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So the cost of a home in Switzerland is insane. To rent a two to three bedroom apartment alone costs about $4,000 a month. Which is why, when we moved back, we bought a fixer-upper. Also, for some crazy reason, we actually enjoy home improvement. Although with each home we improve we like it a […]
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A few years ago, Frank found this gem of a shirt, complete with the Easy Rider detail: He loves wearing it to work. I think it has a particularly stunning affect on his co-workers here in Europe. Since he found this great wardrobe staple, he’s been on the lookout for more button-down shirts with similarly […]
A couple of weeks ago, when Frank’s brother and his family were here, we went out to dinner at a place that is styled as an “American Diner”. In addition to serving hamburgers–which may be healthier than most available in America because they are made with hormone-free Swiss meat–they have a shop which sells various corn-syrup rich products imported from America. After dinner, my daughter picked out a box of Nerds candies as her special treat. We also picked up some Laughy Taffy. Both seemed harmless enough to me–after all, I ate them both as a kid.
Sometimes in the evenings after dinner, we let our daughter have some a small amount of candy before brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. Usually it is some German gummy candy or Swiss chocolate. But lately I’ve noticed she has been suddenly, unusually and uncontrollably hyper after this treat, and I’ve realized that this unusual hyperactivity only happens when she eats her special “American candy.”
This year, my daughter’s Easter basket included a special treat–imported Jelly Belly jelly beans, which the Easter Bunny surreptitiously managed to pick up at that “American”-styled diner. Because these candies are apparently also imported into the European Union (Switzerland is not part of the EU), they must comply with European Union labeling requirements. Our box of Jelly Bellys has this labeling in German, French, and Dutch. Because my German is much better than either French or Dutch, I’ll share with you the information on the box which prompted me to do more research:
“Farbstoffe (E100, E102 [Tartrazine], E110, E129, E132, E133, E150d, E171) . . . E102, E110, E129: Koennen Aktivitaet und Aufmerksamkeit bei Kindern beeintraechtigen.”
In English: “coloring agents (E100, E102 [FD&C yellow 5][Tartrazine], E110 [Sunset Yellow FCF (Orange Yellow S, FD&C Yellow 6)], E129 [Allura Red AC (FD&C Red 40)], E132, E133, E150d, E171) . . . E102 [FD&C yellow 5][Tartrazine], E110 [Sunset Yellow FCF (Orange Yellow S, FD&C Yellow 6)], E129 [Allura Red AC (FD&C Red 40)]: Can affect the activity and attention/concentration of children.”
The European Union is currently re-evaluating the safety of all food coloring agents, and other food additives, and each must undergo a testing and approval process. However, the EU has determined that it would be too burdensome to test the affects of multiple coloring agents when combined, so it is possible that there will be affects not noted by the government agencies. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has called for the FDA to ban Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Orange B and Red 3 because of their association with hyperactivity and behavioral problems in children.
In the future, I’ll be more aware of this issue and monitor the candy my daughter eats more carefully.
We are in between visits. Frank’s brother and his family were here last week from Germany, and this morning my mom arrives from the Good Old US of A. The flight between Hamburg, Germany, and Zurich is about an hour and we can drive there from here in 8-10 hours, so that means we tend to see Frank’s family more often than we see my family in America. We get to America about once a year if we are lucky. This is probably the worst part about living abroad–how far away my family is and how difficult visiting can be. It’s expensive to fly our whole family there (more expensive than an all-inclusive vacation!), and it’s expensive for my family to come here. Not to mention the fact that Americans just don’t have enough vacation days to spend much more than a week over here, making it not worth the expense.
So anyway, it is all very exciting to see family we don’t see often. My daughter is thrilled, as is, I think, her American Grandma.
But the second most exciting this about these visits is the things these Auslanders can bring to us in our little economic island of Switzerland. I’ve mentioned before how expensive things are here. Switzerland has a fairly protected economy, meaning that cheaper, non-Swiss products are not widely imported. This means not only is the price of things high (so that Swiss wages can support the cost of living here), but the range of products is more limited than in, for instance, Germany and the rest of Europe, and much, much more limited than in America. Switzerland is not a part of the European Union, and is generally much more conservative than the rest of Europe. What this means for us is that when we have visitors from Germany or the US, we do a lot if research online comparing prices of things, taking into account current exchange rates between the US dollar, the Euro and the Swiss Franc, and making lists of things we can’t get here or things that are insanely cheaper (like clothes in America).
After living abroad for six years, I’ve learned how to substitute most American products with things available here. (This is a big issue with cooking, although it also means I luckily also have ready access to some great quality ingredients like mascarpone and vanilla beans–and Swiss dairy products really are unparallelled.) So I’ve made my orders from Old Navy and will have some new clothes soon :). And a supply of the one ingredient it still makes some sense to bring from America:
Baking soda. I’ve found it here at Christmas-time when all the baking products are out, but it comes in expensive little packets that can’t beat a $1 box of Arm and Hammer, especially if I want to use it for non-baking applications like cleaning (being the good Hausfrau that I am). And since the Christmas baking season has ended, I haven’t seen it at all.
So, yes, it is very exciting to have visitors!
I love this. It’s just so easy to think that other people live better, have it easier, etc., because they are younger or older or more successful or single or have a family, or live in Switzerland! Or because they don’t live in Switzerland! Ha! That’s a joke.
No matter where I live, it always takes 1-2 years until I feel like I actually live in a place. By then, I’ve gotten family doctors, dentists (okay, still haven’t gotten a dentist here), know where to shop, have a circle of friends, feel like part of a community. But the thing is, no matter where you live, this all takes work. My husband thinks of it as part of my job, which is good, because it is. How do you meet people when you move to a different country?
When we first moved to Switzerland six years ago, I was seven months pregnant and already huge. I had taken some German in high school, but here, where they speak Swiss German, it felt hopeless to even try to understand what people were saying. The rules of the road are slightly different, and with my giant belly, it was very hard for me to drive. And to be honest, it scared me. So being home, pregnant, or with a new baby, was incredibly isolating. The Swiss are very reserved people, and it is hard to really get to know them–it takes a lot of time. So I had to really force myself to get out and find friends. It is a job. I started going to an English-speaking playgroup (with a new baby, this was clearly more for me than for my daughter), and I am still friends with some of the people I met there, even after moving to Dubai for two years.
When I moved to Dubai, I was determined not to be stuck at home. We had inherited a massive Nissan Armada from a colleague of Frank’s, and I took it out exploring right away. A few days after we arrived, I went to a function for the spouses of the employees at Frank’s company, and the other women were shocked that I was “already driving”. This sounds funny if you have never driven in Dubai, but it is very much like driving in India. Which I guess also doesn’t mean anything if you’ve never driven in India. Suffice it to say, you need to be very assertive and try to predict the crazy things other drivers might do at any moment. Like STOP (completely) on the freeway when they have missed an exit and then BACK-UP. On the freeway. So they can catch that exit they missed. Ah, Dubai. I do miss it sometimes.
And I joined a book club. For me, this has been the absolute best way to meet interesting, intelligent people and to better understand the perspectives of other cultures. When I moved to Dubai, this is one of the first things I did. I met some really wonderful, tolerant, supportive women from all over the world. I didn’t particularly enjoy reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, but the conversation that books like that and Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries sparked between women from places like the US, India, Canada, Iraq, Sweden, Jordan, the UAE and Turkey was fascinating. Some of those women had experienced war. Many covered their hair whenever they were in public. Some felt that divorce is never an option. It is hard work to sit and listen to those perspectives and try to understand them. And to share your own in a way that might help other people understand where you are coming from. I am not always good at it, but I can feel myself learning. The way it stretches me, the way I need to force myself to stop and take a deep breath and just listen. Now that I am back in Switzerland, I’m back in my old book club, which is also a wonderfully international group of amazing women. One of my friends from that club is a neighbor of mine in the tiny village where we moved. I feel so grateful, so blessed.
Another one of my friends from that book club is constantly amazing us with stories of all the things she is always doing with her Swiss neighbors. As I said, the Swiss are very reserved and they are wary of foreigners. It can take years to get to know them. Which is why, when she was relating her last activity with the Swiss ladies in her village, I asked her how long she had been there. I thought she’d say ten years or something– how else could she have gotten to know her Swiss neighbors so well? A few years, she said. Amazed, I asked how she did it. She said when they bought their house, she knew they would be the only foreigners in her new village. So she wrote a little note introducing her family and put one in everyone’s mailbox. She followed-up, and did the work to get to know them. That was a great lesson for me.
So yes, the grass is greener here. The cows love it.
Sometimes it’s just all mixed up. I just shared with my five-year-old daughter a photo my dad emailed me, when she asked, “Is Grandpa going to come one time in our house?” I shared that with him and he remarked on the German syntax. He speaks some German too, since we lived in Germany when I was small. It’s funny, I don’t always notice it because I am usually so focused on deriving her meaning, but yes, it is definitely structured like the German. She will also stick a German word into an English sentence and use English grammar, like “Well, my friend bads (bathes) every night.” This is something my German husband is also guilty of, although for him it is usually a joke, and I have to chide him for doing it and making things even more confusing for our daughter.
The other day, I heard my daughter saying to her friend (who is English but goes to Swiss kindergarten in our village with my daughter), “But that knows jeder!” That one really made me smile. In German, jeder means “everyone,” and “That knows everyone” is a perfectly normal sentence construction in German. Frank and I get it but I think it must be confusing to people that only speak one of her languages. A few weeks ago, the girls had been preparing for a school parade where they were dressed as pirates and the English girl’s mother had wondered exactly what they meant when they told her about their shirts with the “dead heads” on them. That’s because the German word for skull, der Totenkopf, translates literally to “dead head.” You have to give these kids credit for figuring out these translations all the time, even if they sometimes come up with a funny one.
Even I have forgotten what is the most natural way to say some things in English since I am not around native speakers much, and almost never around Americans. (I know all of 3 Americans here, but I see only one of them with any regularity.) Even in Dubai, where English is the prominant language, I was often around non-native speakers, so it’s been six years since I’ve lived among native English speakers. I was in a fabric store the other day and I said to the lady across from me, “Wissen Sie–darf ich selber schneiden?” (Do you know, can I cut it myself?) She looked at me for a second and then said, in an American accent, “Yeah, if they’re not around you can just cut it yourself.” How funny to accidentally be speaking to an American in German, and to have been understood and then responded to–in American English. I was really taken aback. I think living where we do now, in a smaller village, I have gotten used to only speaking German when I am out.
But we all do it, mix up the languages. English-speaking expats get together and have conversations in English peppered with German or Swiss German because it’s just easier, and sometimes it makes more sense. It just makes sense to refer to the train station as the Bahnhof, and the kids’ morning snack as ‘znueni because that is what they are. When we relate a conversation we’ve had in German it is also like that. It just doesn’t have the same meaning when you translate everything into English. Verrueckt just works better than “crazy” sometimes. We also have conversations where we sit around trying to remember the English word for something–it’s like a game to see who can find it first. Like a meeting of my book club at a restaurant where we were all trying to come up with the word venison. Non-native speakers are always asking us for the English words for things and sometimes it’s only the German word that will come.
Well, however stupid it makes me feel sometimes when I can’t find an English word or construct an English sentence in a more natural way, I was comforted by this recent New York Times article on the benefits to the brain of bilingualism. It’s like exercise for my Hausfrau brain.
St. Joseph, image from the Kloster Einsiedeln website
The abbreviation for Switzerland is CH, which stands for the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica, meaning the Swiss Confederacy, as Switzerland is a federal country composed of 26 Cantons, much like the U.S. is a federal country composed of 50 states. The Cantons vary quite a bit, linguistically, culturally and geographically. In Switzerland, French, German, Italian, and Romansch are all spoken, depending on where you are. Some Cantons are Protestant (notably, Canton Zurich), while others are Catholic. This variability is explained in part because Switzerland was formed by smaller culturally distinct regions coming together, and by the mountainous Alpine geography that makes up most of Switzerland, which made travel from one part to another in earlier times difficult.
We live in Canton Schwyz, a Catholic, German-speaking Canton. Here, religious holidays are often also government holidays. My daughter’s school events often take place in our village’s Catholic church. For instance, before Christmas we all had to go to the Advent Mass (Adventsdienst), where the children sang Christmas songs. Now that it is Lent, I’m sure we’ll be called back to the church to hear the children sing Easter songs. For being in such a tiny village, the church is quite ornate–I’ll post some pictures in future posts. The neighboring (and larger) village of Einsiedeln also has a Catholic Abbey, called the Kloster Einsiedeln. I’ll post about this in the future, too, as it is a pretty amazing place.
Kloster Einsiedeln, image from myswitzerland.com
This lengthy introduction is all background for explaining that, as you might know if you’re a good Catholic, today is St. Joseph’s Day, celebrating St. Joseph, the spouse of the Virgin Mary.
Reading the Wikipedia page on St. Joseph just now reminded me of how, when I put my house in the U.S. up for sale to move here to Switzerland, my grandmother mailed me a small plastic St. Joseph, which she told me to bury upside-down in the yard to help the house sell more quickly. I carefully followed her instructions, but sadly, it did not help. When the house still hadn’t sold after being up for sale for five years, I ultimately let the bank have the house–along with the upside-down St. Joseph in the backyard.
Anyway, living in a Catholic Canton as we do, today is also an official holiday, meaning my kid is home from school and I’m trying to come up with something to do today to get us out of the house. It also means that nothing’s open today, and I really should have bought more milk on Saturday. You’ve really gotta plan these things in Switzerland.
Since I can’t get vanilla extract in Switzerland, I’ve been making my own, and I thought I’d share the recipe. Put some vanilla beans in a jar you can seal. Immerse them in bourbon (I use Jack Daniels since we tend to have that on hand) and soak for about two months. That’s it. Super easy. And the flavor is wonderful. You can periodically add more bourbon and new vanilla beans over time to replenish your supply.
I’m not sure what the reputation of Aldi is like in America these days. Fifteen years ago (that makes me feel old), I depended on Aldi to get me through law school and still eat. I love it for helping me to do that. I always found their produce to be of good quality, and affordable for a broke law student. The company is actually German, and in Germany, it does have a reputation of carrying good quality, inexpensive items. It took some time, but these days, the general opinion there is that you’d be stupid not to shop there. Aldi is new to Switzerland though, having only entered the market a couple of years ago.
When we first moved to Switzerland almost six years ago, there were basically only two largish (by Swiss standards) grocery stores, Coop and Migros, usually 1/4 to 1/3 the size (if that) of any grocery store in the U.S. While Migros is a little less expensive than Coop, I was blown away by how expensive everything was at both. I would go to the grocery store with a recipe in hand, planning to make something, and when I saw how much the ingredients were, I would give up. I just couldn’t justify spending $5 on a can of [whatever]. I’d leave without buying the things I had specifically come for. Kind of demoralizing, actually.
Add to that the opening hours (or lack thereof), and shopping in Switzerland is downright inconvenient. Most places close around six every day, nothing is open on Sunday, and some still close for a “Mittagspause” at lunch time. You usually have to pay for parking and you need to have a 2 Franc coin with you to put in the grocery cart. (If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi in the US, you know about this–you have to do that at every store here.) You also have to bring your own grocery bags or buy them at the store. I sense that is becoming more common in the US too.
Enter Aldi–where you can buy food that is reasonably priced, you don’t have to pay for parking, AND they are open until 8 p.m. during the week. (Of course they still close at 6 on Saturday and are closed on Sunday.) These small conveniences dramatically improved the convenience level of shopping here. There is a new Aldi just a 15 minute drive from us. Wow. And now the village just across the lake from our house has a Lidl, another German store similar to Aldi, which is also open until 8 p.m. every week night. My quality of life has seriously improved.
These places send out flyers every week of the upcoming specials, which is also very exciting. Exciting enough for the Hausfrau to brew a cup of tea or coffee, take a little break and peruse the latest offers. Exciting stuff. I know I must really be making you want to move to Switzerland.
Anyway, today Aldi had vacuum cleaners on offer. My husband was very concerned that I get to Aldi before it opened at 8 a.m. so I could get one. This is how it is sometimes. Think day-after-Thanksgiving shopping in America. Well, I didn’t get there until 8:15, and as I was putting my coin into my grocery cart I noticed the other women (men don’t do the shopping–unless they are retirees accompanying their Hausfraus) sizing me up, thinking they better get in there before me, in case I was after the same product. You can let out your breath–I was successful. And now as I write this, I am in possession of a brand new vacuum cleaner.* AND two new toilet seats. Score.
*I know my German husband is just as excited about the USE of this vacuum cleaner, so I will have to at least take it out of the box today. And when do I use it, I can happily remind myself that I am saving us $30 for every hour I clean, since that is what a cleaning lady costs here. Which, by the way, is the same hourly rate I made working as a lawyer on a contract basis for my former American law firm. I mean, I guess I’d rather be lawyering than cleaning, but still . . .
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Here she is, our lovely Gracie, who will be eight months old next week. She looks to be very helpfully shoveling snow in this photo, but she just really likes chewing on the shovel. Sometimes it really is like having another child. And this morning I’ve been consumed with a dilemma about her the same […]
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