I almost sent that message to someone in Eagan in response to a notice I got today for a meeting that will take place during our planned trip to Disneyland in Paris. I stopped myself, though, and settled for "sorry--out of town." As I considered my potential response, it struck me as a bit snooty to casually toss off a line like that, don't you think?
We're still new enough here that we're not really used to the idea of just running off to Germany or France for lunch or taking a train to spend the afternoon in Zurich or Geneva. It's a pretty casual thing to the Swiss, of course, or to the Thomson folks who have been here for a while. Still, I thought an answer like that might come across the wrong way in Minnesota. I know there are lots of people who would give just about anything to have the experience that we're having, and we kind of stumbled into it.
I'm always aware that we're here basically because of a series of unforeseeable events that just happened to result in my being in the right place at the right time. It's not like they scoured Thomson for just the right person to send to Switzerland; it's more like my VP was meeting with his directors one afternoon, he asked if anyone wanted to move to Switzerland, no one else said anything, I tentatively stuck my hand up, and that was that. Boom. I'm in Switzerland. What could be easier? Most people aren't that fortunate.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this post has much of a point other than to say that I try not to lose sight of the fact that we're lucky to have an experience that would be great for everyone to have but that isn't available to most people. So I try not to send snotty messages back to Eagan about being in Paris for a couple of days even though it's really cool that I'm going to be in Paris for a couple of days.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cheese of the week: Gouda
This week's cheese is probably a familiar one. Most people are familiar with Gouda cheese. In my view, it'll do in a pinch, but I've decided that I like a really good hard cheese, one that sort of scrapes along my taste buds as it goes through. (In that vein, next week's cheese will be a Swiss Hartkäse, which is, of course, "hard cheese.")
To me, Gouda is similar to the American version of Swiss cheese (the one with holes) but without the zing and without the texture I like. It would be good on a sampler plate with other cheeses, but it's a little bland for my tastes. Stace, of course, loves bland things (except for her men, whom she prefers to be spicy and full of personality, which should be obvious to anyone who has seen me at a party).
Thankfully, it doesn't have anywhere near the offensive smell of last week's cheese; in fact, it doesn't have much of a smell at all. So, overall, I'd call this an inoffensive and pleasant cheese, but not real exciting.
To me, Gouda is similar to the American version of Swiss cheese (the one with holes) but without the zing and without the texture I like. It would be good on a sampler plate with other cheeses, but it's a little bland for my tastes. Stace, of course, loves bland things (except for her men, whom she prefers to be spicy and full of personality, which should be obvious to anyone who has seen me at a party).
Thankfully, it doesn't have anywhere near the offensive smell of last week's cheese; in fact, it doesn't have much of a smell at all. So, overall, I'd call this an inoffensive and pleasant cheese, but not real exciting.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Multilingual birthday
We went to a birthday party on Saturday for a woman we know. She has one of the greatest names ever: Lucy Russi. (They rhyme.) She's from Peru and her husband is Swiss, so she speaks Swiss German with a Spanish accent. They also invited some friends from France, so the nationalities represented at the birthday party were Switzerland, Peru, the United States, and France. We sang Happy Birthday to her in German, Spanish, English, and Italian. (No one at the party was from Italy or the Italian part of Switzerland, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.)
Day in Lucerne
On Friday, Stace and I spent part of the day in Lucerne ("Luzern" to the Swiss). It's about a twenty-minute train ride from here, and it's one of the more popular cities to visit in Switzerland. We've driven through as we've gone to church and visited people there, but we hadn't ever taken the time to just look around the "old city" (Altstadt in German). (Explanation: Most Swiss cities consist of a modern city surrounding the old "town square" section. Zug has a small old town, but Lucerne's is much bigger.)
We had a very good lunch. I have yet to experience a bad Swiss restaurant. (I also have yet to experience an inexpensive Swiss restaurant, which may explain why they're all so good.) I had a spicy pork sausage with Swiss hash browns, which the Swiss call Rösti. That, of course, was my version of heaven. Stace had a really good salad, which the Swiss call, unremarkably, Salat.
We also went to see a famous giant lion sculpture that was carved into the side of a rock in memory of Swiss soldiers who fell in some battle. Unfortunately, the lion was covered in scaffolding while they were cleaning it, so we didn't bother to grab any pictures. We'll be back, I'm sure.
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I'll attach a couple of other pictures from Lucerne's "old city." There's an unfortunate story about the bridge you'll see in one of the pictures. It's about seven hundred years old, and it was decorated with a bunch of paintings a few hundred years ago. In 1993, a boat was tied up to the bridge. It started on fire and burned most of the bridge. The Swiss were heartbroken. They rebuilt the bridge. Both ends are from the original bridge, but the part in the middle is reconstructed. The tower you can see in the picture was used variously as a dungeon and record storage place. As far as I can tell now, it serves as a storage area for the gift shop in the middle of the bridge.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
New feature
One of my favorite things to do in Switzerland is to walk into a grocery store, find the cheese section, and grab a slab of some type of cheese I've never heard of before. That's my idea of heaven. Is it yours, too? Anyway, I've decided to provide reviews of the various cheeses I sample.
This week's entry: Entlebucher Schwingerkäse. Facts about this cheese according to the web: It originates in the Entlebucher canton of Switzerland near Emmenthal. The cheesemaker named this one after a quite obscure local form of wrestling he enjoys, so this could be also known as "wrestlers cheese."
Ethan's review: Mixed feelings. The taste is pretty good. The unfortunate part is that before you get to that pretty-good taste, you have to get past the horrific smell and texture. Think about a truckload of sweaty socks crammed into a damp locker room, mix in some extra BO, and you've got a rough idea of how this cheese smells. To make it worse, it has a moist, sticky texture that clings to your hands. After I eat a slice of this cheese, I wash my hands very thoroughly with lots of soap to get rid of the smell and the feel of it. But, as I said, it tastes pretty good. Not my favorite overall, but a good choice if you have a sinus infection and can't smell anything.
This week's entry: Entlebucher Schwingerkäse. Facts about this cheese according to the web: It originates in the Entlebucher canton of Switzerland near Emmenthal. The cheesemaker named this one after a quite obscure local form of wrestling he enjoys, so this could be also known as "wrestlers cheese."
Ethan's review: Mixed feelings. The taste is pretty good. The unfortunate part is that before you get to that pretty-good taste, you have to get past the horrific smell and texture. Think about a truckload of sweaty socks crammed into a damp locker room, mix in some extra BO, and you've got a rough idea of how this cheese smells. To make it worse, it has a moist, sticky texture that clings to your hands. After I eat a slice of this cheese, I wash my hands very thoroughly with lots of soap to get rid of the smell and the feel of it. But, as I said, it tastes pretty good. Not my favorite overall, but a good choice if you have a sinus infection and can't smell anything.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Pictures
I was browsing through some of our pictures (yes, we do actually take pictures sometimes), and I found a couple of good ones. The first one is a shot from our balcony. The second is a shot from the top of Mt. Rigi, a mountain not too far outside of Zug. You can see a village and a lake below and then the Alps in the distance.
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