More Swiss quirks

Here are a couple of random Swiss oddities I've thought of lately.

First, phone numbers: If you're calling us from within Switzerland, our Swiss phone number is 041 710 73 47. Two problems occur when an American tries to give a phone number to a Swiss person. The first is that the Swiss, and all German speakers, say two-digit numbers backward, e.g., rather than saying, "Ethan is 28 years old," they would say, "Ethan is eight and twenty years old." That fact alone is very hard for Americans to deal with. To make it worse, they think of each section of a phone number as its own number; they don't think of it as a string of digits, and they get very confused if you try to give them just a string of digits.

So, if I were giving my phone number to an American, I'd say, "Zero four one, seven one zero, seven three four seven." However, in German, I have to say it as, "Zero one and forty, seven hundred ten, three and seventy, seven and forty." At that point, I've usually mangled it so badly that the Swiss person will just hand me a piece of paper and a pen and ask me to write it down.

Second, time of day (I think I've covered this one before): You never see anything that says "5:00 p.m." Instead, you see it written as "17.00." However, when they talk, they'll still tell you to come over at 5 that evening.

Third, dates: To a European, today is 24.01.2009, not 1/24/2009. It goes day, month, year. That causes trouble sometimes. My Swiss train pass says that my birthday is July 6 because the clerk at the train station didn't know how to read the date on my Minnesota driver's license.

Fourth, hot water: Electricity is half as expensive between the hours of 22.00 and 6.00 (otherwise known as 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.) To that end, our water heater, which is electric, only heats the water after 10 at night. This means that if we run out of hot water at 4 in the afternoon, we're done until 10:00. I was really annoyed by this until I got our first electric bill and saw how much money we were saving by running our water heater only at night. We've pretty much learned to adapt, although it sometimes means that Tanner ends up taking a short shower on Saturday night.

Last, proof that it does snow here: Yes, as you can see from the picture, it snows, but it melts. There's no snow on the ground right now at our apartment, although there's snow not much higher than us. The lowest temperature we've experienced at night this winter has been 16 degrees (that's above zero, Minnesotans). The longer we're away from Minnesota, the harder it's going to be to go back.