Cultural Musings

First, a couple of odds and ends: Tanner made it back safely from Field Week in Verbier, Switzerland. Naturally, he had a great time. He says that his favorite activity was the ropes course. They also did hiking and rock climbing, visited the Red Cross Museum in Geneva, and did lots of other fun things.

Also, I'm giving you fair warning right now that we're planning to send out one of those annoying Christmas letters this year. We manage to bring ourselves to do that every four or five years. I'm going to write the letter, but I'm going to write it as though it's coming from Stace, but I'm going to write it in such a way that anyone who really knows us will know that it's me writing and not Stace. Make sense?

Finally, to the actual point of today's blog. Here are three random examples of cultural differences between the United States and Switzerland:

1) I was at the grocery store yesterday buying myself a croissant. I had just enough time to run in, grab the croissant, pay for it, and make it to my bus. I went to the express lane. Without warning the cashier either decided to or was required to stop everything and count out the cash in her cash drawer, so she kept a line of about eight people waiting for seven or eight minutes while she slowly and carefully counted up each denomination in her drawer. No one got restless. We all just stood patiently and waited. In the U.S., there would have been shots fired. Needless to say, I missed my bus. The customer doesn't always come first in Switzerland.

2) As I was walking through the train station, people were stationed there handing out apples. There was no advertising blitz or anything like that, no strings attached, just people standing there handing out apples. They were really good. That doesn't happen in downtown Minneapolis.

3) (Mormon alert): I had a semiannual church meeting today in Zurich. In the States, we generally have this meeting on a Sunday evening. The Swiss, who love to have their days free, choose have it at 8 a.m. on a Saturday. Some people need to travel an hour or two to get to the meeting, which makes it an awfully early morning for a lot of folks. Truth be told, I generally skip this meeting here in Switzerland (it's in German, after all), but I was roped into singing in a choir this time around. Let me also add that Zurich is the most painful city in the world in which to drive. Yuck. Nothing makes sense. Even the GPS doesn't know its way around. I drove today, but I take the train most of the time.