The last days

I am probably the most intermittent blogger ever and I am sorry not to be more regular. It is not that I don't like to see myself online--who doesn't?--but time is getting tight here. We leave in two weeks and the time is largely filled with sorting and packing our stuff, making arrangements for living in California again, and visiting all of our favorite places using all of our favorite modes of transportation. On top of that, Markus' family will visit us here this weekend for a last hurrah (related to my birthday so there really will be hurrahs!) And then we will spend our last weekend in Europe at his parent's house in Germany. With any luck, the weather will be pretty good for the next two weeks and we will be out and about a lot.

But I am still collecting the bits and pieces of observations and oddities about life in Switzerland. One of them is the age of public transportation here. We just spent a week in Germany and were surprised how modern the buses and trams were. Zurich has a few modern trams and buses, but overall they are very old-fashioned and probably from the 1970s. I notice this particularly because modern transport accommodates wheelchairs and strollers well by either being at street level and without steps up, or in the case of buses, kneeling. The old trams and buses hardly accommodate strollers and it has been a big challenge for me to get a stroller and two kids up the steep stairs of our local tram. And I purposely brought a small collapsible stroller. What most people have here are giant prams or wide jogger type strollers that only fit into specially modified doors of buses and trams. This means when the bus stops you can't get on the door closest to you, but have to race with the stroller to the one door you can fit into. What this breeds is very helpful behavior from the people around you because you just couldn't get on and off without help from strangers. However, it seems strange in a city where there is clearly lots of money and most things are very modern. My theory for explaining this relates to how well-maintained everything is in Switzerland. I guess that although they are old, the trams and buses are kept in great shape and therefore last forever. Certainly this is the cleanest public transit we have ever been on, even when it is old. Great preservation of resources, but this would be a hard city to be disabled in.

Our trip to Germany was great, if hectic and exhausting. But this seems to be characteristic of our last weeks here anyway. We are trying to do it all (and some of it again!) Then we will be back home again living off memories of trams and trains!

First day of school

We are just back from a visit to Markus' brother's family who live in a village outside of Basel. The whole family was there, including the grandparents. The occasion was the first day of first grade for our neice Cecilia. This turns out to be a big deal in Germany (although not so much of one in Switzerland). We basically had a weekend of fun and preparation for the big day, which included gifts for Cecilia and lots of cake. Germans mark the first day of school with a giant horn filled with school supplies and chocolate. Kids also then get their backpack which is a big reinforced pack that alone weighs several pounds. Cecilia's was pink and blue with multicolored unicorns all over it. In addition she got all of the accessories like matching umbrella, pencil case, lunch box, water bottle, eraser etc. See the picture of all of the grandchildren and grandparents with the loot! Who wouldn't want to go to school with all of those goodies?

On the day of the big event (monday) the whole family trouped down to school with Cecilia and into the classroom where we were greeted by the teacher and then invited to a presentation by the older kids of the school. After school, German traditions reasserted themselves with a party and more gifts (and cake). Overall, it was lots of fun and certainly would eliminate the anxiety of the first day of school.

Now we are back in Zurich for a couple of days, and then we are off on a nostalgia tour of Germany. We will visit Markus' cousins, his highschool friends and his college town. On the drive up, we will stop one night in Heidelberg (where Markus had his first job with IBM). We decided to rent a car for this trip as we have lots of stuff to carry and are making five different stops. Hopefully our kids will weather the rapid changes in sleeping accommodations all right!

We are still discovering new fun places to go...most recently a playground around not far from home that also has a working farm (goats and ponies) and a kind of aviary where they must breed canaries and parakeets as there were hundreds of them. We also visited the Children's zoo that is associated with the Swiss Circus company so it has lots of performing animals (see picture of Nicolas and friend Rasmus with the bathing elephants--shortly before we all got sprayed via their trunks!) Since the end of the Europa-Meister (European soccer cup), Zurich has also hosted an Ironman triathalon, the world cup for in-line skaters, and last weekend the Street Parade, which is a kind of techno-music and culture festival--which we decided to live without, instead we visited Bern (see smudged picture above) for the day. Summer has been really busy here, but it is all about to end. Zurich is a week behind Basel with school starting here next monday. We can only hope that the weather doesn't get any worse now that summer is ending (we have had days of rain again!) But for us, the fun here is ending as well. We have only a month left, and we are trying to sort through all of the things that need to be arranged before we leave. It looks like we must have our apartment professionally cleaned before we go. This will cost $75/hour for cleaning, and $150 for laundering the sheets (which probably means ironing as well.) As usual, there are no cheap short-cuts to be had in Zurich!

To Denmark and Back

We are now back from Denmark and northern Germany for a week and I am just now getting around to posting some pictures and updating our blog. We had a great trip! We visited friends from my graduate school days in Bremen for a weekend. Unfortunately the weather was very wet and cold, but we had a great time playing at an indoor pirate-themed play center and visiting the downtown of Bremen which is really beautiful. See the picture here of us by the famous statue of a shepherd and his pigs in Bremen. I remember visiting exactly this statue with my dad when we visited Bremen when I was in jr. high school, so it was really fun to see it again.

Then we drove north to Denmark to visit my host family (from my year in Denmark 20 years ago!) We stayed two nights in Odense, touring around my old haunts. Then we spent the rest of the week relaxing on the Baltic coast where they have a summer house. This part of Denmark is just idyllic, at least when the weather was as summery as when we were there. The summer house is a cute little fisherman's cottage (apparently 9 people lived in its 3 rooms before it became a vacation house) in a row of similar cottages on the waterfront. We spent the days at the beach, or just playing in the water and yard of the house. My host sister and her family were there with us (and did all the cooking, which was heavenly!) and it was fun to hang out and talk about old times and Danish politics! Tina and Per have a 6 month old baby who was also delightful (and sleeps all night!) We were sad to leave, but on the way back to the Hamburg airport we stopped in the small town of Schleswig which turned out to be more old-fashioned fishing charm. This turned out to be a great place to break the 4-hour drive back to Hamburg and we roamed all over town.

Now we are back and our departure feels more and more imminent. Markus is still pushing his project forward, but otherwise we are trying to identify what needs to be done to move, and what we still want to see or accomplish while here. Today, for example, we met our danish friends at a children's zoo in a town at the far end of the lake (Rapperswil). The zoo is owned by the big Swiss circus company (Knies) as a place for trained animals to retire or winter. While it is a zoo, it also specializes in all sorts of animal rides (ponies, elephants, camels, horse-drawn trains etc.) and sea lion shows. We just had a wonderful time. The highlight of the day was the bathing of the 4 elephants. After getting hosed off, the elephants then get into the pool of water and submerge themselves. Then the trainer helped them spray the audience. We got soaked (which is ok since the weather was hot) and the kids were screaming with laughter.

The other task we have for the next couple of weeks is to visit all of the people we haven't yet seen in Europe. We are planning a big visit to all of Markus' friends from highschool and college that he is still in touch with, which will mean a kind of marathon trip around western Germany. Before that, we will visit Markus' brother's family again to celebrate our neice's first day of school. Apparently that is a really big deal here, with lots of presents and cake (hey, it is German here afterall!) and special "schuletute" which are like big paper horns full of goodies. Markus has been waxing nostalgic about these for weeks so I am interested to see what they are all about. Anyway, all of this is to show that we are trying to milk our last weeks here (6 to go now) for all the possible fun and friendship we can. We also continue to find great new playgrounds and other points of interest in Zurich.

Last Friday we attended the Google party to celebrate the opening of their new garden patio. The decadence just goes on and on! Now the patio hosts not only the latest in garden decor, but also a sandbox for young and old. The party was great with lots of bbq! It was full of kids it felt like. I think this is because lots of the young and mobile googlers were taking advantage of the 3-day weekend afforded by the Swiss day (see below). The highlight of the party was a big bowl of water balloons. What were the organizers thinking????

Finally, I wanted to quickly describe the Swiss national day which was yesterday (Aug. 1). We were expecting something really big and patriotic, given that the Swiss basically use their flag as a marketing tool and seem to be very proud of all things Swiss. Indeed, we did see lots of people out in Swiss flag t-shirts, but truthfully I felt like many of them were like us: tourists or visitors who were there to see what it was all about rather than Swiss enjoying their Swissness. The parade of people in traditional dress and military divisions carrying bayonets was cancelled because it was raining. But later, when the rain stopped we headed down to see what was happening in the city center. There were some interesting tidbits, like old men playing alpine horns (think giant wooden pipes that rest on the ground and sound like trombones only much louder) or a parade of men carrying monster-sized cowbells and making incredible noise with them. But overall, the main event seemed to be eating brautwurst and enjoying some Swiss music. At night, however, as soon as it was dark the fireworks started. Zurichers apparently buy an enourmous number of fireworks to supplement the several shows put on by the city. They began just before 10pm and went on until 2am. This in a country in which it is illegal to put your recycled glass and cans in the public bins after 7pm because it disturbs the peace! Nicolas woke up in a panic (which was overcome when he realized it wasn't guns but fireworks that we could partly see from our apartment windows.) So I guess patriotism found its outlet though noise and light late at night. We found the whole event surprisingly lifeless. Of course, next weekend is the Zurich version of the Love Parade (a giant technomusic-themed street party/parade/drug-induced euphoria) so perhaps the people here are just saving up their wildness for that!

Of Freetime and Freitag

Several people have noticed that I don't seem to be writing blogs very regularly anymore. Looking back over the last blog I noticed a number of spelling and grammar errors as well. Perhaps this is all symptomatic of life here these days. The immigration problems seem to be a kind of turning point for us: we have two more months to stay here but are beginning to look toward home and reentering our lives there. Nicolas talks about California constantly and Markus has developed a real longing to return to his job and bike. For me, it is time outside of motherhood that I crave. We never got around to enrolling the kids into day care and the twice-weekly playgroup that Nicolas has been attending ends this week. This means that I get only an hour or two a week without kids unless I carefully schedule time. So I am looking forward to work and the feeling of accomplishment that goes along with a job, but also to workout and other alone time while the kids have a babysitter. Friends at work will be surprised to hear this, but I read the updates about summer orientation almost longingly!

That said, I must also admit that some of the loss of excitement around here can be attributed to really settling into Zurich. We have established a really normal rhythm to our days, albeit a slow and sometimes frustrating one. The idiosyncracies of life in Switzerland aren't so novel now, and we mostly know what to do. The next two months should be really fun. We are expecting visits from Markus' extended family, as well as a visit to friends around Germany and Denmark in the next couple of months.

We have also made some really great friends here with a Danish family. They have a boy the same age as Nicolas and a girl who is two like Timo. We have been meeting at various playgrounds and riding the trains and boats with them. The kids share no common language, but that doesn't really seem to be a problem. For Nicolas this is an opportunity to push and shout and chase around, which is apparently what boys really like to do. For Timo, it is someone his size from whom to steal toys. So we see quite a lot of them. The mom, Christina, has given up an academic career in Aarhus for full time motherhood here, so we also have lots in common. Best of all, they will be visiting in California in October, so we will get a chance to show them all around there.

Christina is really into the cool bags made here. Certainly, as Swiss exports go, this one is even cooler than Swatch (which is still alive and fashionable here, although I don't remember them being much sought after in the US since the early 90s.) Freitag bags are made with recycled tarp covers from Cargo trucks (what do we call lorries, anyway?) The straps are mostly recycled seat belts and the edging is made of recycled bike innertubes. They are clearly the its-it in bag. The store is made of stacked containers (like the kind that ride on the wheels of semi-trucks.) Christina keeps trying to lure me there, but I have so far resisted...in part because I am afraid to be sucked into a love-affair with these bags (as she has been) and that could cost a fortune. Eventually I will get there (without kids I hope) and then perhaps I will also become the very cool owner of a grungy plastic messenger bag...(Markus still owes me a present for my 40th :)

Well, next week begins our vacation to Denmark, so I will send more updates as the adventures continue!

Sunny weather

We have had another full week. No sooner had my mother and her partner left Zurich (under grey skies) than Therese from the Political Science dept. at SCU arrived and we entered full-blown summer. All of this of course coincided with the immigration problems I have had here. Ultimately Google was unable to persuade the Zurich migration office to grant an exception and I mandated to leave the country. I deregistered with the police station here and we traveled up to Germany for the weekend. Now I be a tourist for the remaining time here. But at least the good weather is still around!

The trip to Oma and Opa's house in Germany was like a visit to kid-paradise. The kids ate hot dogs and french fries, ice cream and lots of gummibears. Therese got lots of practise (which she doesn't need, unlike me) of her household German and lots of time chasing Timo (the runaway). We visited a wild animal park in the woods, several great playgrounds, and the local swim center which is a great collection of pools and pool-activities for kids. Not exactly what Therese expected from her visit to Zurich, but she was a very good sport about it!

Back in Zurich and without guests we have resumed our exploration of new playgrounds and new parts of the city. The city is still dressed up for the European cup which ends this weekend (last game in Vienna...will it be Germany?) Even some of the playgrounds have been augmented. Unlike in the states kids just get naked and play in the fountains. Timo and Nicolas are loving it!

Otherwise, we are expecting some visits from cousins of Markus and a visit to my host family in Denmark in July. Time suddenly seems to be running out...although we have two and a half months left. We discussed tonight ways to really maximize our time still here (including moving Markus' working hours around so that he has more daytime free with the kids and the city.) And sealed the plan with a picnic in a city park and more time in the fountains for the kids. With the sunny weather everything seems jollier here. Here are some pictures taken by Therese of our weekend adventures.

Full house, for now...

Blogging seems to have lost out in my crowded schedule these days. We are again hosting, this time my mother and Bob for three weeks, as well as a two-night visit from one of Markus' old school friends. This has meant more than the usual number of trips to the grocery store, but also more fun and the kids are really enjoying family. We have been to visit Markus' brother and family in the countryside again (where we attended a strange blessing-of-the-farm service on a farm, tucked in among the tractors and cow milking sheds.) We also met his folks for a day in Radolfzell which is a charming small town on the Bodensee. There we had a fabulous lunch that makes a return trip appealing. During that trip the train took us past the Rhine falls, which are like a small Niagara. Mom and Bob are back for another look at that close up today. Unfortunately, the weather has been rainy for two weeks now, and is about to turn colder as well. We have been having thunder and lightening almost every evening, and the rivers are full of muddy water from all the rain. I am really ready for some prolonged sun!

The other big news from here is that the European soccer cup is going on here. Switzerland, afforded a place as a host country, has now lost two games and been eliminated, so the excitement here has abated somewhat. But there is a real sense of party and fun here that I think is normally missing in this staid country. It also means that that there are tons of Swiss t-shirts that are about to go on sale....

While we have had babysitters we have been out to the movies, and this was a real event in itself. We decided to see Sex in the City since we were ready for something fun and decadent. The movies are expensive here, $18 a person (which really tests my spending limit!) But as we were buying tickets (which means that you must pick a specific seat in the theater, such as row D seats 31 and 32, even though there were 20 people in a huge theater for this 5:30 showing) we noticed there were several seating options. If you agreed to sit in the front row, you could spend only $13. Whether they make sure you sit there, I don't know. Or, if you want to reserve one of the three "private" balconies in the back of the seating for two people that is only $90! Now that is an expensive movie. And for that price, are they really watching the film at all?

Sex in the City, like most movies here is generally dubbed into German (hard to imagine Sarah Jessica Parker saying "Ach, ja".) But we went to a theater that had it in original English with German and french subtitles. I wondered how they did this, but it turns out that they just put one line of German and one line of French at the same time. It took up a lot of the movie screen and must have been confusing to those reading them (I guess I am lucky) but I guess that is the concession you make in a multilingual society.

The movie got underway after 20 minutes of advertisements. Part way through the movie the film just stopped mid-sentence and there was apparently a 15 minute intermission. We didn't know if the tape just broke (do theaters even use tape any more?) and didn't know how long it would last. But several of the people got up and came back with popcorn. As we found out later, they might have run to the bathrooms which would take a while as they are on another floor of the theater. Eventually the movie started again, somewhere other than it had ended and we watched the rest. Afterwards we headed to the bathrooms ourselves. What a trip. Now 8:00 the theater is packed with people and loud music. The bathrooms are very high-tech with fancy sinks and high-wind hand dryers. In the toilet stall there were video screens mounted in the floor to watch movie previews while you sat down (or stood up in the men's room). We topped off the evening with a trip to a hip Indian restaurant and a long walk home. How romantic!

There is one last adventure to include here. I received a letter from the city a week ago telling me that I have not got the right visa to remain in Switzerland (thank you Google) and so I must leave the country on June 23. And the kids too as they are Americans and not Germans. Markus got right on to the HR at Google to see if they can fix this, and we are still awaiting their results. However, if we do not get some kind of an exception then we will be leaving Zurich for a while (as yet unclear for how long). As you can imagine this has been something of a nasty shock. Markus' parents are happy at the prospect that we will be moving in with them, but I am not sure they have thought this through. It will be a bit wild and noisy if the kids and I move in with them for long! We are still not clear what this will mean for our stay here, but we will at least hold out until July as we have tickets to visit Denmark in the end of that month. And of course we have rented the apartment until September and as the case would be it is quite hard to end these things prematurely here. As it is we are holding off making more plans for the end of the summer...

The thinnest women in Europe

I have been looking at the women here and marvelling at how thin they all look. Then Markus read an article in the paper that confirmed my observations: women in Switzerland are the least overweight in Europe with only 23% being overweight at all. Pretty impressive. And the men are within the top 5 thinnest in Europe, after places like Romania and Bulgaria. And they look it: it is very rare here to see anyone with a potbelly or chubby legs. I remember seeing a book in the Santa Clara library about a French diet (which of course I browsed through) that said that European women are so thin because they don't snack. Might be true here too. I have to say that there seems to be a lot less snackable food available here than I remember in Germany (where women are apparently fatter). There are many fewer bakeries here to entice passers-by with delicious smells than in either Germany or France. Most food is still purchased in one of the two grocery chains here, even bread it seems. At least in the city, there seems to be few small bakeries. People do snack in the take-away windows of the grocery stores, but it is not the same kind of selection you get elsewhere: mostly just sandwiches and loaves of bread rather than small cakes and crusty rolls. They just seem less prone to finger food here. Maybe it has to do with tidiness (clearly a thing here). Maybe they don't really want people dropping crumbs from baked goods all over.

Or maybe, women are thinner because food is so expensive here. I have more or less adjusted to the cost of shopping for groceries, but eating out is a major shock every time we do it. Why, I am not so sure, since I look at the prices as I order, but by the time the bill comes I am surprised the lunch for two and a cup of coffee comes to $50. It is spring here and every restaurant and cafe seems to have tables out on the sidewalk here. And Zuricher are busy sitting at the tables. But what I have noticed is that although people are sitting at these tables all the time, very few people are eating. Mostly people are just having a coffee or beer. My new theory about this is that it costs too much to actually eat a meal (and there are not so many snacks you can order in a restaurant here) so people satisfy their social going-out urge by having a leisurely drink in the sun. But then they probably go home for dinner.

Of course, maybe Swiss women are just thinner because they have better impulse control than me. It wouldn't take to much. I cannot seem to leave the cheese alone. Even 5 flights of stairs isn't making a noticeable impact on my reserves. And of course, my mother is here with news that "they" are now saying belly fat in your 40s is a harbinger for illness later in life. The good news never ends!

Yes, my mother and Bob are here. They arrived yesterday and are just getting settled in. So far they have been on a tour of the old town and a bit of the neighborhood. But after Timo's nap today, Nicolas is going to show them some of his favorite modes of public transportation. We know how to maximize the all-day public transportation pass! The European soccer cup starts here in a week, so we need to get out and see Zurich before the 1.5 million expected soccer fans arrive. We unwittingly chose an apartment only 2 tram stops from the main soccer stadium, so we are expecting to see a lot of fans soon. We only hope these same fans are not interested in the same sights as us (soccer--mountain tops...doesn't seem like the same crowd!)

I have one last, unrelated (or at least I don't have any official statistics on their relation...) story to tell. I have mentioned our funky neighborhood in other blogs, but it has gotten even funkier... Downstairs from our apartment in the same block is a small woodworking shop. It is a very small shop that sells the hand-made wood projects of a woman who looks to be, maybe 60 years old. For weeks her window has had a large Beaver (perhaps 3 feet high) hand carved out of a single log looking out onto the street. But the other day, the display changed. On our first pass by the exhibit, Markus commented that the things in the window looked pretty phallic. Indeed, there are about thirty variations on penises of all different wood and all different interpretation in the window. The next time we passed by, small embroidered bags had been added to the window that said "love toys". So it looks like our neighborhood artisan has extended her range (and probably marketability) from beavers to dildos. I have attached a picture for the non-believers. Never let me say that the Swiss are uptight...just thin.