Tag: Switzerland

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New Year’s Eve – Guest Writer

Written by the Site Editor 

It is always bizarre to be a teenager and celebrate New Year’s with family. There is the sense that some massive party is being missed – when usually, my friends and I were far too disorganised to organise anything. So I created a system; one year with family, one year with friends. My family have never celebrated New Year’s to much extravagance in my memory – although apparently there was a good ‘end-of-the-world’ party at the turn of the century. One year, we were skiing in Austria and my parents, my sister and I were far too tired to make it to midnight, and decided to celebrate ‘Ugandan New Year’s Eve’, as it was several hours ahead and allowed for a 10pm bedtime.

For the winter of 2015, this was not the case. The plan was to celebrate up in Gruyeres, the small medieval town in Switzerland that bizarrely hosts a horror art museum attributed to the designer of Alien, H. R. Giger. We even invited some friends we had known in Uganda to join us.

We expected there to be some fanfare. But at 8 o’clock when we had gone to dinner, nothing had yet been made evident. It turned out that one of our friends, the father of the family we had invited along with us, is not an evening person. As we tried to coax him into playing games, he grew evermore disinterested. To the extent that winning and losing were met with the same ‘Oh, that’s interesting’ comment. We were far too amused by his reluctant attempt to stay up until midnight to realise that nothing had happened in the village. My sister was head down on the table feeling ill with a condition that we later diagnosed as chickenpox at the age of 14 (I contracted it 2 weeks later at 17). Perhaps it was epitomising Swiss-ness, and a rowdy party was not an option for such a sleepy, usually tourist-filled village.

However, at 11.50pm, something happened. A group of about 10 or 15 people bundled into the central square with a massive speaker. They started pouring drinks, chatting and laughing. The speaker blared out ABBA, Queen and various classic songs that everyone can sing to, be they English, French or German speaking. And for 15 minutes, we laughed and drank together to welcome the new year.

By 00.10, they had cleared out. Obviously, it would not do to have a rowdy event in the town square endure for too long and upset the neighbours. They cleared themselves away, took the speaker and all the plastic cups from their champagne, and bid us good night. We were stunned, as they erased any sign of having been there at all. We walked up to the top of the village to spot fireworks being set off in far away villages and mountain chalet towns. We welcomed 2016 in the tranquillity of a Swiss village – the year that followed was anything but tranquil.

We wish you all the best for the New Year’s, and thank you as ever for your support. Please forward Words for the Weary to anyone who you feel needs a story every week! 

 

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Le Halloween

Halloween is the one day each year when I miss my home in North America more than any other. Halloween in Europe reminds me that I am a stranger in a strange land.

Halloween is about empowerment. Kids are encouraged to be someone else, to ask boldly of strangers. By contrast, two teenagers stood on our doorstep in Belgium some years ago. They were dressed as bedsheet ghosts, the lamest of costumes.  They mumbled “Tricks or Treats”. Clearly novices. I gently pointed out that (a) I had no candy, because (b) it was October 29th so, wrong night, and (c) it was technically the singular, Trick or Treat, no “s”. But they only spoke Flemish. So things sort of broke down at that point. I gave them some apples. We looked awkwardly at one another through the eye-holes in their sheets before they wandered off.

Halloween is about excess: mountains of candy, over the top decorations, sugar-induced meltdowns. These are not only tolerated, but celebrated. Europeans are just hardwired not to go there. Tonight we placed our jack-o-lantern and a bowl of candy at the far end of our long Swiss laneway. Several times this evening I walked out to replenish the bowl. I need not have bothered. Apparently each Swiss child only took one candy each. Only one item from an unsupervised bowl of free candy? Come on! That would NEVER happen at home. Where I come from, this is what happens.

Halloween is about being unselfconscious, both for kids and parents alike. But our Euro-neighbors never let it all hang out. They stand together in svelte black slacks eating canapé and sipping wine while their kids circulate politely around the neighborhood. By contrast, my neighbor in Maryland used to rig a microphone to a speaker hidden in the pumpkin at the end of his driveway. As trick-or-treaters approached his home, to their delight the pumpkin would comment on their wonderful costumes. But in the spirit of unselfconscious excess, this neighbor also hit the booze pretty hard on Halloween. As the night progressed, the talking pumpkin became more belligerent. Alas, no drunken pumpkins in Europe.

Halloween is an intoxicating mix of fun and fear. At the consulate in Switzerland, Marines in camo hide in a darkened hallway that leads to the family Halloween party-room. They step out of the shadows as families pass down the hall. The result is lots of screams and more than one soiled unicorn costume. Take that, Geneva Convention!

I truly love living in Europe. But on Halloween, I miss my home.

 

Bonus – This just in from stateside friends as this blog post went to press: I had to stop tricks or treatsing early this year because I spilled my red wine all over the head and back of my youngest in her stroller. Don’t worry, the Asian costume makers didn’t use cotton, so the polywhateveritwas fabric didn’t absorb the red wine. Add that to the fact that the costume was way too big for her anyways, and that magic means she can wear it again next year! Woot!!! I’m totally winning at this parenting gig, let me tell you!

 

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Mountain Men

Swiss mountains are unforgettable. So too are the people you meet up there.

Last year my wife and I were hiking a remote trail high in the Alps. We came upon a farmer repairing a stone wall. He was a burly fellow with a mutton chop mustache. He looked like Obelix the cartoon character, or an agrarian version of Lemmy from Motorhead.

As we passed I wished him a “Guten Tag”, this being the German part of the country and greetings an essential part of Swiss culture. He raised his hand in a Roman salute and responded “Salve”. His greeting was Romansh, an ancient derivative of Latin used by only a handful of Swiss, yet still one of their four official languages. It was a moment straight out of another millennium.

I regularly hike up a mountain trail behind our house.  Three hikes out of five I will find a man there, sitting alone on a mountainside bench. He is my age and from the Middle East, either an immigrant or an asylum seeker. He sits and smokes and gazes with sad eyes over the broad Lake Geneva valley. We nod and smile at each other as I pass by, but we have never conversed: he speaks neither English nor French nor German. Still, he has become a fixture on the mountain. I miss seeing him when I find the bench empty.

Just today I was hiking alone in high mountain pastures when a storm boiled in. It began to rain hard as I made for the shelter of a stone cattle barn. I sat there under the eaves as a wicked thunderstorm rolled through. It was glorious.

Then out of nowhere three Swiss farmers appeared. We greeted each other. They began to prepare the barn to milk cattle. One of the farmers wore a baseball hat that featured a Canadian maple leaf and the silhouette of a bull. I pointed to the hat and said, with some pride, “Vive le Canada!” He responded with a smile and perfect English, “Yes! Canada! That’s where I get all my bull semen from”.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

 

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The Dump – 26/03/2018

Each week here in Switzerland, we go down the road to the local Déchetterie (dump) to dispose of our week’s garbage. The “sorting of the garbage” ritual is more than just a weekly chore. It is a window unto the Swiss soul.

To begin, it makes practical Swiss sense to dedicate as little space as possible to landfill in a country with so little arable land. The Swiss can’t just truck their garbage to Michigan, like so many other places do. So instead they enlist their citizenry to gather weekly at each town’s pre-determined site to sort things down to the last wrapper. This level of practicality and precision is very Swiss.

Just how precise? Taxonomically speaking, the family garbage is divided into glass, paper, metal, plastic, compost. This is pretty standard for any progressive city. But in Switzerland there is further subdivision of the garbage right down to sub-species. Plastic is sorted into clear plastic, wrapper plastic, colored bottle plastic, and green plastic. Glass is similarly separated into bins designated by color. Any container with a metal cap must have it removed, with the cap sorted into yet another container. The strict separation of paper products borders on OCD.

For the privilege of doing this hauling and sorting ourselves, citizens in our town pay a 55% municipal tax rate, considered one of the most attractively low in the country. And while it is not strictly mandatory to go to the Déchette, it is nonetheless highly incentivized. The alternative curbside pickup requires the use of garbage bags specially stamped with the name of our town. A roll of 20 stamped garbage bags costs $30. It doesn’t take a math genius to deduce that it is far more affordable to join the Déchetterie ritual.

And the ritual is surprisingly community-building. The Déchetterie is only open for 5 hours a week (2 hours Tuesday afternoon, 3 hours Saturday afternoon), also very Swiss. So there is a very good chance of meeting some or all of our neighbors there. There is a sense of pride is doing our civic duty, and witnessing everyone else doing the same. Friendly greetings are exchanged over armloads of tin cans. Discretion is widely practiced in the face of vast volumes of empty liquor bottles coming from neighbor’s cars. There are understanding nods as each empty bottle is meticulously recycled according to its color.

The town retirees are drawn to the Déchetterie for its social aspects. They mill about as gossips and gatekeepers, helpfully instructing newcomers on the finer points of acid vs. lithium battery separation. And they invariably have bottles of wine on the go, even the paid municipal worker who is theoretically in charge. The other week, with the mountains framing her in the background, we saw a lady in a full fur coat sipping champagne from a fluted glass near the compost bins. To add to the ambience, the local militia unit was taking rifle practice at the range just behind the Déchetterie, their gunfire adding a finishing Swiss touch to this caricaturish Swiss scene.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Image Credit to Montreal Gazette]

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The Christmas Concert – 18/12/2017

It officially became the best Christmas concert of all time when they broke out the bongo drums and booze.

My daughter’s school choir sang this morning in an ancient stone church in the next village. As I walked there I greeted some French-Swiss construction workers who, true to form, were leaning on their shovels and smoking. The German-Swiss street crews work. The French-Swiss crews smoke.

The concert was hosted by the local International Women’s Guild.  The only thing international about the Guild is the use of the word “International” in the title. These women are all English. Like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. Like the Queen mum and her Corgies. The aging flower of Britannia.

The audience sang along with Silent Night, While Shepherds Watched their Flocks, What Child is This, and other old-fashioned-hey-nonny-nonny English Christmas classics. The songs were interspersed with readings by proper British authors like Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens. There was even an inexplicable Beatrix Potter poem about an Ostrich pulling the Christmas sleigh. How did these people once hold dominion over a quarter of the world?

Then things got “International”.

First, the choir made the mistake of projecting the words to a French carol. The Guild ladies sang along, but only out of duty and with nowhere near the gusto of the other carols. There were sideways glances and knowing nods exchanged, lest anyone be perceived by their Guild-sisters as being unpatriotic or worse, a Francophile.

Then came the Hanukkah song. This was received by the stunned assembly like the sting of a boxer’s jab. It was followed by the bruising right hook of the Kwanza song. The choir director had to explain to the baffled crowd what Kwanza was. One of the boys in the choir produced a bongo drum.

Then all hell broke loose. The bongos wailed, the choir sang, and the director, with her ample backside to the crowd, began to shake her caboose in time with the music in a most un-British manner. The Guild matrons swooned.

Decorum was restored by the taking up of a collection for some suitably obscure British charity involving animals. Then the crowd filed into the back of the church for biscuits and mulled wine. Even the kids were given mulled wine. It was 10:30 in the morning.

As I walked back to the car I passed the construction workers once more, their cigarette butts piled high from a long, unproductive morning. Each of them was by now also holding a steaming cup of mulled wine, a gift given by the passing Guild ladies returning to their cars.

I love Christmas. God bless us everyone, no exceptions.

 

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier. Note there will be no posts for the next two weeks on account of the holidays. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year to everyone! More to follow in January, 2018.]