Here we are

Whew! We're back. Our flight out of Atlanta was delayed by three hours, but Stace and Tanner got upgraded to business class, so things turned out fine. Tanner was in heaven. Lindsey and I had fun hanging out in the cattle pen we call "economy" (also known by its other name, "hell").

One little story that made me laugh at the differences between the Swiss and the Americans: After we got home yesterday, I went to the post office to pick up our mail, which had been on hold. In the U.S., they'll hold your mail for free, and they gather it up and hand it to you in a big pile whenever you get around to dropping by the post office to pick it up. (In Switzerland, of course, they charge you a fee to hold your mail.)

I had told them that I'd pick up the mail on the 20th, but since I had time, I figured I'd just swing by a day early and get it. Bad idea. I went up to the window with my forms, and the woman went to look for my mail. She came back a minute later and told me that I was a day early and that I'd have to come back the next day, the scheduled day, to pick up my mail. My first reaction was a flash of annoyance because I thought she was just being ultra-Swiss, but as I thought about it, I wondered if there was more to the story.

Sure enough, there was. I went to the window today to pick up my held mail, and it was all ready for me. It had been tied in a neat little bundle with two strings, horizontally and vertically. Each piece of mail had been stamped with a notation about the day I was coming back from vacation and the day I would be there to pick up my mail. So, to the credit of the Swiss, it wasn't that they were trying to arbitrarily enforce a rule (although they're certainly capable of that); it was just that they had a very orderly system for handling the mail and I needed to work within the system.