So the Olympics started over the weekend, and I was watching the opening ceremony, and the Swiss commentator was making the usual inane chatter about the different teams as they walked into the arean, "This team has 57 athletes here this year," "This team is really strong in cycling," "Here come the defending champions for volleyball." Then the team from Singapore walked in, and the Swiss commentator said, "Here is the team from Singapore. Singapore is even cleaner than Switzerland." No joke, that is really what he said.
I ordered furniture from IKEA the other week -- a bedframe, a couch, some end tables, and a kitchen table and chairs. The same day, my landlord offered to show me some things that I could borrow. Being completely furniture deprived, I said yes to almost everything he offered, and it was only upon returning with the goods to my apartment that I realized that in addition to the three end tables I ordered from IKEA, I also borrowed another 6 small tables from my landlord. Who needs chairs and television when you have a lifetime supply of small tables?
IKEA delivers. In Switzerland, IKEA delivers whenever they decide to deliver. You get a letter in the mail and a voicemail in Swiss German saying the date that they will drop the things off, and a time frame, and you'd better be home when the stuff comes. It's sort of like cable in the U.S. Apparently, they also have a tendency to forget some items, or to only deliver parts of items, so I had a coworker call them to make sure that they were delivering a bedframe, a couch, three end tables, and a kitchen table and chairs. The person on the phone said he couldn't verify what was being delivered, but he could tell her that it weighed 160 kilograms. For all I know, I could get a delivery of 160 kilograms of toilet seat covers. In any case, I went onto the IKEA website to look at how much their stuff weighs, and the things I ordered should weigh, in total, 110 kilograms. So either they don't know how to weigh things, or I'm getting an extra 50 kg of furniture and household items for free!
Got my DSL set up, so my Vonage phone now works again, so I spent half the weekend on the phone, since I don't have to worry about long-distance rates anymore. The crazy thing is that it's also cheaper for me to call Switzerland, now that I have my old phone up and running again. How can it be cheaper for me to call Swiss lines from what is supposedly an American line, than to call Swiss lines from my Swiss numbers?
Because it's so expensive to make phone calls here (some cell phone plans charge about 80 cents a minute for local calls), everyone does SMS, instead. In New York, you walk around, and everyone has a headset or a cell phone attached to their ears. Here, everyone walks around looking down at the cell phones in their hands, where they are madly typing and sending text messages. It's quieter, but it's also hard to walk, when everyone is looking at their cell phone screen. I don't think I'm coordinated enough.
Another laundry mystery: the laundry machines here are really small and very slow. You put in two sheets and two pillowcases, and the machine is stuffed full. The shortest wash cycle is 46 minutes, and some options go for over 2 hours. I ask you, if you lived in a building that only gave you 2 days a month to do laundry, and those days were almost always during the week, and the loads are tiny and the cycles long, and you had to finish by 9 pm on your days, would you have enough clean clothes? Thankfully, I can do laundry whenever I want, unlike in most buildings, but I don't see how I would get by, otherwise...
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