Back!

Well, we're back. And exhausted (thankyou to 6 hours on a bus, 22 hours on trains, 2 hours on a plane and 7 hours of being woken up a lot on an uncomfortable couch in an airport in Stockholm since Monday morning). Fortunately we had an excellent time and the weather was super (so much warmer then icy Fribourg, which half killed me when I finally got off the train this morning) and it was the best holiday I've had in ages, which made all the endless travelling worth it.


Happy birthday cat, meanwhile, to my mother-in-law (whose birthday was last week some time) and my tiny new nephew Dominic, who was born last week. Honestly, you leave the country for 5 minutes or so and all sorts of things happen.

Orf

I'm orf on my honeymoon. Back in a few weeks.

My Version

It was four years ago today that Reto and I met. In general I don't remember these things, but since we were both on holidays, since I was keeping a diary at the time, and since he was taking squillions of photos all the time, it's easy to look back and remind myself what the date was.

Stamsund

We were in a town called Stamsund in far, far northern Norway. I had already been there for a week or so, and had planned to leave but then, fortuitously, I twisted my ankle while out bushwalking and decided to stay for a while longer.

Not Stamsund. I think this might be Reine, which was apparently voted the most picturesque town in Norway

The first I remember seeing of Reto was at night, when a bunch of us were sitting outside waiting for the aurora borealis to show up. I'm sure the story would be far more charming if the northern lights had have arrived and we had fallen hopelessly in love under their glowy magnificence or something like that, but instead we sat out in the freezing under the black night sky until we couldn't stand the cold any more, and then I explained to him how to use the washing machine.

What we didn't see. Actually, I saw them for the first time the night after Reto left

We spent the next few days together, sitting in the sun and wandering around and eating blueberries (which were growing all over the place. There's nothing more delicious than fruit you've picked yourself), swimming in the idiotically cold arctic water and eating the icecream that would become our namesake. I spent a good part of this time being kind of confused about what Reto's name was, being constantly sure I had misheard (because what sort of weird name is "Reto" anyway?) and thinking it was rude to ask for clarification.

Our ancestor. Sort of.

Reto left, and our habit of chasing each other from one country to another began, a habit that was to continue for a couple of years before we decided to try spending time in not only the same hemisphere but the same tiny apartment. Actually, there's also a whole bit of the story that I've left out because it involves me hitting Reto over the head repeatedly to make him realise he was hopelessly in love with me, but I don't really like that bit of the story and so it stays out.

And then we lived happily ever after.

It's my story and I say only the best bits stay in.

thankyou Google Images

Happy Birthday Eric!

Slightly belated, but since you can't read anyway I suppose it doesn't matter too much! I hope you had a lovely day!

Not A Moron

Today I was mocked in my french class for not knowing what "brushing" was (in the context of going to the hairdressers). "Don't you know the word in english?" the teacher said to me. Well obviously I do, but I suspect it's not the same thing because no one pays to have their hair brushed. And whaddayaknow, it's a blow-dry.

My teacher allegedly speaks english,but I secretly suspect that she doesn't at all.

Alone At Last

Olivia left yesterday. It was really nice having her here. She kept doing the washing up (which was excellent because it saved me from having to nag Reto about it). She got hilariously drunk after a single gin and tonic. She was atrociously bad at bowling and at Ligretto, this card game that R & I were given a few weeks ago, thus saving me from having to lose at everything all the time (which was a nice change and yet still didn't manage to make me enjoy myself). She helped with the cooking and had ideas about what we should eat (which was great. I hate the fact that Reto is so blank when it comes to food). Oh, and she gave us the gift of toast! Olivia asked us what we wanted as a belated wedding present and we said "a toaster!" and, surprise surprise, she gave us one! And it's all fancy with its buttons and knobs and croissant warming rack, and I have a tube of Vegemite at the back of the cupboard that I haven't eaten any of in aaaages (what with the lack of toast-making facilities) and now I've had toast two days in a row! And it's great!

Olivia: sucks at bowling. Although embarrassingly enough, she did beat me once.

Her camera is kinda crappy too.

Ouch!

I have a sporting injury! Yesterday we went tenpin bowling (I am atrociously bad at it, but as it turns out not quite as bad as Olivia. Did I mention that Olivia is my friend who has been staying with us for a while? Oh the luxury of having a spare room! Anyway, at least you can drink beer while you bowl, which gives it a definite advantage over most other sports. Plus I rather like the shoes). I mysteriously managed to cut my thumb and mangle my knuckles a bit, and today I've noticed that my left buttock is in agonies. Obviously its muscles haven't done anything quite so active in a while. I feel so sporty!*



* Obviously if I was actually sporty the minor exertion of three whatever they're calleds (games?) at the bowling alley wouldn't be enough to make my muscles wince. Since I am obviously not sporty, though, the reminder that I did anything vaguely more active than go for a walk makes me feel like some sort of super athlete.

Friends Frenzy

I've been in a bit of a frenzy of socialising lately. My french class has suddenly gone all friendly, meaning that I spend an afternoon each week (as well as 5 mornings a week) making semi-incomprehensible conversation and drinking a lot of coffee. My Australian pal Olivia has recently come back to Switzerland after 7 months of being harrassed and having food poisoning in Egypt (she also had a good time, but she does seem to have a lot of harrassment/vomiting stories which sort of take the shine off but add a lot of interest), and she's staying with us at the moment. I've got back into the swing of my weekly chats with the upstairs neighbour (did I ever mention those? He wants to improve his english, and the price he pays is having to suffer hearing my french).

Actually, that's about the extent of my socialising lately, but it's more than usual.

Retro

I've seen about 4 people on roller skates this week. All of them on their own (as in, I didn't see 4 people rollerskating together, which would have been less odd). And when was the last time I saw someone on roller skates? In the 80s maybe?

Huh.

Happy Birthday Kim!

Doesn't he look like Turbles! At least sort of! Well, he's the right colour, anyway.

Brr!

Today we had a really excellent afternoon swimming in the river in Berne (along with about 8 million other people). There is a local pool complex thingie down by the river (which, unexpectedly, is all free to use), so off we went and we ditched our towels under a tree and we walked off up a path along the side of the river. At the place where we decided to get into the river (about 500m from where we started), we took the option befitting our advancing years and unreliable swimwear and leapt in from the stairs on the river bank (as opposed to all the teenagers who were jumping off the bridge, which was only a drop of a few metres but I really doubt that my togs would have done their best to retain my modesty if I had subjected them to that sort of exertion). The water was freezing*. Actually 18 degrees, but cold enough to take my breath away when I jumped in.

Anyway, the current, which is pretty zippy, carries you back those 500m that you walked, then you have to swim over to the side of the river and grab onto one of the strategically located poles to get out. I'm not sure what happens if you don't make it to a pole. I gather there is another option for pole-assisted getting out another 250m away, but after that? I think there might be a weir. Which doesn't sound like too much fun.

Anyway, it was super. And surprisingly exhausting, what with the shock of the cold and then the constant minor struggle to keep nicely afloat, and swimming over to the side and so on. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who finds themself at a loose end, with cossies and a towel, in the general vicinity of Berne. Although possibly that description really only applies to people who live in the general vicinity of Berne and who therefore probably already know about it or have done it.





* I have no tolerance for cold water and am a complete wuss about getting into it. It really wasn't that bad, but I carried on a lot.

Things On Our Living Room Floor

A rug (recently vacuumed. Our normal standards of tidiness don't warrant photographing):This rug was a wedding present, and a much appreciated one given the Swiss loathing for carpeting. All of our floors are hard and cold and not at all pleasant for sitting on, so this rug (which is really thick and densely furry) creates a lovely oasis in the living room.

The other interesting thing on the living room floor at the moment is this:

Which is the beginning of a blanket I am making. Which I suspect might take forever to finish, and I also think that I might start to regret the uneven size of all the squares and the boring arranging I have to do to make the edges all neat and even (hmm, maybe I won't make the edges even. That's an intriguing idea), but hopefully one day it will be all pretty and useful and finished. The purple is much more purple than it looks in that photo, too.

Finally Over!

Our honeymoon is all booked! All forms of transport, all accommodation, and I'm never thinking about any of it again! Atrociously enough, we're going to have to travel for about 22.5 hours to get there ("there" being a town in the far far north of Norway, 2.5 hours on a plane, 16 hours on trains and 4 hours on a boat away via Oslo) and about 28.5 hours to get back (via Stockholm, 6 hours on a bus, 20 hours on a train and another wee flight). Plus of course the hour and a half that we need to get from our place to the airport.

That's crazy. We could have practically gone to Australia in that time.

Oh, and in other good news, I have used up all of my stupid frequent flyer points and will now be saying goodbye to the United programme forever! Yay!

Zimbabwean Dollars, Perhaps?

A while ago, Reto forced me to bet him a million zillion dollars that Australia would win more cycling medals than Switzerland at the olympics. I embraced some olympic-appropriate patriotism and the certainty that Australia's olympics are the summer ones and Switzerland's are the winter, I ignored my complete lack of knowledge of our talent at riding bikes (indeed the first time I heard of that Cadel Evans person was last week (after we had made the bet!) when my french teacher explained who he was. His name caused a lot of difficulty. I thought perhaps "cadel" was a french word that I didn't know yet) and I took the bet.

This afternoon Reto had a gloating frenzy because apparently some Swiss dude got a bronze medal in a bicycle event. Make the most of it while it lasts, Mr Smug*.




* I'm still not sure if we're any good at riding bikes, but I'm certainly willing to try to dampen R's sense of victory. Aussie Aussie Aussie, etc etc etc!

Honeymoon Rage

There's nothing that ruins a holiday like having to organise it, particularly a holiday that involves lots of long (ie. reservation necessary) trips on trains, boats and planes.

We're going on a honeymoon. Finally. To the place where we met, actually (and practically on the anniversary of when we met, which is twice the bang for your romantic buck), and where the icecream we named ourselves after* hails from (Norway). Getting there is going to be arduous (plane, train, boat) but at least we've already booked it, getting back is still the world's biggest headache (bus, train, plane), not least because we're trying to use my pathetic collection of frequent flyer points to book the flight.

I hate frequent flyer points. Without actually going into it, because everyone hates frequent flyer points and it's not really an interesting conversation,
1. The fact that my frequent flyer thing is with United Airlines is moronic.
2. All frequent flyer websites seem to be unbelievably moronic. Why are they so badly organised? Why don't they tell you the things you need to know (ie. how to book the flights, what flights are actually available, how many points they cost, what are the taxes)? Why don't they let you book a one way flight? Why don't they make it easy to contact them? Where are the phone numbers and emails? Why did I have to crawl pathetically around for ages on their stupid site for about half an hour looking for what I needed? Only to phone them up later and be told that everything I had read was wrong?

Morons.



* Did I ever mention that on here? The new surname we eventually decided to take as our married name comes from a Norwegian ice cream.

Taking The Good With The Bad

I don't like sweet and sour. Reto doesn't like tofu. The other day I made sweet and sour tofu for dinner and it was deeeelicious (we both thought so). I wasn't sure for a while if it actually was nice or if it just wasn't as icky as I was expecting, but I had leftovers for lunch for the next two days and now I'm sure it was delicious.

So here's the recipe. By the book, and with my modifications [in brackets. Including potentially patronising detail for those who are inept]:

500g tofu, diced [or why not use meat if you're a whiner like Reto? Although he did say that he didn't think the tofu was at all offensive in this recipe. Or maybe what he said was that if he's going to be forced to eat tofu it may as well be in this form where it's practically delicious, rather than marinated in soy and ginger which he hates]

Veggies, cut into thin strips [the official version says 1 small carrot, 1 red capsicum, 2 spring onions. I used 1 large carrot, half a zucchini, half a capsicum, a brown onion and some green beans, and I also rejected their authoritarian advice on how to cut them. Despots]

200g shiitake mushrooms, sliced [I used dried ones, which I soaked for 10 minutes or so in warm water then sliced]

1 T (tablespoon) groundnut oil [whatever that is]

1T sesame oil [I used canola oil instead of both of these oils. I also reject all oil measurements because I like to think I know better than some moron recipe]

300mL water

3T cider vinegar

2T brown sugar [Switzerland has apparently voted against brown sugar. I used raw sugar]

2T tomato paste

soy sauce to taste [a splash]

1T cornflour

300g fresh diced pineapple [I used tinned. Also note that I hate pineapple, which is a large part of my anti sweet-and-sour stance. The fact that Reto loves it may be a part of his S&S stance. He also likes ham and pineapple pizzas, which means that we very rarely share]

Marinade:

4T groundnut oil

50mL sesame oil [again with the canola for both oils]

75mL soy sauce

4T brown sugar [again with the raw sugar]

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

2cm fresh ginger, grated

1T tomato paste

Mix all the marinade ingredients together, then bung in the tofu and leave it to marinate overnight [note this step before you decide to make it for dinner tonight].

The next day, take the tofu out of the marinade, keeping the rest of the marinade for later. Fry the tofu in some of the oil until it's all golden and delicious, then take it out and set it aside for the time being.

Saute the veggies in a bit more of the oil. Add the marinade, water, vinegar, brown sugar, tomato paste and soy sauce. Bring it all to the boil then stir in the cornflour to thicken it a bit [it might be best to stir the cornflour into some water before adding it, to minimise the chance of it turning all lumpy and annoying]. Bung in the pineapple and tofu and heat until it's heated.

Then eat it. With rice. Then tell me how super I am. I mean, how super it was.

And here's some balloons. Awww

Happy Birthday Reto!

The best husband I have. Ermmm, I mean, could hope to have.Happy birthday also to Demian, who is off wallowing in exile in the wilds of New York city, and to Isabelle (wallowing in the wilds of Switzerland). Who'd have thought there were so many birthdays today?

Happy Birthday, Mum!

I don't know if this hat is more celebratory or olden-days-loopy-military, but what a furry little cutie pie!Have a super day, mum! Or what's left of it now that the time difference and being off at my french lesson have thwarted my posting this post before 11pm AEST.

Being Australian

On Friday we celebrated Switzerland Day in a pleasantly Australian fashion, by going to a pub and eating crappy (excellent) pub food and drinking heaps of beer. Then we sat around for ages waiting for the fireworks to start, which also felt pleasantly familiar. Less normal was the hysteria of people letting their own fireworks off (what with that sort of thing being legal here) and seeing all the insanely gigantic bonfires around the place*.

In other Australia-heavy news, yesterday I bought a bottle brush! Sadly since we are apartment-bound types and we don't even have a balcony, it will have to survive in a tiny wee pot on our tiny wee window sill, but it still makes me feel outrageously patriotic or something.

(note the capsicums looking more accurately tiny in this photo than they did in the other one. Note also the tiny garden gnome Reto gave me for my birthday. Odd.)

* The first time I was in Switz on Switzo Day, a few years ago, I went to some sort of celebration in Reto's home town and they had the WORLD'S BIGGEST BONFIRE just near the carpark of the local town hall or something. We were all standing there and squillions of cars were parked there and about 3 metres away was this enormous blazing inferno. Odd.

Happy Switzerland Day!

*

And happy long weekend to me. Which is doubly nice in this land of non-long weekends, and where if the holiday falls on a weekend you don't get a weekday off in lieu!

* Note that I chose that cat for its William-Tell style enthusiasm for apples. Obviously.

Pardon?

Today a woman sat next to me on the train. After she sat down she asked me a long, meandering question in french about how the trains work in Switzerland (like with seat reservations and so on, not about the mechanics of trains), I got confused and we muddled through in some french and some english and eventually we answered her question. As it turned out that wasn't her only question, though, and since my french was better than her english, we blathered on for quite a while longer in french with a significant amount of success (and who knew I knew so much about trains?).

When we got to Fribourg I got off the train, and nary two steps onto the platform, some woman accosted me and asked if this was the train to Thun. No, I said, it goes to Berne and Zurich, and then I thought "I think I may have just said something in complete gibberish" but the woman looked satisfied with my answer and so off we both went and a few moments later it occurred to me that she had asked me in german and I had replied in german.

Which is hardly earth-shattering, but I was shocked. In my french classes I am forever agonising over whether what I am saying is french or german (or some sort of half-hearted mongrel non-language). Apparently the solution is to not give it any thought at all.

Happy Birthday Steph!

Have a super day ... ... or else scary kitty will zap you with his hypno eyes and then eat you to death with his fang. And who'd clear up the mess?

Surprise!

As you will all no doubt remember, back in May I went to some sort of herb-selling market thing and bought a few pots of basil and parsley and stuff to put on the window sill. I also bought what I thought at the time was a chilli plant, but as it turns out, I was wrong.

What with all the squillions of different names that things go by, it's no wonder I'm relentlessly confused. A capsicum might also be a pepper or a poivron or a peperoni or it might be related to paprika, and then there's all the misinformation and crossed porpoises when you're wondering what pizza to order and it says "peperoni" and you think "well, I don't really feel like meat" but that's not what they're talking about because peperoni is capsicum and not pepperoni (the unexpectedly appealing meaty delight). For crying out loud.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Urm .... am I really watching some crappy German quiz show about Australia that seems to be implying that couples therapy involves drinking beer (helps with letting the emotions out, it seems), that Australians eat tinned cheeseburgers, that dehydrated wine is normal (you can take it camping!) and that thongs have bottle openers in the soles? They seem to be serious .. although happily they did just admit that the beer therapy thing was a lie, and DJ Bobo is one of the contestants (and surely no one can possibly take him seriously?).

Not In Kansas .. Or Are We?

That concert that we went to on Friday night (which was super, by the way) was part of the jazz festival that was has been on here for the last fortnight or so, and look at their logo thingie:

Weird. Even better was the backdrop thingie on the stage:

Giganto instrument-wielding kangaroos. Odd.

Nice For A Change

Tomorrow's going to be a nice day. I get Reto back from the army (only slightly damaged!), and then we're going to go and see my favourite Swiss band (it's a very short short-list, but that is more a reflection of my apathy than of the standard of Swiss bands. I suspect they are the only Swiss band I've seen live since I came here, actually) playing at a venue (temporary stage built out of scaffolding) a mere 50m or so from our apartment. Then the next day we're off to Zurich for the party of a friend, and then the next day I'm carrying on loafing in Zurich (and eating fancy brunch!) with another friend! I'm practically like a social butterfly!

And then on Monday it's back to french lessons and being annoyed. Sigh. At least now I can whine about it to Reto in the evenings (in person, not on the phone).

World Youth Day

Happy World Youth Day to all my pals in Sydney. I hope you're all having a charming time and not being annoying at all, even though it's apparently legal again now*.

* And for those who couldn't be bothered following the link: the extremely potted story is that some act was whipped up in the NSW parliament recently so that anyone found to be "annoying" pilgrims there for WYD could be fined up to $5500, but now a federal court has said that our fundamental right to be annoying within the confines of the law is sacred (ha! They didn't say "sacred", that was just me). Which is good.

Not Doing Anything Rash

Since Reto and I have become the owners of Powers Of Taping Stuff On The Telly (which is a few months ago now), I've been watching the episodes of Sex And The City that have been on SF2 (TV station) in the dead of night, every night. Before you get too excited and say "ooh, that sounds nice, I haven't seen that in ages", don't get carried away with programming your recording device, because the last episode was on last night.

And wasn't it annoying? Not that I haven't seen it before, but it was annoying this time around for a whole bunch of new reasons. Yes, obviously the sudden change in her boyfriend's behaviour (the bit where he suddenly went from being totally self-reliant and interesting to needy and pathetic in an implausible but extremely useful piece of plot twistery, just so we would all think it was okay when she fell back into the arms of her relentlessly disappointing other boyfriend) was annoying, and the way she always happens to fall over or be scrabbling around on the floor or something equally charmingly undignifed at just the right moment, but more annoying this time was how atrocious her friends were.

For those of you who don't know, in the last few episodes of Sex And The City, Carrie chucked it all in and moved to Paris with her boyfriend. She got there and had, as we all do, an excellent time having all these shiny new experiences, and a horrible time what with being lost with no language, no friends, no family, no understanding of the culture, no one to rely on except the boyfriend (who already has his own life there and doesn't necessarily have all the time in the world to help her adjust) and the constant feeling of not belonging. Possibly I am exaggerating that a bit with regard to what happened in the TV show, but I think in terms of the daily life of people who have emigrated, it's not too far from the truth.

Anyway, Carrie phoned her friend to complain and to speak to someone familiar and her friend said "If it's so atrocious there, you should come back here!". That, in my opinion, is not a nice thing for a friend to say. Yes, it's nice to know that your people miss you, but surely we all know that already? I think a far kinder thing to say would be "Wow, that sounds terrible, but what a weird problem to have, the fact that you don't even know your own phone number! Today I went to work and then I came home and I did my laundry and I watched Australia's Funniest Home Videos. Look how bizarro your life is in comparison!". People don't move to a new country on a whim, and I think it's a bit belittling to encourage them to chuck it all and move back on one (note that in the show she had been in Paris for a week or something). If my friends encouraged me to wallow in the difficulty of living here and then to throw my hands in the air and say "it's all too hard" rather then providing the emotional support and good sense that I need from them (even from this vast distance), I would be very unimpressed (take note, friends. Not that you're not all doing a lovely job).

Living in another country and being distant from all your dearest people and not understanding the language or the social expectations or the way you buy vegetables in the supermarket (you weigh them before you go to the checkout!) is difficult and frequently infuriating. Not living half a world away from your international boyfriend is rather excellent (depending of course on whether he's an idiot, as in Carrie's case, or not an idiot, as in mine), but it doesn't necessarily mean that life is going to be a basket of puppies. If there's one thing I've learned from reading all these blogs about people moving to new countries, and of hearing the stories of people in my language classes, it's that we all have exactly the same experience of having difficulty making a new life in a new country, and I suspect that what we all need is support and sympathy and people to distract us with stories of their own problems, not friends saying "if it's not fun, why bother?".

Also note that this rant was not brought to you by my friends or family or the quality of my life at the moment. Those last few episodes of SATC really annoyed me a lot.

Hang On, I'll Just Check

For how long is it acceptable not to know your own phone number?

Surely in this age of programmed-in numbers, the answer is "forever"? I mean, when was the last time you ever actually needed to know a phone number off the top of your head? Yes, you should have them all written down somewhere in case you have some sort of terrible technological disaster and your mobile phone is destroyed etc, and yes I do admit that if there's anyone whose number you should know it's probably your own, but that doesn't mean you actually need to know them. Not when you probably have them stored in your phone which is probably a metre or so away from you.

I suspect I may have been mocked in my french class for several reasons this morning. First, for not actually knowing how to read out a phone number (as in, do you read out each number individually, do you group them into pairs, do you throw in a little pause after the first four numbers etc), second for getting french numbers and german numbers hopelessly mixed up (which I do alllll the time. German is totally my fallback language for numbers, and once I switch into german I find it very hard to get out of it), and thirdly for not knowing any of my phone numbers in Switzerland. I suppose I've had my mobile number for quite a while now (ie. let's not mention that one), but the landline number is pretty new (since May or something) and I really don't think it's shocking that I don't know it. I've given it to people about twice (both times after reading it out from my mobile phone or from my address book), and I've never called it myself, and I've certainly never made an effort to memorise it.

I have come across many people in the past who haven't known their own phone numbers. It's just not that unusual, and yet there wasn't a single person in my class today who didn't goggle at me like I was some sort of moron. Morons.

Nothing Says I Love You Like ...

... bits of raw chicken shaped like hearts.

I would like to make it clear that it wasn't my intention to make raw meat hearts. I just sliced it up, and this is what I got.

Back To Primary School Reading

There are practically more french books in our house now than there are english ones.

While that's obviously not actually true at all, it is true that the french section of our bookshelf is slowly oozing sideways, mostly because
a) every time I go to my favourite second hand book shop (very rarely, but still) I always get a french book or two these days, and because
b) the dude who lives upstairs just gave me a gigantic pile of his comics (Asterix, Tintin and some other cartoon duo who I've never heard of). Which was lovely of him, because they are right about my speed at the moment and because I really love Asterix. Tintin I don't know so well and he seems to be more olden-days-style-racist than I prefer, but ... well, it's all good practice. Plus it's handy that he (the neighbour who loaned me the books) lives so close, because I would really have struggled under the weight of them all if I had had to walk more than about 15 steps.

Nothin' Much

Apparently I've been in too much of a frenzy of NOT LIKING MY NEW FRENCH TEACHER AT ALL to post any posts lately. She (the new teacher) is small (of stature) and aggressive and spends a lot of time pointing at people until they give her the answer she wants. Long after it becomes apparent that the person she's pointing at can't give her the answer she wants she carries on pointing. It's all a bit high-stress and annoying, but at least it's uniting us against her. Which is really the only bright side.

And that's practically all that's happening here at the moment. I am enjoying eating food that Reto grimaces at (like tofu marinated in soy sauce and ginger, mmmm) and I am drinking more than I do when he's here (which sounds like it might have overtones of depressing solitary drunkenness, but it's much more cheerful than that. I like having a glass or two of wine with dinner but Reto doesn't seem to care as much as I do, so now that he's away I'm liberated from feeling like a bit of a boozehound when I have another glass and he doesn't). But that's about it.

Partially Broken Husband

As is their habit, the army returned Reto to me in worse condition that that which I sent him to them in. And it's only been a week! So that was a fun weekend for us both of sitting around and listening to him complain, and of looking at his bruises (which were inexplicable and impressive), and of being made to put my hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever. Which, as everyone knows, is a completely pathetic way of judging feverishness. Although apparently not as bad as using our thermometer, which told me that my temperature was 33.7 or something, aka officially wikipedia-standard hypothermic. Which I don't think I was. Happily for Reto, though, according to our thermometer he was also far from being feverish (or even normo-thermic or whatever it's called).

Anyway, I've just posted R back to the army now, so that's all the whining over with* for the time being. Or at least until he phones me ...

mystery bruise

* not that I am complaining about complaining. No one appreciates a good whinge like me. Well, possibly everyone does, but my point is that I like whining just as much as the next person. And sadly Reto hogged all the whiny limelight this weekend.

The Floor

Something you possibly weren't expecting, and that possibly isn't interesting, it's a tour of the floors of our house. All of which I am very fond of.

The living room:These Switzies love their wooden floors. It's the same in the bedroom and the spare room, and all of them are VERY SQUEAKY. There are also some really big gaps between some of the boards, which is handy for sweeping. Instead of using a dustpan and brush to pick all the crud up, you can just sweep it into the gaps! No, really!

The hallway: This is lino, which as far as I can tell judging by other people's places is not normal at all. I love it. It's so retro and dorky and excellent.

These are the kitchen tiles:I'm a big fan of the small tile look, and I like the multicoloured nature of these ones. We also have these tiles in the bathroom but they are all the same shade of boring not-white so I'm not bothering with a picture of them. Instead, you get ...

.. a picture of these tiles: which are on some of the walls in the kitchen and some of the walls in the bathroom (and not the floor at all), and how super are they? I love the fact that everything in our flat is so brown and olden-days-ish.

Memory Lane

Because I somehow failed to do it in the last 5 months or so, and because I'm wasting some time when I really should be swotting up on some french, I just made a wee album of photos for our wedding to put on my Facebook profile.

Which reminded me of a happy story.

We got married at Shelly Beach, a (relatively) quiet wee spot in Sydney, just around the corner from the much larger and less charming Manly beach. Shelly Beach has pleasantly calm water (it's in a cove thing so no waves to speak of) and has lovely clear water (the sand there is less sandy and more shelly, and what with the lack of waves it doesn't really get churned up much so you can always see what's going on underwater at Shelly Beach) and is generally popular with families (who are scared of their kids being drowned by waves) and snorkellers. A few years ago I went snorkelling at Shelly Beach. It was all very pleasant until the part where a bluebottle got its horrible bluebottle tentacles all wrapped around my neck and stung the hell out of me.

I don't really have a lot of experience with being stung by bluebottles. In general I find that they usually manage to get other people instead of me, and so my main memory at the time was of when my sister got got by one and it left all these big horrible red welts around her ankles that didn't go away for ages.

Anyway, there I am flailing about in the ocean, probably about 30m or so from the shore, trying to get these tentacles off me and meanwhile getting ever more tangled in them and also getting stung all over my hands and arms. By the time I eventually got back to the shore I was all a-tizzy with the exhaustion of coping with the horrible burning pain, swimming back to shore and trying to remember how you are supposed to treat bluebottle stings. I know we used to be told that vinegar was the way to go, but then didn't they change that advice to fresh water? Or salty water? Or urine? Opting for the easiest and least pervy* option, I went to the shower things and put my neck under the water, but that just made it hurt more. There were no life guards around (ie. the people who would have the vinegar) so instead I went to a cafe and asked if I could have some ice or something, which also didn't really help me much and plus I was getting quite a lot of strange looks as I sat there clutching ice at myself and feeling hysterical. Not to mention the fact that I was almost crying from the pain and I was secretly convinced that I was going to collapse with either a heart attack (because it felt like my heart was galloping along at about a zillion miles an hour) or some sort of anaphylactic shock (because it felt like my neck was swollen to about 8 times its normal size, which I was sure was hindering my breathing and therefore killing me. Incidentally, I was later very disappointed when I looked in a mirror and saw that my neck wasn't red or swollen at all. I do like having the visible signs of trauma; it's the best way to get more sympathy).

Needless to say, I survived and then enjoyed telling people about the day that I got a bluebottle wrapped around my neck. My story lost a lot of its charm (for me) when I met this dude who had been out surfing a week or two earlier and and been stung by a bluebottle and reacted reeeally badly and got these enormous welts all over his torso which ended up turning scabby and taking weeks and weeks to heal, but still, my "and then a bluebottle tried to strangle me!" story remained traumatic and dramatic for me.

And then I got married at the same place. Nice.

* Urine obviously being the pervy option. Frankly, although the pain was pretty bad, I think it would have had to have been a lot worse before I started asking strangers if I could borrow their urine.

Languages? I Don't Like 'Em.

Aagh. What with having been on holidays from french classes for the last 2 weeks, and with having spent a significant amount of time in german-speaking areas lately, I've suddenly becomed trapped in some sort of moronic language limbo where I'm permanently confused and confusing. People speak to me and I'm too busy wondering where I am and what language they are speaking to actually listen to them. Whenever someone looks at me as though they are going to speak, I have a small moment of panic where I wonder how I should say hello. I start to speak in french and half way through the sentence turns kinda german. I'm spending my time crippled with confusion.

Not that I'm setting anything on fire with my awesome non-english-speaking skills at the best of times, but at the moment I really feel like I am floundering more than usual. I'm presuming it will all be less arduous next week when I get back into french lesson mode, but I think as an added precaution I might avoid german-speakers as much as possible for the next little while.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Happy birthday Dad!

Tiny Whiny

For those of you in Australia (or any sensible-fridge country) who haven't really bothered to notice that I occasionally whine about the size of the fridge here, please note the following photographic evidence:
and for some perspective on just how tiny the freezer is:

That's not unusual here. Fridges, for whatever moron reason, are tiny.

Also note that I have embraced using clothes pegs to keep opened packets of stuff (ground coffee and linseeds in these pictures) shut. I don't know why this never occurred to me before. Actually, I do; it's because we don't have any elastic bands and because I'm apparently the sort of cheapskate to whom the idea of actually buying them deliberately is anathema. Where do all the elastic bands come from in Australia? We always had squillions of them there, but here, none. There are those purple ones around bunches of asparagus, and sometimes you would get them wrapped around the paper (when it was delivered, usually the crappy free local paper), but surely that can't be all?

Sport

As I'm sure I've mentioned, even though I DON'T LIKE SPORT AT ALL, I am sort of a fan of large-scale sporting events, in the manner of the Olympics and this soccer thing that's just finished. I like how people hang around and there is free outdoor entertainment and public transport is more friendly than it normally is (although you're annoyed that there are no spare seats, you enjoy seeing all the enormous dutch men in fluorescent orange wigs struggling with their banners and wondering if this is the stop to get off at).

In this spirit, I was always determined that I would make some sort of an effort to at least go to some of the cities where the games were being held and see what the vibe was like while the soccer was on. Being more of a slacker than a doer, though, the closest I got was R and I going to Berne a few days ago and having dinner in some restaurant that was just next to a fanzone*. There wasn't any soccer on that night, so instead of sporty entertainment there was some woman on stage who is apparently quite famous in Switzo (well, Reto had heard of her, and he is pretty oblivious to everything), singing the kind of music that Reto's mother would like (ie. atrocious folksy sort of stuff with no redeeming features whatsoever). So that wasn't endearing at all. Later we walked past another fanzone in Berne and this one was heaps wackier, but there was still a bit more yodelling going on than I would have liked. Admittedly this was sort of rock yodelling, and the singer seemed to be wearing some sort of heavily spangled outfit that doesn't go with yodelling (and therefore I suspect the yodelling might have been ironic or something), but it was still somehow ... not great.

Ever since I saw Ms Mac's picture of the ginormous soccer player statue in the train station in Zurich, I had also been meaning to go there and have a bit of a squiz. Apathy won for a long time, though, and so the first time I was actually in Zurich with the opportunity to look at them (ie. while they were there) was on Monday, ie. the day after the soccer finished. Switzerland being as it is and all, there was none of this "leaving the christmas tree up until it dies and you're left with squillions of old crunchy pine needles tromped into the carpet" type attitude (not least because this is the land of no carpet), so in spite of the fact that I was there at the crack of dawn (10am or so, after helping Reto lug his vaaaast quantites of army crap onto the train), the soccer giants were already in a state of semi-dismantledness. All their arms were gone. I saw a pile of giganto hands with their pink little (enormous) fingernails sticking out of some giant-hand-mincing machine (or possibly just a normal rubbish skip). One of the armless soccer chappies had been pulled down and was lying in a rather ungainly fashion on the ground, face down, with his shorts missing and a man standing in the area where Soccer Giant's bum should have been had he apparently not been in the throes of being dismantled bum-first.

I had intended to take my camera with me that day so that I could take a photo of Reto in all his army finery, all laden down with his idiotically heavy gun and his bayonet and his cammo helmet and his bags and bags of army junk, but a photo of these partially deconstructed soccer chappies would have been far better. But I forgot the camera, and so now I have neither photo. I suppose that's what I get for saying "I'd like a phone with no features at all, please" when I went to buy my mobile. At least it can send and receive SMSes, which is a distinct step up from my previous phone. Which, by the way, wasn't so old as to predate SMSes, it was just sort of broken.

Just picture them armless, pantsless, and lying face down with normal-sized humans coming out of their bottoms. It's a bit like an Almodovar film, isn't it? Thanks to Ms Mac for the photo, too.

* a fanzone being a fenced off area where everything you could possibly imagine is banned. Like weaponry and pets and glass bottles and anything you might be able to throw (I think that was actually specified on the signage. What can't you throw?? Things that are so sticky that they don't let go of your hand when you try to pelt them? Post-it notes?)

Stoopid Technology

Sigh. Reto's been off killing people (or whatever it is they do in the army) for a good day and a half now, and I am apparently incapable of coping without him. Last night I had to phone him (just five minutes before his army-enforced bed time!) to find out how to turn up the volume on his computer when all the usual methods didn't work, and this morning I can't make the printer print. There's plenty of ink in it, it's just not coming out. Sigh. I disapprove of me being this pathetic, but I also have very little interest in finding out how all this boring technology works. What a dilemma.

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!