Did you know that they don’t eat jello in Switzerland? I just found this out yesterday, and for some reason it was a big surprise. It was just such an important childhood food that it seems strange to imagine a childhood devoid of jello. I am not sure what they have that could fill the role that jello plays in childhood desserts. Certainly not the black licorice-flavored hard bread. Probably not the dry, crumbly caramels. The hot chestnut stands wouldn’t fill the gap, and neither would the heavy cream poured over scratchy meringues. I’m at a loss.
Slowly but surely, but mostly slowly, the technological revolution is coming to Switzerland. The Swiss have discovered the iPod, and just as it was in New York five years ago, so it is here. People on the cutting edge impress people with their iPodness, and proudly sport the white headphones, which are not such a ubiquitous sight here. My decision to disguise my iPod by wearing black headphones was met with disbelief, as it is a badge of honor here, and not a sign of consumer conformity. How funny, iPods are still the rare status symbol they once were across the Atlantic!
The Internet is working to connect the world into one, happy, emailing family. Switzerland is joining the spamfest, as well. My friend said that he got his first email account when he was taking a computer class in school. They told the students all about the Internet and email, and then had them all learn more about it by signing up, in class, for a Hotmail account. That’s right, their teachers signed them up for a lifetime of spam about Cialis and barely legal teens. I guess their school didn’t have a server.
Telephone deregulation. Not a trend here at all, unfortunately. The phone plans for both cell phones and landlines charge the kind of prices you would expect if you were living in a remote village in Tanzania, and you were trying to call your friend in New Guinea. To overcome this problem, I use Vonage, a U.S.-based Internet phone service that gives me a New York number, unlimited incoming minutes, unlimited minutes to the U.S. and Canada, and cheaper rates than my Swiss numbers, for about $25 a month. By comparison, you can pay about $40 a month here to get 100 minutes of phone calls. Understandably, my Swiss peers are rather incredulous when they find out how cheap phone plans are outside of Switzerland.
Anyways, I’m trying to get ready for my upcoming dive trip to Belize. I went to a local dive shop over the weekend to get a part replaced on my scuba gear, and noticing that the shop was fairly empty, I asked if it would be possible for them to replace it while I waited, so that I wouldn’t have to make another trip to pick it up. When I had called the dive shop owner earlier in the week, he had intimated that this was possible, since it was just a quick job. On Saturday, however, I was given a rather long-winded explanation that because Saturdays are so busy, their policy is to only do while-you-wait repairs on weekdays. I pointed out that they weren’t busy at all on this particular Saturday, and that the repair in question was a fast one. The girl said she would check and see, but that she wasn’t sure if it was possible. In the end, she spent ten minutes finding out if it was possible to fix it that day, ten minutes looking for the right part, and about two minutes having it fixed. They seemed dead-set on having me come on a weekday, on the principle that they don't like to do same-day repairs on weekends, but finally relented when I told them that their shop closes before I can make it over from work. But really, if she had just looked around and noticed that I was one of two customers in a shop manned by three people, the two-minute repair wouldn’t have taken quite so long.
It’s been a long time since I’ve driven a car, but I’m pretty sure that if I got back behind the wheel, I would be able to manage OK, since automatic cars are… automatic. Apparently, however, they aren’t so automatic. Here, almost everyone drives stick, and automatic is very foreign and unnatural. My friend, who has been driving for seven years, had never driven an automatic until recently, and his dad took him out, learner’s permit-style, to show him the ropes and make sure he could figure out the complexities of driving an automatic car. That seems somehow backwards to me, to have to learn how to drive an automatic car if you already know how to drive stick. The reverse makes sense, having to learn stick if you’re used to automatic, but I thought that the whole point of automatic was that it was automatic, and didn’t require much learning.
Also, I watched Swiss Music Star (like American Idol) for the first time last night. Whoa. Nothing like watching untalented people wearing ridiculous clothes singing songs that they don’t understand (most sang in English, with varying degrees of comprehension).
Slowly but surely, but mostly slowly, the technological revolution is coming to Switzerland. The Swiss have discovered the iPod, and just as it was in New York five years ago, so it is here. People on the cutting edge impress people with their iPodness, and proudly sport the white headphones, which are not such a ubiquitous sight here. My decision to disguise my iPod by wearing black headphones was met with disbelief, as it is a badge of honor here, and not a sign of consumer conformity. How funny, iPods are still the rare status symbol they once were across the Atlantic!
The Internet is working to connect the world into one, happy, emailing family. Switzerland is joining the spamfest, as well. My friend said that he got his first email account when he was taking a computer class in school. They told the students all about the Internet and email, and then had them all learn more about it by signing up, in class, for a Hotmail account. That’s right, their teachers signed them up for a lifetime of spam about Cialis and barely legal teens. I guess their school didn’t have a server.
Telephone deregulation. Not a trend here at all, unfortunately. The phone plans for both cell phones and landlines charge the kind of prices you would expect if you were living in a remote village in Tanzania, and you were trying to call your friend in New Guinea. To overcome this problem, I use Vonage, a U.S.-based Internet phone service that gives me a New York number, unlimited incoming minutes, unlimited minutes to the U.S. and Canada, and cheaper rates than my Swiss numbers, for about $25 a month. By comparison, you can pay about $40 a month here to get 100 minutes of phone calls. Understandably, my Swiss peers are rather incredulous when they find out how cheap phone plans are outside of Switzerland.
Anyways, I’m trying to get ready for my upcoming dive trip to Belize. I went to a local dive shop over the weekend to get a part replaced on my scuba gear, and noticing that the shop was fairly empty, I asked if it would be possible for them to replace it while I waited, so that I wouldn’t have to make another trip to pick it up. When I had called the dive shop owner earlier in the week, he had intimated that this was possible, since it was just a quick job. On Saturday, however, I was given a rather long-winded explanation that because Saturdays are so busy, their policy is to only do while-you-wait repairs on weekdays. I pointed out that they weren’t busy at all on this particular Saturday, and that the repair in question was a fast one. The girl said she would check and see, but that she wasn’t sure if it was possible. In the end, she spent ten minutes finding out if it was possible to fix it that day, ten minutes looking for the right part, and about two minutes having it fixed. They seemed dead-set on having me come on a weekday, on the principle that they don't like to do same-day repairs on weekends, but finally relented when I told them that their shop closes before I can make it over from work. But really, if she had just looked around and noticed that I was one of two customers in a shop manned by three people, the two-minute repair wouldn’t have taken quite so long.
It’s been a long time since I’ve driven a car, but I’m pretty sure that if I got back behind the wheel, I would be able to manage OK, since automatic cars are… automatic. Apparently, however, they aren’t so automatic. Here, almost everyone drives stick, and automatic is very foreign and unnatural. My friend, who has been driving for seven years, had never driven an automatic until recently, and his dad took him out, learner’s permit-style, to show him the ropes and make sure he could figure out the complexities of driving an automatic car. That seems somehow backwards to me, to have to learn how to drive an automatic car if you already know how to drive stick. The reverse makes sense, having to learn stick if you’re used to automatic, but I thought that the whole point of automatic was that it was automatic, and didn’t require much learning.
Also, I watched Swiss Music Star (like American Idol) for the first time last night. Whoa. Nothing like watching untalented people wearing ridiculous clothes singing songs that they don’t understand (most sang in English, with varying degrees of comprehension).
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