the fridge shelves, maybe I could just fit my amputated leg in in one piece. Just.)

Yay For The *^&%^*@# Soccer

This soccer thing is starting imminently (tomorrow, I believe) and everyone's all a-tizzy about it. Shops all over the place have flags and soccer balls in their windows, people are flying flags from their cars, all sorts of merchandise is being hocked everywhere you look, and we people with blogs are complaining up a storm.

Much as I have absolutely no interest in any forms of sport at all, I'm kinda looking forward to the whole shebang. All my hazy memories of the Sydney olympics revolve around how much better it was than we all expected, and how everything worked so well and people were happy and we all watched The Dream on telly and I successfully managed to avoid having anything to do with sport (apart from the time when my sister and I went kayaking and someone yelled "go for gold!" at us, which I enjoyed enormously). That being the only sporting event I have ever been even remotely associated with, I'm assuming, possibly naively, that this will be the same. I think possibly the fact that I don't live in a city where games are being played is a bit of an advantage, because it seems that everyone who does is feeling bitter about the unavoidable disruption that sqillions of pesky fans descending like locusts will inevitably cause.

Meanwhile, something seems to be going on with the train line between here and Lausanne, with the result that all of the decent trains today were cancelled and I spent an hour longer than usual waiting in the freezing (really, I could see my breath, even at noon. It was allegedly about 15 degrees, but my fingers started turning purple) for stupid crowded, slow trains to arrive. On one of the trains, while we were in the throes of stopping for 15 minutes in a tunnel, a dude with a guitar tried to entertain everyone by singing some song about how it sucks to be trapped on a train in a tunnel, and then some woman hurled abuse at him for disturbing her peace. Actually it was all in french so I could be a bit confused about what was actually said, but I'd like to think I'm not. Anyway, those train people might want to work on repairing that before tomorrow, because squillions of cancelled trains, squillions of tourists who don't really know where they're going, and squillions of cranky locals is not necessarily a good combination.

I'm looking forward to it enormously. I do like a good whine.

Vampire Sheep

I've just finished reading Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood. It wasn't my favourite thing of hers I've read, which is possibly why the most striking thing about it for me at the moment is the totally bizarro description of stuff you buy at markets and in second-hand shops as being like "vampire sheep", as in

"How difficult these objects are to dispose of, I thought; they lurk passively, like vampire sheep, waiting for someone to buy them".

Is that what vampire sheep do? They lurk passively? They wait for somone to buy them? It doesn't sound very plausible to me. I don't think that normal vampires (ie. of the non-sheep variety) tend to lurk passively or wait for people to buy them (that's based on my having once upon a time been an enthusiastic viewer of Buffy The Vampire Slayer). I suppose normal sheep might be described as passive lurkers, but I don't think that they are necessarily waiting to be bought.

And why "vampire sheep"? Why sheep (you'll have to trust me that the vampire thing makes sense in the context of the book)? And what do vampire sheep do (apart from lurk passively and wait to be bought)? Do they drink the blood of other sheep? Or do they go for human blood (imagine waking up at night to discover yourself being bitten by a crazed vampire sheep instead of by a darkly handsome vampire person. Confusing.). I wonder if all that wool makes it harder to stab them through the heart. Buffy would have to get a whole new repertoire of moves to use on them, because a lot of her high kicks etc would go right over the heads of any vampire sheep adversaries she might meet (as would much of her witty slaying repartee, I imagine, haha).

No doubt if Gary Larson ever gives up on cows, there would be a whole lot of material waiting for him there with the vampire sheep.

Art Brut

The other day I went to my favourite museum ever, and I bought this poster.

The museum is the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, and it's full of art made by people who I like to group collectively as "crazy" (no offense intended), but who the museum far more PC-ishly describes as

"marginalised people entrenched in the attitude of a rebellious spirit or impervious to collective norms and values, those who produce Art Brut include prisoners, inmates of psychiatric hospitals, eccentrics loners and misfits. They work in solitude, secrecy and silence, unconcerned by public criticism or the gaze of others. Their works are unaffected by influences from artistic traditions and apply singular methods of representation. These creators devise their own techniques, often with completely novel means and materials."

I first went to the museum in 2004, and at the time they were having a special exhibition of the dude featured in my new poster. I can't really remember much about him, but he made these awesome wooden sculptures, lots of horses and donkies and stuff, and they were all surprisingly life-like (and life-sized) but with big goofy smiley faces turned at funny angles. The poster is a picture of him with a horse he made (which I'm very pleased to say is still in the museum) that he bunged an ill-fitting bridle on, jumped on and pretended to ride. I really wanted to buy this poster at the time, but I was a bit of a grotty backpacker back then and I doubted that the poster would make it all the way back home unmangled so I didn't buy it. And now, years later, they still have the poster for sale. It's like fate. All over our living room wall.

Other excellent stuff at the museum includes the totally awesome faces made out of shells (some dude from the 1800s, I think, who used to buy other people's collections of huge and wacky shells and then stick them together somehow to make really excellent faces), the other shell-themed thing (these semi-religious looking and extremely detailed garden-type scenes made of squillions of little shells all stuck together, painted with garish nailpolishes and lit with unnecessarily high-watt bulbs), various animal sculptures made out of sticks, and this rather excellent and creepily sweet-looking book about a planet full of adorable little children being brutalised by mean men with dogs and rescued by mysterious trans-gender kiddies who happily usually manage to save the day that they are currently having an extended exhibition on.

It's wacky and excellent and I thoroughly recommend it.

Oi, Oi, Oi!

The potatoes have had their day, look who coffee is celebrating now!

Laundry Revisited

I'm less concerned about all the tedious quirks of doing laundry in Switzerland than I was a year ago. I still think that washing in warm water is kind of stupid, but I have embraced the fact that machines here generally don't let me go any cooler than 30 degrees and I just don't care any more. Some cantons are also apparently a squillion times more sensible than Aargau in that the power of our washing machine doesn't seem to go off at lunchtime, but still, doing laundry in this country is a million times more annoying than it needs to be.

Our new apartment is in a building with about 5 other flats, and we have one washing machine between the lot of us. There is no roster, it's all done on a "whatever" kind of basis, where if you turn up and the machine is being used, it's not your turn. This system suits my non-orderly approach to housework. What doesn't suit me is the fact that we have to pay with coins to use our machine. To do one load, you need six 20 frankincent* coins, but for some idiotic reason the machine only takes 5 at a time. So you put 5 in, then 55 minutes later you zip back up the 2 floors, put in another 20, and then 11 minutes later it's finished (although only if you're lucky, I have just discovered. If you're not lucky, you open the washing machine door, slop dirty water all over your sunburnt feet, then have to run back down two flights of stairs, get another 20c piece, run back up two flights of stairs and hope that that will be enough). Which is high-maintenance laundry, in my opinion.

After the fun of washing, there is also the annoyance of drying. In Aarau, as well as driers we had these excellent drying rooms where there was always space on the lines and everything dried in a few hours. Here there is no drier (which is fine because I hate driers) and very little hanging space, all of it in a room not conducive to things becoming dry very quickly**.



*no, obviously they're not really called frankincents, but that is what I like to call them. Although I have just discovered that I don't enjoy it nearly as much when I have to write it down because the spelling is ridiculous. It really should be "francincents", I suppose, as in franc cents, but you would no doubt read that all wrong, and it's supposed to sound like "frankincense" the well known tree residue/gift for babies. It's just a happy coincidence that it also has a hint of "frankenstein" about it
** a bummer when you only have one sheet and you therefore need to do your laundry at the crack of dawn in order for the sheet to dry in time for you to go to bed at night. Actually, we have 3 sheets now, but still the doona covers need to dry before one can successfully go to sleep again. Reto is officially in charge of all bedding/towelling type laundry here (since his schedule is sufficiently flexible that no one cares when he turns up for work), so it shouldn't annoy me, but I always have to nag him or else he would never get around to cleaning anything. And on that note, see also "washing up".

In Case You Were Wondering About My Feet

Yesterday I spent a while sitting in the sun. Now my feet are sunburnt.

I hate weather.

In other news, I also ate more meat this weekend than I have in the last several months combined (possibly). I went to the housewarming party of some friends on Saturday and had a frenzy of eating ostrich and chicken and assorted types of pig product, and then on Sunday we had another barbecue with the in-laws, and ate kebabs (on sticks) made of bits of chicken interspersed with bits of cheese, which was just as weird as it sounds. And yet also quite nice.

Happy Birthday Ivy!

Happy belated birthday to Ivy, who I did remember at the time, but who I haven't got around to giving a cat to until now. Fortunately, because she's only 2 and probably doesn't read my blog, she should never know that her birthday cat was late.

Birthday Continued

We went out for my birthday dinner last night, and it was super. There was the aperitif in the garden (champagne with somethingorother. I'm not really sure, actually, but thumbs up anyway), and there was the super delicious salad with my entree (which was some sort of sheep cheese/mint thingie), and there was the really great duck cassoulet thingie, and the mystery meat item, the name of which neither Reto nor I were familiar with in either french or german (which is bad enough for me who just learnt food items last week, but obviously far worse for Reto who is allegedly an intelligent native german-speaker. And atrocious for both of us because we didn't recognise it when we ate it, but all meat is kinda the same in my opinion...), and then the rhubarb pie for dessert, and all the booze and coffee and and and. Better than that, though, was the cute little kitty cat that was asleep in a chair somewhere in the room,then woke up, wandered around the restaurant and kept jumping on the lap of someone at the next table who had apparently ordered the fish. Health and safety be damned!

Driving Me Bonkers

I don't care for driving. I didn't learn until I was in my mid-twenties, and I've never really considered it to be an essential skill (there is always walking or public transport or other people who just love to drive), particularly here in the Land Of Trains (speaking of which, my train back from my french lesson today was 50 minutes late!! 50 minutes!! That's unheard of. Apparently there was some train crisis between Geneva and Lausanne, and then when the train did arrive, the doors didn't open! Some dude had to come along and unlock them all with a key! A key! etc). Anyway, I did eventually get my license in Australia, sadly after they had changed the rules which meant that as well as the written exam and practical exam, I also had to do two extra written exams and labour under various speed and blood alcohol limitations for years longer than everyone else my age. Not that I cared much, since I never really drove anywhere anyway.

Anyway, since being in Switzo I have heard numerous things from numerous foreigners about how the process of using your foreign license to get a Switzy one is easy as pie, and involves nothing more than posting some stuff off and doing an eye test (which actually could be more arduous than you would imagine for someone with eyesight as perfect (no false modesty here) as mine, because my grasp of the pronunciation of lots of letters in both french and german is a bit dubious. Assuming it's a "what are the letters in the fourth row?" type test. For some reason in my french lessons, having missed the first week, I never really learnt the alphabet and when one day the teacher said to me "You, say the alphabet!" I just made random noises until I got to Z and never learnt the more direct route). Great, I thought. Today I got my assistant (Reto) to look into it all for me, and ...

... he tells me that the rule in this stupid canton is that I have to do a stupid written test. Which is of course totally fair enough, and if I'm going to be honest about it I'd really think that that's not enough because as an uninterested lefty-driver I don't think I would be particularly confident or great at becoming a righty-driver, but I don't want to do another stupid driving test! And I have to do it in french, german or italian! Aaagh.

Bless Me! Grr!

People don't acknowledge me when I sneeze.

I don't think I ever mixed in "bless you" circles until a few years ago, but at a former job in Australia, all my colleagues were obsessive about saying it whenever anyone sneezed. Anyone but me. At first people relentlessly ignored my sneezing, then, as we all got to know each other a bit better, they sort of looked at me questioningly, then later they laughed a bit and asked me what that noise was, and then later they told me that I have the most ridiculous sneeze ever and that I sound like a bird. I think everyone always thought I was desperately trying to smother my sneezes so that no one would realise I was alive or had a pulmonary system, but personally I have never been able to hear any particular difference in how I sneeze and how everyone else does.

Now here I am in a shiny new place where no one knows me and where I don't really share a language with most of the people I spend most of my time with (apart from Reto, obviously), and again it's the stony silence when I sneeze. Everyone else gets a "bless you" equivalent, and I'm just waiting until the day someone feels comfortable enough to snicker.

Does This Mean I'm Not Really 30 Yet?

Well, in general it may have been a lovely birthday (apart of course from getting up at the crack of dawn and going to french and the fact that it was about 10 degrees and so forth), but it all fell apart a bit in the evening when we walked to the restaurant where we were planning to have my delicious birthday dinner (a present from my parents, thankyou very much mum and dad) only to find that Reto's reckless "I won't phone them or make a reservation, we'll just turn up. It's a Tuesday night!" plan was foolhardy. In his defence, he did a surprising amount of grovelling when they told us they had no spare tables, but it was all in vain, and so instead we got takeaway from a Vietnamese restaurant up the road from our place. Happily, and contrary to most of my expectations, the Vietnamese food was really lovely, and the meal was marred only by the fact that my hands had become so numb on the walk back from our non-restaurant meal (which was a good 20 minutes each way, plus assorted bits of dawdling near the restaurant and while I was on the phone being inundated with happy birthday phone calls) that I couldn't really work my chopsticks. What with most of my fingers doing their extremely normal (although not usually in spring) trick of turning deathly white, numb and bloodless, then horribly sore on their return to health.

My birthday dinner has now been postponed until Thursday (we've made a reservation already!). Reto tried to sell me the line that "it'll be even better because you get to look forward to it for another two days!" but no one was buying that claptrap.

Happy Birthday Me!

Happy birthday to me! And also to Ms Mac!

I'm 30 now. Yoicks.

I'm not sure that that is really a birthday cat, but isn't his hat adorable/bizarro/spacey? Or maybe antenna-ey? Or mind controlly?

Milano

We went to Milan on the weekend. It rained a lot, but we discovered that the Milanese version of happy hour (it goes for hours and comes with an endless array of delicious, free nibbly items. My favourites were these ace stuffed, crumbed, fried olives, and these zingy little spicy biscuity things) is super, that there is apparently no standardisation of coffee names (I have a hard enough time knowing what sort of coffee I want to order at the best of times, but when you can order the same thing in the same place on two separate occasions, and get something different each time, you know you are dealing with people who are out to confound you. In related news, the wackiest coffee I had was an espresso crema, which turned out to be an espresso (no surprise there) with vast quantities of hardcore foam (not the crema that I would have imagined, which I always thought was sort of brownish and scarce, but then again I'm no expert. The stuff on my coffee was the consistency and colour of beaten egg whites, though, which was odd) and some inexplicable layer of mysterious golden yellow, super-sweet (possibly boozy) stuff at the bottom. This all fitted into a wee espresso cup (well, a big-ish wee espresso cup) and I wasn't expecting it at all. It was lovely, though), and that a holiday involving no planning, organisation or expectations may well be the way to go.

It rained a lot

The place we stayed at wasn't great. It was allegedly all designy and smartypants (and cheap, thankyou very much lastminute.com), and it looked quite nice, but it was surprisingly non-functional. The soap dish in the shower had no holes in it so my soap melted. The pillows were like bricks. The towel rack made my towel dangle dangerously close to the bidet (not that anyone used the bidet because apparently we are united in the belief that they are kind of odd). The lifts, door locks and heating mechanism of the towel rack all didn't work. I think the front desk staff implied that Reto and I are incestuous siblings, because after looking at his ID and then mine they said to me "you have the same surname??" in an incredulous manner. Breakfast was great and plentiful, though, and the hotel was in a good location, so sadly I can't whine too much.

When good pot plants turn bad

In other wacky news, I saw Tilda Swinton while lurking near some old fortress/palace thing and counting stray cats (they were so cute. And surprisingly inept at stalking the pigeons), Milan has more potplants and wacky old-fangled trams than I have ever seen anywhere before, and we came across a rather excellent exhibition on Australian design and innovation at some excellent museum that we stumbled upon while wandering aimlessly.

Just call me a stalker. Or Reto, because he took the photo (after I forced him to)

Who could ask for more?

Dress Ups

This town is positively a-twitter with monks and nuns. There are monasteries and nunneries all over the place, and for some reason it's always strange to see these people dressed in their old-fangled outfits (long sweeping robes and funny hats and so on) getting around doing normal things, like catching the train or going to the supermarket. Much like it's also strange to see normal people (such as my husband) dressed as army people, hanging around and smoking and loitering at the train stations with their enormous, ridiculous guns. It's like there's some elaborate dress-ups game going on, and I haven't been invited*.




* Not that I necessarily want to be invited to a life of austere chastity, or to one of being trained up to kill people

Will I Look Insane?

Would it be completely insane to get my (presumably talentless) husband to cut my hair for me? On the "yes" side (as in yes it would be insane) ... well, as mentioned, he probably is talentless at hairdressing. On the "no" side, I hate going to the hairdressers, there is no particular need for me to look respectable/non-loopy at the moment, I have no ability to express my hairdressing requirements in any of the available languages (I even struggle in english, actually) and therefore would probably end up looking just as unlike I want to look if Reto cuts my hair as if any hair professional in this neck of the woods does it. Oh, and hairdressers are idiotically expensive here, so think of all the money I would be saving ...

I asked Reto if he would be willing to do it and he said "no" for a while, then eventually "yes", but I secretly suspect he only said "yes" to scare me into shutting up about it. I am a bit scared. Anyone have an opinion?

Happy Birthday Olivia!

Happy birthday Olivia!

I hope Egypt is treating you well, and I hope I see you again soon in Switz! Oh, and have a nice birthday!

Happy Mothers' Day, Mum!

Happy mothers' day, mum!

And in other news, my mother may well have liked the botanical gardens market thingie that Reto and I went to yesterday. I have been meaning for ages to buy pots of herbs for our window sills, but the ones they hock in the supermarkets always look so depressed and semi-comatose, and I haven't really been organised enough to look anywhere other than supermarkets yet. Anyway, the other day Reto told me about this botanical gardens market and so yesterday we wandered down to have a squiz, and it was super! They had all sorts of crazy herbs I have hardly even heard of (although possibly that was more because the names were in french/german than because my botanical knowledge is lacking) and about 8 million different varieties of mint, and about 25 different types of organic tomato plants (which we don't have space for) and heaps of different types of chilli plants and all sorts of boring lettucey plants and .. well, a bunch of other things too, but who knows what they all were, and who really cares when you only have 3 crappy window sills (plus a few more that are a bit sloped and that pot plants would probably fall off). We ended up buying some mint (not apple mint or pineapple mint or peppermint or any of the other interesting types, sadly, but the pleasantly reliable one that we have in Sydney that grows relentlessly and is impossible to kill. Or a variety that looks like it, at least), a chilli plant (with green/orange chillis, apparently), some parsley (dull), some sort of basil that is not the normal kind, and two pretty succulent thingies. Aww!

Now all we need is a bunch of pots to put them all in.

What Do We Want?

We seem to live on the main protesting drag in town. Since we moved in (4 weeks ago?) three protests have passed noisily past our windows (and that's just the ones while we were at home!) first there were the people who were cranky because they had lost their jobs with the train people (or are about to, or something like that) then there were the May Day neo-nazis who seemed to have come here specially for their hard day's protest (and possibly also for the charming scenery) because they were yelling at us in german, which apparently isn't the done thing in this neck o' the protesting woods. Then this evening there was a joint appearance by what Reto describes as a bunch of generic lefties/anarchists/punks/illegal immigrants. I'm not sure what their point was, nor how you spot an illrgal immigrant simply by looking, but they certainly won in terms of numbers.

Convalescent Kitty

Happy recuperating, Dad.

And just so that no one gets the wrong idea, as far as I know my father is not wearing one of these collars. As far as I know he has no desire to lick any wounds he might have. Actually, as far as I know he doesn't even have any wounds.

Next Time I'm In Charge

Late-ish this afternoon (a bit after 5) I said to Reto "do you want to go for a walk?" and he sort of said no, and then he said yes, and so I envisaged us going on a half-hearted wander around the town and then coming home and having dinner. Since Reto knows the area here much better than I do, he chose the route we took, and .....

.. an hour and a half later we were still off wandering through fields in the middle of nowhere, no end in sight. I was wearing an extremely inappropriate skirt and extremely inappropriate boots, and we were sloshing through mud, wandering in forests and mysterious gorges and being sort of lost. Had I been more appropriately dressed, and not hungry and thirsty it might have been really excellent, but I wasn't (and I was and I was, respectively) and so it wasn't. Although, as you can imagine, I did enjoy the complaining.

Am I Becoming More Swiss?

Yes: The other night I cooked Swiss-type food for the first time ever (as long as you don't count all that fondue, or the zopf I once made in Sydney, which personally I don't)
No: I made a very inauthentic version of a very Swiss dish (Zürcher geschnwhatso, which, for those of you who don't know, don't want to read the german entry and/or don't like bothering with links, is a dish with a name it's hard to keep track of (not that it changes or anything, just that it has too many jarring consonants in it to be bothered with) and involves the holy Swiss trinity of meat (veal), dairy products (a creamy sauce) and potatoes (it's typically served with rösti, aka grated and fried potatoes))
Yes: But the recipe I followed was from a Hiltl cookbook, which probably makes it quite authentically Swiss. And even twice as Swiss if you consider that the cookbook was a present from a Swiss friend
No: And I think the fact that it was completely inauthentic made it all the yummier, because really, I can't stand the more standard version
Yes: I made pretty bog-standard rösti to go with it, which gets a big Swiss tick, I think
No: The recipe I followed was veggo, which isn't really within the Swiss eating ethos at all. And not just veggo, but veggo with a decent source of protein, ie. tofu as a substitute for meat (as opposed to the completely lame veggo meals you usually see on offer, not just in this country but all over the place in my experience, that are composed entirely of vegetables or cheese or something, as though legumes and nuts and pulses and whatnot aren't a valuable and vital part of a healthy vegetarian diet. I have quite strong feelings on this topic, and there's nothing I resent more than seeing that the only vegetarian option on offer is some lame "vegetable stack", whatever that is. Note, incidentally, that I am not actually a vegetarian but I am CRANKY NONETHELESS)

So what's the conclusion? I dunno. I really quite enjoyed our tofu geschnthingies, and even Reto enjoyed it (against everyone's expectations. Apparently he doesn't like tofu or mushrooms or onions, which are basically the only ingredients I used apart from cream and flour and stuff). I may even cook it again one day. I would never cook the veal version myself, though, nor order it in a restaurant. Hmm.

Assorted Photos

For the sake of my mother, who really hasn't seen any pictures of our flat or town, here are some photos....

our flat, now with added couch!

our place is up there somewhere, centre-leftish ...

a funicular to take you up the hill. Interestingly enough, it's powered by poo, couterweights of sewerage or something. It smells, but is surprisingly charming in spite of that. Although possibly not for the people who live right next to it (not only because of the smell, but also because patrons of the poo train can look in their windows)

a statue and a tree. pretty.

Minutiae

Stuff we've been up to lately:

Our planned Sopranos-a-thon on Thursday didn't happen because a friend of ours planned to drop in for lunch during a large cross-country motorbike excursion that she was on. The friend is remaining nameless because in the end, owing to the vagaries of weather and motorbike mechanics, she was SIX HOURS LATE (which was actually fine, and it just meant that lunch turned into dinner, but I'm sure I will be able to use it to wring a frenzy of guilt and apologies from her for ages to come, which I will enjoy enormously). Thursday ended up, therefore, being a rather pleasant day of lolling, of watching some group of youthful neo-nazis demonstrating up and down our street, and of seeing the last-ish bit of some cycling race that is going on around here at the moment. Interestingly enough, the day's cycling was won by an Australian chap called Robbie someone, who I have never heard of but Reto tells me is quite famous. Go Team Australia.

On Friday I went on a wee excursion to Zurich and bought a pair of jeans and about 8 tonnes of chocolate. Possibly the oddest thing that happened during that day was when I was walking along the swankier end of the street, and as I was passing Prada a car came screeching to a halt just next to me. Before the car had stopped the passenger-side door was opened, and the woman who was sitting there used her swanky-ish high-heel-clad foot to brace the door open as the car came to a halt. As soon as it had stopped, she leapt out of the car, rushed into Prada and the car zoomed off again. Some sort of fashion emergency, apparently.

I've also discovered that Reto and I have very different policies on butter usage. I scrape it off the top of the block, he cuts a slice from the end. I can't believe I didn't notice this earlier.

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!

Holidays!

I'm on holidays! From learning French*! For two days (plus the weekend)! I get to sleep in**! And not think! And tomorrow we're having a mini film-festival at our place (because it's some sort of public holiday. Something religious, I think, but I'm not really sure, and it means we will both be home and at a loose end)! Well, not really films, but we've borrowed a bunch of the first series of The Sopranos from the local library, so it's more like a TV festival! With gin and tonic and some generic snacky items and these weirdly named biscuits*** that Reto insisted on buying! And we're going to go and gawk at bike riders in some sort of cycling competition thingie that will be in Fribourg tomorrow (possibly from the vantage point of a bar down the road if it's open, which it may well not be but fingers crossed)! And I'm going to read a book that's too big to fit into my bag that I take to my french lessons****! Hurrah!




* which is a full time gig at the moment, in case I haven't mentioned that
** apart from the faux-insomnia, of course. I've decided to experiment with ditching the doona from my doona and using wintery pyjamas and a blanket instead (because I think my doona might be too warm)
*** they're called "nippon". They seen to involve rice bubbles coated with crap chocolate. I haven't tried one yet, but I am not holding my breath
**** White Teeth. I have four stupid textbooks for French, and what with all the umbrellas and sunnies (because I have no power of anticipating what the weather will be like in this stupid country, and so whenever I take only an umbrella it's always sunny, and whenever I take only sunnies it always rains, so now I always take both and it's always cloudy and non-rainy) and mug (for the vast quantities of green tea I drink while learning French. It's really not the same out of a plastic cup) and assorted other junk that I need every day, I am really limited to books of 150 pages or less on my hour and a half of train travel each day. At least the view out the window is pretty.

Zzzz, Grr

I haven't had an uninterrupted night's sleep since we moved to Fribourg. Every night I wake up repeatedly for no apparent reason. At first I was waking up all over the place (as in at all sorts of times during the night), but lately I have got into more of a routine of sleeping until 4am or so, and then waking up sporadically for the next few hours until I eventually am forced to get up (exhausted) at 7am-ish. I have never slept this badly for this long before. We have tried changing all sorts of things about our sleeping habits (windows open/windows closed, swapping sides of the bed, swapping doonas and pillows, shutters shut/shutters open, various pyjama options, going to bed early/late) but nothing much seems to help. Reto now has some sort of looney half-baked theory about electricity disturbing my sleep (because we have all sorts of bedside lamp cables going under the bed because there is no power point on one side of the bed), but I think that maybe feng-shui-ing the room is the way to go. Such is our desperation.

Anyone have any ideas?

Murten

Yeterday was a lovely sunny day. I put on my non-wintery coat (for only the second time since being back in Switzy, the first time being on Friday) and off we went to Murten, where we wandered aroud the town (quaint and charming), then wandered down to the lake, had a picnic, toyed with the idea of going on a boat trip to somewhere, but then decided not to and lolled on our picnic blanket for ages instead, reading and chatting and drinking tea from a thermos (which is something that I suspect I have never done before, but I am now a thermos convert. It was super and not at all grandmotherly). Being me, I had taken a brolly and spent all my time under it, avoiding the sun.

And yet, in the evening when we got home, I saw that I was sort of sunburnt.

I hate weather.

Good Day To Be A Cow

Today while I was slaving over a hot french textbook (by which I am trying to refer to the saying "slaving over a hot stove", not to imply that my french textbook is either stolen or lewd) Reto went off for a jaunt in the countryside. By which I mean he sat on trains for about 3 zillion years to get to his dad's place to retrieve assorted junk that we have left there.

The people who live over the road from Reto's dad are farmers, and apparently today was the day that they let the cows out of the barn after the long cold winter. Reto was there when the barn doors were opened, and as opposed to their usual disinterested dawdle up the road, today when they got outside they were running, practically frolicking! What a happy day for cows!

Tater Update

... and in a record blog-posting frenzy, here's the update on the Year Of The Potato. I knew they were versatile (chips, salads, other chips, mash! Will it never end?) but this adds a whole new dimension!

Fun At The Supermarket

There are several supermarkets near us. The closest is a crappy tiny wee Migros that has very little other than 2kg bags of potatoes. A bit further away there is a Coop that has most stuff. Even further away, but where I happened to go today because I was over in that direction having a coffee with me 'usband, there is a giganto Migros that sells absolutely everything ...

... except mince. They have soooo much meat in this place, including a whole fridge dedicated to wackier meat options like offal and tripe and tongues and horses and stuff (not that eating horses is so unorthodox here), and they don't sell normal boring beef mince. Looks like it might be veggo lasagne.

Cake Aux Poires Et Au Gingembre

I just cooked a cake in french. As in, the recipe was in french (I got it from one of the crappy train magazines, which seems a funny place to be getting recipes from, but the picture looked nice). It's still in the oven, so I have yet to see if it was disastrous or not (actually, it seemed a bit dry when it went into the oven, but there's no way I can have misinterpreted "60mL de lait" so I am assuming that's just the way the recipe is), but how hard can cooking a cake really be? Not very hard, I say, and that's even accounting for the fact that we don't really have a cake tin.

And speaking of things that we haven't yet bought but that would probably be handy when baking cakes in french, I don't actually have a french dictionary. Yes, yes, much like I could go out and buy a toaster instead of whining about it for a year and a half, I suppose I could go out and buy a french-english dictionary. Reto has a french-german one, though, and I have a german-english one, and so that does me quite well for the time being. Much like I can make toast under the griller. Except that our griller in this flat seems to be broken. Maybe I should get one of those little kitchen blow-torch things. Then I could make toast and creme brulee.

UPDATE: The cake was super! I meant to take a pic of it when it came out of the oven, but then I forgot and we ate half of it. So here's the rest. Oh, and it looks nothing like it did in the picture. There it was all dark and gingerbready-looking. Hmm.

Happy Anniversary, Mum And Dad!

Happy anniversary to my parents, who got married 36 years ago. And on a weekday. I'm not sure what weekday it was, but given that the day after their anniversary is a public holiday,I assume they made it into a very long weekend.

Not Just Me

Reto got a letter addressed to "Madame Reto NewSurname" the other day. Hee hee, someone thinks he's a woman.

Celebrating Root Vegetables

Did you know that 2008 is the Year Of The Potato? Me neither, but my coffee cream thing tells me so, and therefore I imagine it must be true. Perhaps when I have more inclination I might look into it further.

I also didn't know that "bintje" was a type of potato.

Happy Birthday Phil!

Happy birthday Phil!

Where To Go?

... and while I am having a frenzy of constant blog-posting, does anyone have any ideas about where in Switzerland would be a good place to go away to for the weekend? I am looking primarily for an excellent place to stay (if I didn't live in the town it's in, I would go here, because it's totally wacky and whimsical and weird and fantastic. How awesome is the bath that rolls out the window??), more along the lines of interesting than fancy. Of secondary importance is that there be stuff to do in the area. Bearing that in mind, I don't say no to mountains, food, or thermal pools. We're going in May. But where are we going??

Videos

Our local video shop has a section called "zone 1", which is full of DVDs from the USA (and Canada as well, I guess. Wherever zone 1 DVDs are the norm) and it's full of movies that are still on in cinemas! Surely there are legal issues with this?

Happy Birthday Tina!

Happy birthday Tina! You'll be pleased to know that it was a lovely day here after all, not rainy and horrible at all!

Chez New (haha)

I am so in love with our new flat. It's great. It's big (well, in comparison to our last flat and in comparison to having no flat at all), it's really centrally located (just step out the door and you are in the main drag (depending on what you consider is the main drag)), there are restaurants and cafes and shops all over the place (including the shop directly over the road that sells asian-style paper parasols! And I was so sure that I would have to get my sister to bring me one from Sydney when she comes to visit! You can ignore all those instructions now, Steph! There's also the vietnamese restaurant a few doors up that apparently has two slightly different takeaway menus, with the result that the stir-fried tofu and veggies I ordered the other night ("number five") came out of the kitchen as some sort of triple-meat rice frenzy. Which was disappointing, but I just made Reto share his meal with me and my problem was halved), and we're only a five minute or so walk from the train station.

a protest out our window the other day. Something about trains

As it turns out my fear that the flat would be more ramshackle than charming was pretty unfounded. It is quite ramshackle (in a "crumbly plaster" sort of way, although only in patches. And the floorboards are very squeaky in places), but everything works. The stove and the hot water system in particular, with a terrifying style of burn-inflicting efficiency.

Mr K tried to befriend the serviette holder, but he didn't expect its hidden rage

The only possible improvement left (now that we have the internet at home again! Yay!) is the delivery of our couch, and happily that is apparently happening on Thursday! Yay!

no couch but lots of space

Happy Birthday Daniel!

Happy birthday Daniel, who doesn't read this blog!

Happy Belated Moving Day!

Happy belated moving day to Phil!

Cheese And Smut

Reto and I went on a wee trip on Sunday (during the only break in the relentless grey/rainy/snowy/haily skies there has been since we moved here) to Gruyeres (yes, as in the cheese). I had no idea what it was going to be like, but Reto said it was supposed to be relentlessly touristy and cutesy, and I thought there might be a good chance of getting some cheese-eating done, so off we went.

Gruyeres is relentlessly touristy and cutesy. If you intend but fail to get some cheese eating done, you have no one to blame but yourself. There is also a lot of double cream in the region, and apparently meringue with double cream is quite the local specialty. Which strikes me as the poor man's version of pavlova (what, no fruit? No squishy centre? And double cream? Blergh! We went to some cafe for a coffee in the afternoon and instead of giving us the normal milk/cream stuff that you get with your coffee here, they gave us wee chocolate pots filled with double cream, which looked all adorable and decadent but tasted a bit blah and ended up leaving a layer of oily blobs over the top of the coffee. Like I said, blergh). Unlike every single other person there that day, Reto and I didn't have raclette or fondue for lunch, but in spite of our avoidance of the traditional cheese-heavy dishes, we still managed to clog our arteries a bit (as I said, it would have been hard not to).

We went for a wander through the lovely castle on the hill (saving 10chf or something like it with our Swiss Museum Passes, hurrah) and we goggled appropriately at all the adorable old cobbles and low doorways and twirly staircases and snow-covered peaks.

We also wondered why it was that there were so many goth-looking guys (for they were mainly guys) in serious, long black leather coats. We discovered the answer to this question when we went to the HR Giger museum. HR Giger was (is?) some Swiss chap who designed the aliens for the Alien movies (and also for various other spacey movies that I haven't necessarily heard of) and then he bought this house in the otherwise-charming town of Gruyeres and devoted it to his life's work. We went in (saving another 8 chf or so, that good ol' museum pass) and looked at squillions of drawings and paintings and sculptures and models of Alien aliens, and personally I was kinda shocked by the extremely pornographic nature of it all. Not because I am prudish or anything when it comes to imaginative sex among consenting aliens, but because it really wasn't what I was expecting to see there in what is probably one of the cutesy-touristiest bits of Switzerland, and because the pictures in the adults-only rooms were hardly more graphic than the pictures in the "fun for all ages" rooms, and because the sexual themes were everywhere, in every picture in the place. I don't remember the movies being quite so sexually charged. It was surprising. It was weird. It was a huuuuge contrast to all the cheese and twee-ness outside. It gave the whole day a strange feel, and if someone asked me now what my day in Gruyeres was like, I would have to think for a moment in order to come up with an answer that was appropriate for all ages.

Relentlessly Happy

Funnily enough, I seem to be relentlessly happy at the moment. I think it's mainly because we finally have our own flat again (no more living with the in-laws! Hurrah! Not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just nice not to see them every day), and what a super flat it is (more about that later). It's also because, contrary to all expectations, I don't hate the french lessons that I have recently started, and because I have the relentless freedom of my shiny train ticket, and because I have rediscovered the joys of cooking (see also "not living with the in-laws any more". I like to cook what I like to eat, not what the hardcore meat-loving Swiss like to eat). It's raining/hailing/snowing relentlessly, which I always enjoy. I have a shiny new town to discover (which is actually not shiny or new at all) and I'm excited about inviting friends over to see our new flat. Things that could make my life a bit happier at the moment include owning a cat (which isn't going to happen) and having a couch (we ordered a replacement for the one that wouldn't fit through the front door, and hopefully it will turn up any second now). Oh, having the internet at home would also be a plus.

Speed-Typing In The Library

Hey everyone! Just a wee note to let you know that we have moved into our new flat (which is awesome and nowhere near as ramshackle as I had feared, but still charmingly ramshackle), that Fribourg is lovely, that my french lessons are surprisingly non-hideous (although I may have inadvertently agreed to go out for lunch with the class lunatic, but only because he was waffling away at me in french and I didn't know what I was agreeing to), and that we have no internet access at home yet. So I won't be emailing. Not for awhile.

Oh, and we have no couch. The delivery dudes turned up with it, they hefted it up three flights of stairs and then it was about 10cm too long to fit through the doorway. So thankyou very much to Keith and Patsy for the ridiculously luxurious rug which we now spend all our time sitting on. Sigh.

The Best Games Ever

I was off wasting some time in Lausanne the other day (actually enrolling in my french course which I am starting on Tuesday - aagh - and which was moronically difficult to do what with me spending ages not being able to find the place and then the three people I dealt with there not really being able to speak much english, and then them giving me a form in french to fill in but I didn't know what to write where and they were telling me what to write but they were telling me in french and then there were all the spelling issues and so on..) and as I had a bit of time up my sleeve before having to pick up my husband in Fribourg and take him home I thought I would pop down to the Olympic Museum and see what they had to say for themselves.

Rather than being at all controversial or decisive, though; rather than talking about the incongruence of the juxtaposing of all the red stuff festooned everywhere with information about the history of China and its many warm and embracey qualities, and the statue celebrating the Olympic ideal of non-violence (a gun with the barrel tied in a knot, and a plaque next to it talking about how the Olympics aim towards an "increasing effort to create peace and non-violence through sport"); rather than talking about whether or not I would throw things at people taking part in the torch relay (which incidentally I would not), I am going to instead talk about the wondrous event that was the Sydney Olympics.

A few of the walls inside the museum are dedicated to a small blurb about each of the modern Olympics and what was so great about them. As anyone who remembers what little Juaney Samaranch said during the closing ceremony will not be surprised to hear, what is written in the blurb about the Sydney Olympics is that they were "the best Games in history". Huh. Apparently that wasn't just the sort of hysterical hyperbole that they say during the closing ceremonies all the time, it was actually true enough to write on a wall in a museum (although of course we all knew that anyway. Or at least, it was certainly the best Olympics that I have ever been to, not that I attended any actual sporting events of course, since, let's face it, sport is boring. All the non-sporty bits were super, though).

Interestingly, the wall also said that the reason the Sydney Games were so super was because of the many volunteers (some of whom you still occasionally see out and about in their volunteer uniforms, weirdos), because of the Australian love and knowledge of sport (fair enough), and because of our "anglo-saxon capacity for fair play". Hmm. Are anglo saxons known for their capacity for fair play? Does that mean that everyone else is cheating? I thought the reason the Sydney Olympics were so super was because it was sunny and the trains weren't atrocious and because everyone was bizarrely happy all the time. Oh, and because we all really enjoyed that show that Roy and HG did (I can't believe I have forgotten what it was called and that I can't be bothered to google it. The Dream?).

Happy Sort-Of Moving Day!

Well, even though today is totally the wrong day for it, and even though there has been a glut of celebratory cats lately ...

... happy moving day to Kathryn (yesterday) and to us (tomorrow)! Our moving day was actually supposed to be yesterday as well, but what with one thing and another (and another and another) it was changed to Monday then to Sunday then to Friday now back to Monday. It's a good thing it's not today, really, because we woke up this morning to find snow everywhere (and it's still falling).

In other news, Reto got the keys for our new flat on Friday, and he says it's far more ramshackle than he had thought. Hmm. He also says that the bedroom is far narrower than he recalled (apparently we can anticipate having about 10cm of spare space on either side of the bed) and he's concerned that the couch-deliverers won't get the couch up the rickety, narrow staircase (3rd floor, no lift). Aaaaagh.

Fun At Le Kiosk

Today I found myself killing some time in a Kiosk (aka shop all over Switz that sells newspapers and magazines and so on. I rather enjoy making wedding-related jokes about them these days, as those of you who know that our wedding reception was held at a place called Le Kiosk would understand). Anyway, I thought I might check what my horoscope in Vogue said (I'm not a believer at all in astrology, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading my horoscope, and several years ago, also while killing time in newsagencies, actually, I discovered that Vogue has my favourite horoscopes. Which is odd, because as well as not being a horoscope fan, I also don't hold with the Vogue ethos, whatever that might be).

Anyway, I picked up some insanely overpriced international version of Vogue and flicked through the last pages hoping that I might stumble on the horoscopes by accident. I didn't, which wasn't surprising because I never do because Vogue is a stupid magazine with pages that it's impossible to flick through, so I went to the beginning of the magazine instead to look for the contents section. And instead of finding that with any ease at all, I flicked (incompetently) through pages forever until I finally found what I was looking for after FIFTY FIVE PAGES OF ADS! 55! Sadly my task didn't end there, though, because that wasn't the only page of contents information. Do you know where the next one was? Page 57 would be a good guess, but obviously you would be foolish to suggest it. No, the list of contents was continued on PAGE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY! And then it was all wrapped up on PAGE ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX!* And all of those other pages up until there were ads!

All of which was very annoying, but not as much as the fact that horoscopes were not listed anywhere in the contents at all! And by that stage I'd spent so long standing there not buying magazines that I got fed up and left. I wonder if my horoscope mentioned anything about that.




* The whole magazine had something like 300 pages, I think

Happy Birthday Lidia!

Happy birthday Lidia! Now you're as old as me (again)!

Leukerbad Revisited

Because my first trip to Leukerbad was such fun, I decided, a week later, to mark the occasion by going there again. Actually, I went because I heard on the grapevine that an Australian person who lives there was leaving the country and that she wanted to give away her book collection. I emailed her and said "please may I have your books?" and she said "sure" and so I spent another long and arduous day sitting on a train.


This trip was quite different from the last one. For starters, there was no Reto there to chat with and to fall asleep on. There were no thermal pools, no Miss Switzerland and no fighter planes (there were still lots of those birds though). It was grim and grey and freezing and snowing (apparently most of the ski lifts there were on wind hold all day). Instead of lugging around wet towels and swimwear, I lugged around bags and bags of books (really, she gave me about 50 books. Mostly paperback, fortunately, but still extremely heavy). I hardly even gave the likelihood of the bus falling off the road and down the side of the mountain a second thought.


And was it worth it? Well, since it's my solemn duty now to travel as much as possible so as to get my money's worth on my train ticket*, and seeing as I got a giganto stack of books out of it, I'd say yes, of course. I had a really nice time chatting to the woman who gave me the books, and I always like a nice trip to the mountains. I'm not sure that a lot of the books are things I would necessarily choose to read myself (a lot of romance stuff. There's even one with a picture on the cover of a man with a sword and a ponytail, wearing a billowy white open-to-the-navel pirate shirt and gesturing heroically) but that doesn't mean I won't. I carried the damn things half way across the country, after all, and I will certainly get my effort's worth out of them.





* and I am doing very well indeed on this front. I seem to have done about $400 worth of travel in the past week and a bit

Hello, My Employed Husband

Congratulations to Reto, who is rejoining the world of employed people today!



And also to Alisa, who is moving into her shiny new flat today (if only I was too, sigh. Into my own shiny new flat, that is, not hers).