Another election come and gone. I won’t talk about it, though, except to say that the whole thing was a big disappointment to me, and I hope that people’s priorities will change over the next four years.
A few anecdotes for your amusement. I was waiting for a tram to go to the Halloween party last week, and that particular tram stop also served as a bus stop. When I got to the stop, there was already a guy waiting. Pretty laid-back looking guy with long hair and a guitar. So we waited. After a few minutes, he asked if the bus wasn’t running, or if there was a change in the schedule. It turns out that the bus, at that time of night, was supposed to run every 12 minutes, and he had already been waiting for 13 minutes, and was rather concerned. Imagine looking at a bus timetable in New York, and actually expecting it to have any relevance to the actual buses!!
This is something that never occurred to me but probably should have. I was (as I often am) daydreaming out loud about the foods that I miss, and I said something about turkey and Swiss in some sort of sandwich context, and my friend turns to me and says, “What’s Swiss?” “Swiss cheese” is not a term that is used here (just like “Chinese food” is probably not used in China), and so they also lose phrases such as “when they recovered the corpse, it was so riddled with bullets that it looked like Swiss cheese,” which I think is a great loss. I did get back at him immediately thereafter, however, when he said, “Well, why would you think we would call it Swiss cheese, it’s not like you have something called American cheese.” Ha, yes we do! So, there.
Also, the crazy people here are unlike the crazy people I’m used to. After 9 years of living in Cambridge and New York, I thought that I knew crazy people, and I thought I knew every kind of crazy person – some of them are even my friends. But upon coming here, I realized that there is a whole other kind of crazy person to study – the Swiss crazy person. The Swiss crazy person is almost always male. He rarely smells bad, but if he does smell, it is only of too much beer. He is generally dressed appropriately and acts quite politely, considering the fact that he is completely insane. He doesn’t pick fights, scream obscenities, or molest people in the street. If he asks for money, he will generally walk up to you, and ask you for some change, if it’s OK with you. Sometimes he will show great fascination with his imaginary friend and with stationary objects, such as light posts and trashcans, and will laugh over jokes with the first, and make new friends with the others, skipping merrily the whole time. Sometimes he will serenade his neighbors with great flourishes of the hand and facial contortions, but always in a non-threatening way. Where are the spastic screamers, the belligerent stinkers, and the trench-coated fondlers? And where are the angry panhandlers and twitching junkies? I have no idea. It appears that the Swiss have rules regulating their crazy people, albeit a different set of rules, and the crazy people, being Swiss, stay within those boundaries.
A report on the computer cleaning that took place last week: the computer cleaner was the same person who had cleaned our office telephones a while back, and she showed up with her toolbelt full of tools, as well as a bag about the size of an old-timey doctor’s bag. Using various cloths, brushes, sprays, and scrubbers, she cleaned our monitors and keyboards. My monitor and keyboard took about 8 minutes to clean (yes, I timed her). If you ever feel the urge to clean your keyboard, get some mild sprays, soft clothes, large paintbrushes, and a toothbrush, and you’ll be good to go. Turn the keyboard upside down and beat it to get crumbs out. Wipe the keyboard briskly with cloths and spray, then go over it with the big brush. Finally, get in between each key with the toothbrush and a corner of a cloth soaked in cleaning solution.
And finally, some strange things that are going on. Coming up soon, there is an onion fair in a nearby town. Farmers bring in all of their onions, and there is a street festival celebrating the onion. You can buy onions and delicacies made out of onions, and people take a half-day off of work to go look at the onions. Seriously. And also, posted at many tram stops around Zurich are signs in German that proudly announce that one a certain day, you can reserve a seat, a table, or a whole car on the tram, and they will serve fondue, and you can ride around on the tram eating fondue. Just what I want to do: sit backwards on a lurching tram and eat a pound of melted cheese. I get motion-sick just thinking about it.
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