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!