Monday, August 23, 2004

23 August 2004

The furniture saga continues. Apparently, when you buy a bed, you have to buy the bed slats separately. These things never occured to me as being separate items that people would get at different times or in different combinations. Bed slats are bed slats. So I ordered my bedframe, and it was delivered, and I put it together, and it looks quite nice except for the fact thatit is entirely useless when it comes to supporting a mattress, since there are no bed slats, and my mattress is not of the levitating variety. You would think that the ordering site would either say quite prominently, "This bed won't work as a bed unless you buy more things with it," or give a helpful link to "Things you will definitely need in order to make this bed functional." I suppose they do it that way so that if you already have some bed slats lying around, you don't have to end up with an extra set. Except that I don't know anyone who has random bed slats, since THEY COME WITH THE BED. Also, they were quite pointed in telling me that the mattress and sheets didn't come with the bed. Yes, I realize that, and I'm pretty sure the model sitting on the bed in the pictures is not included, either. I just want a large, elevated, flat surface to hold my mattress off of the ground. Is that so hard to get?

The Swiss like things to be a certain way, and that way is clean. In fact, the German word for "clean" is used colloquially to mean "good" in Switzerland. How far does this go? Some examples:

1) A friend killed a cockroach on my terrace, and threw it over the side. When he left the building, he saw the cockroach in the street, and picked it up and moved it into the gutter, because it didn't belong in the street.

2) Three roommates that I know have a cleaner kitchen than most Americans I know. At the end of a meal, they are incapable of leaving the dishes overnight, or even worse, letting them accumulate until the sink is full. Dishes can only be dirty while they are in use.

3) Another friend vacuumed his bedroom at 5 in the morning, because he simply could not sleep, knowing that the room was dirty. How dirty, you might ask, it must have been pretty bad. There were small dust bunnies that had come from a down comforter and feather pillows, but the thought of them was just so disturbing that he couldn't rest until they were gone.

You should see the ice cream ads here. Perhaps to provide some form of release from the rigors of everyday rules and regulations concerning propriety, the Swiss have the most sexually charged ice cream ads you have ever seen. They're not on the same level as Playboy or Penthouse, but I think they would fit into Maxim pretty well. Girls seductively eating popsicles, guys holding out large ice cream cones, just out of reach of their girlfriends, girls sharing ice cream with each other. Strangely, though, this hyper-sexualization seems to go almost exclusively with ice cream ads, and not with other products. Salami and bratwurst are sold with serious pictures of mountain men and cows, but ice cream is all about getting laid.

It is entirely possible to get locked in your apartment here. The locks work with keys on both sides, rather than a key on one side and a knob on the other. If you are prone to losing track of your keys, you can find yourself stuck inside until you find them. The outer doors of the buildings are the same way, such that, if someone has locked the front door, I have to go fishing through my bag to let myself out, and the keys by the time I get downstairs have somehow managed to get under everything else.

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