Let It Stop Snowing/Isn't It Pretty?

Over the last few days I've been taking photos of the snow on our balcony in order to impress you all with the arctic conditions of my life.

(I can't believe I ever thought this was impressive)

(Getting better/worse, depending on which side of the wall you're standing on)

(That's more like it. Or not)

Snowy!

So cold and so pretty!
Although it is sort of wreaking havoc with our pram, which has very small and uncooperative wheels that tend to get all clogged up and stop rolling whenever they are faced with mud or fallen leaves or even humid air. Or snow, as it turns out. I may stay indoors for the next few months.

Being Unpatriotic

Things that are better in Switzerland:

Television. Not really, but television ads are definitely a step in the right direction. I don't know exactly what the rules are, but if the show's less than an hour and a half or so long, you won't see any ads in it. Hurrah.

Food you buy at outdoor events. Pluto pups and other revolting versions of things on sticks. Hot chips, fairy floss, meat pies and sausage rolls. Versus raclette, a sausage with a really nice bun and mustard, älplermagronen (or whatever the spelling is. pasta and potato and a cheesy sauce with onions and apple sauce. mmmm, perfect when you're on top of a mountain and it's freezing) and käsekuchen (a savoury quichey thing, not to be confused with its literal translation, cheesecake, which is not even remotely the same thing), not to mention all those deep-fried desserty things, like apple rings with vanilla sauce (aka custard). Switzerland definitely wins here (although I would never say no to a nice warm cinnamon doughnut from the Lions Club vans of my youth).

Cheese. There's nothing worse than suddenly finding yourself in the mood for some interesting cheese on the way home when you're in Australia, and finding that all that's on offer in Coles is 8000 types of cheddar and a splash of feta. Not that there's anything wrong with cheddar or feta, but a bit more readily-available variety never hurt anyone.

Christmas. I feel bad for saying that, and actually I'm not sure that it's even true, but I really do enjoy the wintery build-up to christmas here, the glühwein and christmas biscuits (even if I don't associate them at all with christmas myself), all the indoor eating-based activity. Not to mention the christmas lights and candles and decorations that all look so much more charming in the grim wintery weather. Actually, what I think I might be saying here is that traditional christmas things are much better in Switzerland than they are in Australia, and that it goes without saying that an Australian christmas should not try to confuse itself with a European christmas, because it's in no way the same thing.

That is all.

The Calm Before The Snow

What delightful weather we've been having lately, especially on the weekends! Last Saturday we went on an excursion to look at the Eiger, and had a lovely time forcing our extremely urban pram to cope with dirt roads (!), puddles (!!) and patches of snow (oh, the horror!). We were also accosted by tourists (I'm kinda loath to say they were Japanese, because it seems like such a cliche, but they were so there you go) who were so swept away by No's cuteness that they insisted on taking her photo a lot, which was hilarious and weird and lovely.

(The pram endures the outdoors)

Oh, and we ate fantastic Swiss mountainy food (lots of potato and meat and things. We resisted the call of dessert, but really, you should have seen the meringue on offer. It was topped with what was described in the menu as "viel schlagrahm" (=lots of whipped cream. The menu was mostly translated into english as well, but the english translation for this bit left off the "lots". Maybe tourists in Switzerland will think that that is the standard amount of whipped cream on any dessert. Hmm), and they weren't kidding. The finished product was easily the size of my head, and every time one was brought out by a waiter, everyone turned and stared and giggled a bit. Which was nice.

And then this Saturday we wasted the nice morning by doing a bit of Christmas reconnaissance in Bern (we've decided to put up christmas decorations for the first time ever, which means we have to buy some christmas decorations. R had very firm and surprisingly conservative ideas about what is and isn't acceptable in a christmas decoration, but I won him over in the end and now it seems I am going to have to talk him out of buying all the revolting jokey cat head/psycho squirrel/doughnut/ostrich-on-a-tropical-holiday type baubles that we saw. For crying out loud. He still refuses to consider tinsel, though. And I think he secretly wants real live candles with flame to put on the tree, but refuses to take responsibility if our house burns down) and then went to Thun and had a delightful time in the afternoon sun with the mountains and the lake and the apple strudel. How much longer can this last?

(Dwindling afternoon sun near Thun)

Where Do I Live Again?

Out one window,

and out the other.

I Blame The Baby

Oh, and while I'm in a bit of a blogging frenzy, I'd just like to take the opportunity to say how sad I am to not have been to the Zurich Film Fest this year. This is the first year this century (!) that I haven't been an extreme attendee of at least one film festival, and sadly it's also the year that there was a bit of an Australiana theme at the Zurich fest. On the bright side, I did miss out on all that Zurich-and-back public transport tedium, the aggravating ticketing system and eating far too many (delicious) pretzels when I didn't have enough time for a proper meal.

Huh?

I have serious problems remembering things that people have told me in french. Yesterday I caught the train to Geneva, and spent the whole trip (all hour and twenty minutes of it) sitting opposite a man with a one-year-old daughter. Babies being the conversation-makers that they are, we spent the whole time chatting, about babies, daily life, politics, the weather (when will all this stupid fog go away?), all the usual stuff. And really, by the end of it I could hardly remember anything he'd said. It happens every time a conversation goes for more than about 10 minutes. Which can be embarrassing.

In other news, the Tiniest Australian (citizenship, check; passport, on the way) has started eating solid food. It's messy. I have some sort of unexplored hatred of the idea of feeding her pureed food, so we're going with the idea of baby-led weaning, which means that she has spent the last few days sucking on chunks of bread, raspberries (which she seems to really enjoy, at least the bits that make it to her mouth and don't just get mushed into nothing by her inept baby hands), capsicum (ditto), pork, carrots and zucchini. And then wiping herself, me, Reto, all our furniture and everything she can get her hands on with a horrible mixture of pre-sucked food and slobber. What a cutie.

Disappointing

I saw a cheese at Coop today called "Moron du Jura" and I was going to buy it for the sole purpose of putting a picture of it on here, but then I didn't.

Things that make the No cry lately: people sneezing, people blowing their nose, people laughing. Which is a bit of a bummer because I have a cold and we've been watching 30 Rock on telly.

Really?

Did I never put up a single picture of the No? Okay, here's one:

Who knows why she's so sad. I suspect it's all an act.

Return To Lisbon

Having agonised for ages over where we should go for a holiday, we finally (last week) made a decision to go back to Lisbon (next week. Well, tomorrow actually). I'm thoroughly looking forward to going back to somewhere that we've been to relatively recently, so we don't have to face all the usual drama of finding out where we are and how we get where we want to go. Plus we had a really great time there last time, and even though it seems very unlikely that we'll happen across a film festival this time, I'm full of optimism. Plus we seem to be staying at some wacky interesting hotel that Reto found, and not a return trip to the B&B from last time, which, although not bad, does suffer somewhat from being above a wine bar full of drunken people who don't know which is the light switch for the toilets and which is the light switch for the B&B room.

On a potentially negative note, it will also be the No's first flight, which we are all bracing ourselves for. Good practice/terrible advance warning for her first flight to Australia, which we are thinking will happen in Feb or so next year.

Seasonal Confusion

Apparently the supermarkets here are in denial about it still being summer. My local Migros started selling the "autumn" themed yoghurts weeks ago, and yesterday in Coop I saw some Christmas biscuits. Specifically, I found pfeffernusse, which I love and have stupidly missed out on for the last few years because shops seem to sell them briefly in October (or September, I now discover) and I think "ooh, it's too early for that" and then they vanish forever. Anyway, there they were yesterday, sitting on the shelves and giving me the eye, so I bought them and now I seem to have scoffed the lot.

They're not really as good as I remember, actually.

Ways In Which I Will Never Be Swiss

1. Answering the phone by saying my name instead of by saying "hello". Some junk mail caller got all stroppy at me the other day because I wouldn't tell him my name. He didn't seem to know how to proceed if he couldn't call me Madame whoever.

2. Writing 1s, 7s and 9s with all their extra tails and lines.

I Didn't Vote ..

.. but fortunately they're not going to fine me*. Even though it's all my own fault.

Apparently I enrolled as an overseas voter in 2007 (for the last federal election), but apparently I forgot that and apparently the AEC website don't tell you that sort of thing when you look up your enrolment details, and so when I eventually got around to sending in my forms to apply for a postal vote, I got an email telling me that they had already sent the forms to the wrong address and that now my only chance left to vote is to go to Geneva and do it there (at the permanent mission or whatever it is). Which I had no intention of doing, not only because about a day or two before I got that email I had been to the mission in Geneva to get some stuff certified to make the No into a tiny Australian and I wasn't about to make that annoying journey again.

Even if they had sent the voting forms to the right address it still would have been extremely annoying. To complete the forms, you have to get another Australian (one who is enrolled to vote, I suppose) to sign your voting forms. I have a grand total of one Australian friend in this country (hello Sarah!) and she is inconveniently located in Zurich. So in many ways, not voting is much more convenient for me, but you can all rest assured that if Tony Abbott is the next PM, I will feel very very guilty.





* There's a federal election on today in Australia, in case you didn't know, and voting is compulsory, in case you didn't know, in the sense that they fine you if you don't vote, but apparently not if you misinform them about your address and thus scupper your chance of voting. And apparently it's not really compulsory if you don't live in Australia, and after you've been away for 5 years or something it might be not so much compulsory to vote as forbidden. Nice (that was sarcastic, by the way. I find it outrageous that they apparently want to deny me my chance to vote in my own country, even if I don't live in it).

Is It Something In The Water?

Last night as I was making some rice to have with dinner it occurred to me, as it frequently does, that these Swiss are crazy. They recommended cooking time for rice here seems to be 45-60 minutes for brown (which is what we were eating last night) and about half that for white rice*. Really? It's been a while since I cooked rice in what I like to annoy Reto by referring to as The Sensible Continent (=Australia, obviously. And then we have an argument about whether it actually is a continent or not, which Reto obviously always loses because he is wrong and foolish), but I'm sure brown rice cooks there in something like 25 minutes, and white rice in about half that time. And my (many many many) rice-cooking experiments in this country lead me to think that Australian estimates are far closer to the truth than Swiss ones.

Which reminds me of a conversation that I eavesdropped on some time ago, where my mother-in-law and brother-in-law were discussing corn on the cob, and whether we were, at the time, eating the fresh variety or the pre-cooked variety. There was some confusion for a while, and eventually my mother-in-law said "no, it's the fresh stuff; I boiled it for half an hour". I assumed she was joking and sort of laughed a bit, and then when I told them that I was under the impression that corn on the cob needs to be boiled for about 5 minutes it became clear that everyone thinks I have no idea about anything, can't cook and am probably feeding my family on nothing but hay and raw potatoes.

So what's going on? Why do we apparently need to cook everything forever in this wacky country? And why is the corn on the cob still so gristly and tough even after it's been tormented for all that time?






* I mean normal uncooked rice, not that horrible parboiled stuff which looks, tastes and smells weird and also doesn't really seem to even take much less time to cook anyway. I did read somewhere once that parboiled rice retains more of its nutritional value, but that doesn't convince me that it's worth eating.

Not To Be Neurotic Or Anything, But ...

My parents, who are visiting, brought me a bunch of old Good Weekend magazines (which comes with the paper on Saturdays, and which I love). In this one I'm reading now, the journalist flew to Geneva to interview someone. She says

"the two-hour train trip to Lausanne costs more than $100".

Hmm. Maybe she caught a regional train and stopped at every station there is between Geneva and Lausanne, and maybe she means a return first class trip, and maybe the exchange rate was very very very bad, but it seems to me that someone should be doing a better job of checking the facts.

Surely there are enough stereotypes about Switzerland that are true that we can gleefully repeat to others, without making up stuff that is just blatantly wrong? Incidentally, I always thought that the fear of draughts (as in movement of air, not the board game. Oh how the Swiss love board games) was a bit of a rumour. Apparently not.

Thanks, Everyone

Noémie: waah, waah, waah
Everyone In The Entire World: Oh, she's teething.
Me: Aaargh!

Really, strangers on buses who have spent a grand total of two stops-worth of time in the vicinity of the No feel the need to tell me that the reason she's crying is that she's teething. Really? Not that she's hot, tired and hungry? Well, I suppose you're the expert aren't you, whoever you are?

Grr

Me: Grr, it's so hot.
Everyone Else: But you're Australian, you must love it.
Me: If I loved the heat I wouldn't have moved to Switzerland. Grr.

How Good Are We?

We went to visit our tiny new nephew the other day, and because R is the godfather it was his responsibility to bring the geburtstafel (baby name sign thing that sits in the garden for the next year or so). Poncy and ridiculous as I think these signs are, we dragged out all our DIY skills (minimal, I thought) and made the best sign ever.

Pretty good, hey?

Who Needs 'em?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, single parenting seems to be suiting me surprisingly well (R is off in the army). Under my watchful single eye (just call me Cyclops) No has progressed to sleeping a whopping 10 hours straight (well, she's done it a few times over the last week), I've found the time and enthusiasm to cook myself all sorts of fancy and delicious food that I never really bother with when Reto's home, I've scrubbed half the flat in preparation for moving (next week!) and packed a fair bit of it as well. I'm also an expert (albeit a fairly fed up one) at lugging our stupid pram up and down our stupid stairs a million times a day,and wrangling it onto buses and trains and through tiny tortuous aisles in shops. In between that and all the baby-carrying I'm constantly doing, I'm sure my arms have never worked so hard. Oh, and I successfully took No off for her first lot of vaccinations, which she coped with admirably for the first second or so, but then the realisation that she'd been stabbed in the leg set in and she screamed like she's never screamed before, poor little thing.

Unfortunately, Reto comes home again on Friday (having finished all his army duty forever!) and will no doubt throw everything into disarray, or at the very least force me to watch a lot of sport (Wimbledon AND the World Cup, zzzz) on the telly.