28 July 2004

How easily one gets used to changes in lifestyle. I work 9 to 6, with an hour lunch break, five days a week. It’s sunny and 75 degrees, the windows are open, and I’m in the office with my dog sitting on my lap. After work, I’ll take the tram and buy some bread at the bakery, walk home, and then sit on my terrace and listen to music. The church bells will chime every quarter-hour. It will get dark by about 10, and then I’ll study some German and get ready for bed. And it feels like this is the way life has always been and always will be, even though it’s so different from how it was before.

Speaking of church bells, there are a ton of them, and they mark the time every 15 minutes, 24/7, and at certain times they ring for several minutes straight (7 am every morning, and several times a day for Mass). It makes no sense to me that the Swiss can get so upset by the noise made by neighbors showering or flushing their toilets after 10 pm, but really loud church bells are perfectly OK at 4 in the morning. And at 4:15. And 4:30. 4:45. You get the point. Fellow Holdenites: Jim Marvin would be in heaven, with all of the bells ringing all of the time.

Exciting plans for the week include: buying household essentials, like oven mitts, paper towels, and screwdrivers; going to a coworker's apartment for dinner; watching Kill Bill Vol. 1 at an open air cinema by the lake; German lessons; IKEA; and my humble little shindig...

Went with a Swiss friend to an open-air bar last night that is a Jewish swimming pool during the day, and a grill/bar at night. So by day it is an all-male pool for the Jewish community, and by night it is a co-ed haven for eating pork sausages and drinking beer, which seems an odd combination to me, but if it works.... If you ask to see their menu, they say that there is none. Just sausage and salad.

There are a lot of strange combinations here, actually. There are two large umbrella corporations, Migros and Coop, that do and sell everything: you can go there for a bank account, for your groceries, for electronics, for language classes, to exercise, and so on. It reminds me of Japanese mega-corporations like Asahi and Sapporo. Incidentally, one of the most popular ways to keep your money is in an account with the post office.

People get up *really early* here. The standard Swiss working day is 7:30 to 5:00, with an hour lunch break. I had to get a leaky faucet fixed, and the plumber showed up at 7:30 on the dot. When do these people wake up?? I guess when the bells start going crazy at 7 in the morning.

Non-Swiss news: my nephew can *walk* and say “Uh-oh,” “Mama,” and “Baba,” (which refers both to his dad and to the phone, because my sister always says, “Let’s call Papa,” while holding the phone up); my friend Jeannette Louh is starting at Columbia Business School this fall; and my friend Denise Mak is starting at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris this fall. Change is in the air all over the world...