Cheese please

We are back from visiting Germany; again a great time was had by all. This time we spent a day with friends of ours from San Jose who have moved back to southern Germany. They have two boys so Nicolas and Timo had a great time with old friends. Best of all, the weather has changed here, and it is beautiful: days in the low 70s and very sunny. Perfect for strolling along the lake or going to the playground.

Today we took a tram to the other side of Zurich and then rode a funicular (kind of a cable car for 10 people that goes up a steep incline). Needless to say, the boys were in train heaven! The view was beautiful: the city below, the lake shimmering in the sun and the alps like white ghosts in the background. Then we were home for cheese sandwiches and naps (sadly not for me!)

Which brings me to the topic of the day: food. We are not really eating like the Swiss; at least I imagine not, but we don't really know as we don't know any Swiss and we don't go to restaurants much (and so far these have been falafel places and McDonald's). However, from what I can see in the grocery store, most people eat a few key vegetables, a little meat and lots of cheese. I was surprised to see packaged foods pretty big here, although differently than in the US. Probably because so many people groceryshop as pedestrians (rather than loading up the car once a week they shop as they walk home from work) packaged foods are often very streamlined. For example, lots of very heavy things, like spaghetti sauce are less often found in jars here and are more often packaged as dried powder in a paper envelope. Sure we have this sort of thing in the US too, but there is much more of it here. Even things like fishsticks are packaged to be very small. Whereas American food often comes in a bag inside of a big box, foods here are very tightly packaged in shrink wrap or a small box.

Probably this also reflects the garbage scene here as well. Instead of weekly pickup for a set fee, here you must buy special city garbage bags that cost about $2 each (think 8 gallon bags) and only those can be put out for pickup. So you really pay more if you create more waste (a bit hard on us diaper uses) and discourage excessive packaging.

Same sort of principle for recycling stuff. Actually, when I read the guide for new people in Switzerland, it said that the Swiss are wild about recycling. Must be written by someone who hasn't seen the recycle process in the US! Here recycling is available, but is a big burden on the consumer. Of course, it cuts your garbage cost by reducing the number of bags you must pay for, but I can't imagine that recycling is very big here considering how hard it is. There are bins around the city that take various glass and metal types. You must bring them clean, and separate them into the different bins yourself. If you have plastic bottles like coke, you can take those back to the grocery store and put them in a bin there. Most of the packaged things here, however, are not recycled. For instance, most milk and juice comes in 1-liter tetrapack boxes (kind of plastic lined boxes) that cannot be recycled. We go through several of these a day. Then things like single serving yogurt cups, plastic from meat or cheese packaging, etc cannot be recycled at all. So basically, to be a green citizen, you need to travel to several different places to drop off your various bottles, cans and plastics. This is no small thing in a city where there are only .3 cars per person! Then there is paper recycling. This should be the easiest of all since it creates the most waste. To recycle paper here, you must collect like papers (say all office white paper the same shape, or all newspapers, or all cereal boxes) and tie it into a bundle with string and put it out on the stoop on Mondays. To me this is a system that assumes there are people in every household who don't have much else to do....but who are these people? Maybe this is what one is supposed to do with the more leisure time Europeans get? Though the Swiss seem to have less of this than elsewhere in Europe, and at least in Germany recycling is a lot easier.

So anyway, back to food. We mostly eat cheese. I have resigned myself to this luxury, in part because it is so good here, and in part because the alternatives are more difficult to deal with. Meat is available, if very expensive (we did buy hamburger the other day to make meatballs, but it cost $18/kilo and seemed pretty grisly), but looks different here than at home. Lots more sausage and processed meats. We stick mostly to ham. But the cheese here is lovely. I love strong smelling cheese so I am in cheese heaven. The kids less so. They of course don't have any of the child-friendly varieties we have in the US (no cheddar, jack, etc.) but they have all sorts of wonderful variations on Swiss cheese that you never see in the US. To offset the cheese intake, I am resolved to eat salads for dinner...one of these days. Kids eat a lot of ham, hot dogs and pasta. The mainstays like tofu that we ate in the US are hard to find here. The whole soy thing seems to have missed consumers here, as has the omega-3 frenzy (although my brother-in-law cites a study from Sweden showing kids with learning problems improve a lot with fishoil supplements.) When visiting my in-laws we revert to German style eating: meat-potatoes-salad for lunch and then bread-cheese-sausage for dinner (every day.) So I was wondering why I haven't lost any weight yet....