Tuesday, June 14, 2005

14 June 2005

Zurich is eternally under construction. You will never see a pothole or a crack in the pavement, because they rip up their roads and sidewalks and redo them before any potholes or cracks can form. They do this with the tramlines, as well, tearing up and replacing the tracks before they show any wear and tear. Why have two workers fixing something for a day when you can have eight workers replacing it for two weeks? It’s good for unemployment, and it also makes everything look shiny and new all the time! Every workday, there are packs of construction workers jack-hammering pavement, removing debris, mixing concrete, laying down asphalt, and doing whatever else they do in their impossibly clean and blindingly fluorescent orange pants and shirts. (I have never seen such orange pants, and I’ve never seen construction workers in such clean clothes).

The Swiss (and Swiss construction workers and contractors) get up way too early for their (my) own good. When I lived in New York, my next-door neighbor was having work done, so for several weeks I was rudely awakened at 9 o’clock every morning by the hammering and scraping of the contractors. If only workers here started at 9 o’clock, since I am out of the apartment by 8:40 every day. No, here in Switzerland, if there is work being done in my building, it starts at 7 o’clock, just to make sure that I can enjoy an hour or so of jarring noise before I get out of bed. I suppose I could get up at that time, as well, but as a matter of principle, I refuse to be vertical before 8 o’clock, unless (as has happened several times so far), I have a delivery or workman coming over at 7 o’clock, in which case I am sure they are quite stunned that I stumble to the door in my PJs and then shoo them out as quickly as possible so that I can crawl back into bed.

As long as I’m on the subject of workmen and apartments, I’ve had a rather strange little ongoing story. My building is very old, since it is in the historic district of Zurich, and so it needs some work from time to time to fix leaks and cracks and so on. Since I moved in, my landlord has had to enter my apartment about four or five times, sometimes with a workman, to check on the roof, fix a leak, do some painting, or whatnot. He does this when I am at work. A while back, when he was checking the roof, he decided that my roof terrace was overgrown, and had a gardener come in to weed, prune, trim, and sweep. A few weeks ago, he let a painter in to paint the corner of my living room, and when I came home after work, the bathroom had been cleaned -- the sink, counter, and toilet were scrubbed so that they looked factory-fresh, even though the apartment visit had nothing to do with the bathroom. Sort of odd, but, hey, free bathroom cleaning. Last week, he had to check for leaks or cracks that might explain a problem with the apartment downstairs. When I came home, the hallway and stairs had been vacuumed.

It’s like I have little apartment-cleaning fairies that come in and clean one thing each time. I wonder if he comes in, decides it’s messy, and cleans it himself, or if the workman does it, or if he calls in a cleaning person. And why clean at all, or why clean only one thing? It weirds me out thinking about it, these little mini-cleaning projects that take place each time the landlord comes by. I hate cleaning, and it’s nice to have some of it taken care of sometimes, but this is just too creepy, even for me. Now I don’t know whether to let things get messy before he comes over, to take advantage of the Cleaning Fairy, or if I should clean up beforehand, to avoid the weirdness.

Despite being in an old building, my apartment (thankfully) has a dishwasher, and the washer and dryer are right outside my front door. I grew up using dishwashers and clothes dryers, and it has always seemed unthinkably inconvenient not to have them, but it is quite commonplace here to wash all dishes by hand and to hang your laundry out to dry. In fact, I have met Swiss people my age who have never used a dishwasher or clothes dryer (in fact, one of them, despite never having used a dryer, categorically said that they were not to be trusted. On the other hand, he was also mistrustful of foreigners, women with opinions, and lawyers, so as a foreign, opinionated, female, dishwasher- and dryer-using lawyer, I must have seemed especially shady.)

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