Flying the nest

I guess I am a little susceptible to the occasional fit of nostalgia, but a fun game I have been playing with friends recently is to ask where they were at the beginning of this decade, compared to now at the end. I love hearing about all the changes a decade can make!

My answer: In 2009 I was one year out from my Tufts degree, still living in Boston and complaining about how dull it was, woefully underpaid while working two jobs in the midst of the great recession of our lifetimes, and flailing with all the existential what will I do with my life type questions that a 23 year old is prone to.

The night after booking a spontaneous Thanksgiving trip to Europe with five of my good Bostonite friends at the time, I met a Swiss guy out at a bar who told me he would be home over Thanksgiving too. We stayed in a string of the cheapest hostels we could find in Munich, Fussen, and Zurich, and due to my ability to pronounce street names in a way that locals could occasionally understand, was voted by my pals the trip member most likely to actually learn German someday (this still makes me laugh, although they probably have no recollection!) I met up with this Swiss guy in Zurich and ate real Swiss fondue and Luxemburgli for the first time (pre-smart phone days, we just set a place to meet weeks beforehand!) Little did I know that that this would only be the beginning of a long string of coincidences that would lead to a lifetime of Swiss fondue eating. (I know said Swiss man still reads here so hopefully he doesn’t mind this trip down memory lane :P) But I GUARANTEE you 23 year old me would have laughed at any proposal of actually LIVING in this place someday. Maybe Spain or somewhere a little wilder, I would have said. It wasn’t until years later, the first time I saw the Matterhorn, that I let myself finally throw myself into the idea of this whole Swiss life.

New Years 2009 was spent in a casino in I believe New Jersey, but that is a whole other story. LOL.

Anyway, I hope you will forgive two nostalgic posts in a row but man the end of a decade will do that to you. I capped off a year of big changes with my very first Christmas spent outside of the US and indeed away from my family and it was very enjoyable but also…foreign? Like so many things, your expectations around the holidays are like being a fish swimming in water. You don’t notice it until it’s not there.

The big day for the Swiss is actually the 24th, Christmas Eve. It is technically a half day from work, so most people go in and then have a big dinner with family in the evening. This is also the day that all the presents are opened (there are no stockings, something I have already told Benno we will definitely be incorporating into our mixed culture Christmas). Benno’s family gathers (his parents + two brothers + Benno and me) and always eats a very traditional meal of meat fondue, otherwise known as Fondue Chinoise. Then after dinner gifts are opened, but this is nothing compared to what I am used to in the US. Maybe you get one or two small things like chocolate. Only children really get GIFTS in the American sense. Benno’s family is super wonderful and welcoming but it was certainly different than the wild chaos of the Christmas traditions I grew up with. I missed my family, but was also so excited to be starting my own Christmas traditions with Benno. Ah, these conflicting feelings of adult life.

Christmas Day itself seems relegated mostly to sleeping in and sofa chilling, from what I can see. Benno and I decided instead to head to the mountains for a couple days for skiing, which was AMAZING. The first day we enjoyed a lovely day with almost no one on the pistes, fresh powder, and a delicious meal in about the most old school Swiss restaurants I have ever been in. The entire town of Andermatt is like a time capsule and I can highly recommend it for a weekend getaway that is a bit more off the beaten path, something that will likely change soon with all the new investments. Benno complimented the chef after privately telling me that his meal was classically done in probably the same way that it had been done for a century, and sure enough the waiter responded that the chef had been cooking the same dishes at the restaurant for over thirty years. The second day we were surprised by five of Benno’s (and mine, I guess I can say that at this point) friends who had happened to also book a ski day in Andermatt. We had a wonderful time.

I really need to write another post about my early attempts at assimilation into our new small town Swiss culture because it has been very interesting. For now all I will say is that one is much more closely…surveilled…than I am used to in a smaller community, a fact that surprises Benno not at all but is totally new to me.  I don’t mean that in a negative way, but I am used to that city life where if you disappeared for months no one would notice unless blood started seeping from under your door or something, so friendly conversation about how they noticed my running habits is a little alarming off the bat. Everyone has been pretty friendly if utterly unused to foreigners like me and I am enjoying my turn as a cultural anthropologist, for the most part.

Until the next sporadic interval that I update this blog, many many good wishes for the new year and I hope the holidays have been everything your heart desires!

A small thought about time

It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve been living in Switzerland for over five years now. A friend today happened to remind me of my final weekend in NYC those five years and some months ago. Some friends showed up around 10pm with bagels and lox and told me I wasn’t going to go to sleep tonight. Seven hours later, after various adventures all over lower Manhattan, we staged an exuberant return with dancing heels in hand, ready for those bagels. However, an unfortunate wrench was thrown into our plans when I discovered that my keys must have fallen out of my purse on some dance floor or the other. Luckily my friend’s boyfriend felt up to a challenge, and saved the day by shimmying up a drainpipe and breaking into my apartment with frightening ease. Putting this out of my mind, we tripped up to the roof with our bagels, ready for me to watch the sun rise over the NYC skyline one final time as a resident. We did a few too many jumping photos and woke up my upstairs neighbor, who gave us a thorough scolding. Below is a little photo medley my friend Dre made of the moment, as I seem to not have any of my own photos from this time period anymore.

I wonder if the 28 year old giggling while being scolded by the neighbor would even recognize the person I am now, sitting in a home of my own (!) in the Swiss countryside, just under a squat clock tower and next to a forest and one of the largest castles I have ever seen. My new neighbors include some friendly sheep with gently tinkling bells. Every day I cycle off to work, where I teach to students who call me “Dr. Farnham,” even when I tell them not to, and learn about pesticides in Uganda and parasites in Siberia and mining in Mozambique and migrants in Costa Rica.

There are truly so many lives we live in a lifetime. I say all this not because one life is inherently better or worse than the other, but because it is awe-inspiring how much capacity we have for change, for growth, for always finding a room where the sun is shining. And because sometimes I think it is worth remembering, pausing in the thick of the now, and remembering our past selves.

 

2018 in the books (plus other musings)

In what has become a mini-tradition for me, I’ve been thinking about my 2018 reading life and decided that while I may be reading fewer books these years than when I lived in the US, the enjoyment I get out of the books I do read seems to have increased. It was more difficult than usual to choose my favorites of the 28.5 books I read in 2018, but here are a few.

If 2017 was the year of discovering Irish literature, 2018 was definitely about improving my knowledge about African literature. Clearly this is destined to be a multiyear quest, but I still loved a lot of the books that I started with.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. This is about as dark as it gets (as one senses when the word apartheid is on the dust cover), but probably the most haunting tale I read all year. review of Disgrace

The U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos. This guy was a contemporary of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and won huge accolades in his own lifetime but seems strangely unknown today. I would say this is a valiant and possibly winning attempt at the Great American Novel. My review of book 1, the 42nd Parallel, Book 2, 1919, (review of book 3 to come).

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. If you are a fantasy fan like me, it has probably been far too long since you’ve encountered something truly original. review of Library at Mount Char

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson. Likely my favorite non-fiction pick of the year, I really appreciated re-seeing historical events through a economist lens. my review of Why Nations Fail.  Honorary mention here to Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo as an accompaniment piece that looks specifically at the economics of aid to Africa over the last 50 years.

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. I kind of think everyone should read this book about the Congo. King Leopold’s Ghost

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. I loved this philosophical science fiction pick so much. The Dispossessed

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Don’t miss this super fascinating Chinese science fiction pick that starts in the Cultural Revolution and ends with an alien invasion! The Three-Body Problem

To be honest, I could keep going (I also discovered Gore Vidal this year who is by far my favorite American historical fiction writer ever and I read some other books that I rated 5 stars), but if I’m saying the best of the best I think the above are it.

That concludes the book review portion of this blog entry, but this year I feel strangely philosophical about other parts of the New Year’s, as well. When I think about what I will remember from this year, it is likely the horrible blood infection I had way back in February that put me out of work for a month and out of energy for probably closer to 3-4 months. I’ve never been quite that ill before and I hope it is a long time until I am that ill again. I won’t say that this happens every time, but sometimes these last months I’ve been on a run or a hike or a whatever and felt a random burst of joy at feeling this energy again. I hope that I can hold onto this gratefulness.

The second thing I think I will remember from this year is how consistently challenged I felt at work, and how many times I felt as if I had no idea what I was doing as multiple pairs of eyes were trained on me for “expertise.” Don’t get me wrong- I have slowly realized that I do have expertise, it is just different than how I imagined it when I was on the other side of the table. I read something very interesting recently that I try to remember when these moments come (luckily less frequently now!), which is that if you have never experienced imposter syndrome, you are probably not pushing yourself enough in your career. I certainly had some failures in “leading” this last year, but I finished the year on a strong note. What really gave me a confidence boost, interestingly enough, was when my supervisor had to be out of the country for several weeks in a row, leaving me to lead a complicated bunch of personalities into synthesizing a hugely complex fieldwork plan across 4 countries. In some ways being left on my own at the helm so to speak gave me confidence and space in which to develop my own rapport with group members, and they in return developed more respect for what I can contribute.

Even if I was challenged and (the dreaded word) stressed often at work this year, I think I will always remember it as an important growing year in my life. I’m not going to lie, at times during the beginning of the year I thought longingly about how much easier my life would be in a job with less managing and coordinating responsibility, of returning to a world where I was mostly responsibly for my own deliverables. But in the end, I feel a real sense of accomplishment in who I am professionally on January 2, 2019 vs. January 2, 2018.

I wouldn’t mind if the rest of my “growing” happens at a slower rate, however.

There were so many other, wonderful things this year. My first trip to the continent of Africa with a few weeks in Tanzania, so much skiing even into April in Switzerland and Austria, a birthday trip to Europapark where I possibly filled up an entire year’s quota of laughter, a stay on a Swiss French farm, eating crickets in Mexico City and ceviche on a hidden beach in the Mayan Riviera, also getting shaken down by the police in Mexico City lol, an adventure trip to the U.S.A. with a rotating crew of favorite characters, an Easter trip to Malta, paragliding over the Bernese Alps, another multiday trek this time in Scotland, weekend trips to Italy, London, and Germany, and some epic hut hike weekends with favorite people and visitors. Oh, and my first fasnacht, which will be the topic of a future blogpost.

I just played a fun game and clicked randomly on the .jpg numbers of pictures I have from the last year- I call it iPhone Photo 2018 Roulette 😉 Can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store!

A weekend in the life: part 2

A long time ago I wrote a post detailing what an average everyday weekend in my life looked like as a PhD. I look back with fondness on that post because the shape of my life has changed a lot in the interim- the people, the work, my home. So I thought I would write a post about another ordinary weekend in my postdoc life- another little entry into the time capsule.

Friday, December 14

6:00AM Benno’s alarm clock goes off and he springs out of bed merrily like the morning person he is. I take a little while longer but am awake drinking coffee and checking email by 6:30AM.

7:32AM I catch the train to Basel and enjoy a cappuccino while preparing for my first meeting. I arrive at the office by 8:40AM or so.

9:00AM The annual review meeting for one of the PhDs I help supervise. This lasts for around 1.5 hours and I still find it a bit strange to be on the other side of the table during these meetings. I make mental notes on what I would do differently next time in such a meeting- coming up with good feedback at these meetings is more difficult than I anticipated.

11AM Briefly meet with my supervisor to discuss urgent issues. The whole group is together only 1 more week before the PhD students from Africa go back to their respective countries, so progress is getting urgent. The goal for the next week is to completely finalize the fieldwork plan for 2019, along with the data collection tools.

12:30PM Eat lunch with some colleagues. Discussion is mostly about which countries have the best food, a favorite topic of mine. Continue working after lunch until around 4PM, when we have organized a celebratory apero for one of the PhD colleagues turning 40. However, the surprise is foiled when we find out that she has spontaneously decided to travel. We reschedule for Monday and decide to have some drinks together anyway. Apero drinks conversation are centered around the differences between military service in Burkina Faso and Switzerland.

6:00PM I catch the train from Basel back to Zurich. The plan is to join two of my good girlfriends in Zurich for a catch up chat. Because of the time delay getting from Basel to Zurich, I join them only for dessert and drinks, arriving around 7:30PM. After some much needed girl talk, I head back to Baden and arrive home around 11:30PM. I relax on the sofa with Benno a bit while chatting about our days- it was his holiday party that night so it was fun to hear the gossip. In a weird turn of events, we both fall asleep without realizing it on the sofa, and wake up 3 hours later. However, I only realized we had both fallen asleep when I looked at my phone while brushing my teeth and realized it was 3AM! Twilight zone.

Saturday, 15 December

9AM Slowly roll out of bed. Benno and I agree that the apartment is in dire need of a deep clean. I start on the job while he goes off to prepare brunch for us, our usual weekend tradition. He buys fresh bread, cheese, and salami, and then comes back and fries a couple eggs for us while I start on the cleaning. We enjoy also the new jam and honey that Benno’s parents gave us last weekend.

11AM Time to take a cleaning break to watch downhill skiing, our usual winter ritual. This week it is in Südtirol, otherwise known as the Dolomites area in northern Italy where German and Italian are spoken interchangeably. Swiss favorite Marc Gisin has a terrible fall, but other than that sad event the Swiss have a good showing and we are happy.

3PM I finish up cleaning and go for a nice 11KM jog.

7PM It is my friend’s birthday party. Benno has to work on a brochure for an event for his shooting club, so I pick up some flowers and wine and head to my friend’s house in Zurich. Good times and good laughs are had- I got to see a lot of friends that I haven’t seen for a while. Enjoy a long conversation about the #metoo movement in Switzerland vs. the rest of the world. Many conversations as well about the ups and downs of our postdoc and PhD lives and research in general. We make sandwiches out of cheese and Spanish ham and drink lots of red wine. Eventually I head back home around 12:30AM.

Sunday, 16 December

10AM I roll out of bed to a welcome sight- a full blanket of snow on the ground. Unfortunately I have no time to dawdle this morning because we have a brunch to get to in Zurich.

11AM Brunch at Hiltl, a popular vegetarian restaurant in Zurich, with Benno and four other friends. A long conversation ensues about the different cultural emphases on humility vs confidence and the relative importance of politeness in the US, India, Switzerland, and Germany.

2PM Most friends head home, but my friend Heidi who is visiting from Munich decides somewhat spontaneously to come back to Baden with us and spend the night. She takes a quick nap while I do some Christmas shopping at the Baden Christmas markets that are specially open on a Sunday today.

4PM Following a long discussed plan, Heidi and I watch the Sound of Music while Benno prepares dinner and dessert. The Sound of Music is a movie that Austrians/Germans/Swiss are vaguely aware of, but have not really seen. This movie is basically my only childhood exposure to Alps culture aside from the book Heidi, and I was very curious how accurate it is to my later experience actually living in these areas. I actually found that the movie surprisingly lived up to my childhood memories! And is not entirely inaccurate to how Alps culture really is. Except for that line in the “My favorite things” song that talks about schnitzel with noodles. Who eats schnitzel with noodles?!? We laughed in fact about how frequently schnitzel in general is discussed during the movie but agree that that is also accurate to life. We also groan a bit about how sexist the movie is in parts. We get teary eyed when they start singing the Edelweiss song. Benno is reluctant to join in to the viewing wholeheartedly but enjoys the Nazi chase scene.

7PM We eat a delicious homemade fondue prepared by Benno, and a slice of Nusstorte after a long digestive pause. All is incredible and we agree again that Benno can feed us any time.

10:30PM Early bed time to prepare for another intensive Monday on all our parts.

So that is it! A “typical weekend” around the house, a mix of catching up with friends and relaxing. Also a good mix of jumping between Basel/Zurich/Baden, which is unfortunately also a big part of my life these days. I know the Swiss train system very well these days!

 

 

The wacky world of Swiss Christmas traditions

Today is December 6! Which means very little in the part of the world I come from but a great deal indeed to Swiss children. See, it’s the closest they get to Santa Claus- today, a man named Samichlaus and his evil assistant Schmutzli comes to visit. In Benno’s hometown and all over Switzerland, a whole crew of volunteer Samichlaus/Schmutzlis from the community go from door to door, visiting the children and rewarding them if they are good (Samichlaus) and threatening to take them off to the woods in their sack if they were bad this year (Schmutzli). I have inside information that occasionally a cheat sheet on naughtiness vs niceness for the S & S duo is left on the door.

I just google imaged Schmutzli und Samichlaus (above) and seriously. I think I’ll have nightmares tonight about that guy carrying me off in his sack and I’m 32 years old. I’ve asked various adult Swiss about this and they admit to being terrified as a youth but still somehow continue to inflict this on future generations of children. I’m sure there is lots to unpack about the Swiss psyche there. The other St. Nicholas Day must-have are these Grättima:

Which are actually pretty good but creep me out when I imagine them being handed out by Schmutzli. I think that’s not really how it goes but they have become irretrievably linked in my mind (could they be the symbolic children from the wood?? Some of them look suspiciously like they are screaming).

I was reading a bit about the origins of Schmutzli as this tradition seems both strange and vaguely racist (um, blackface). Interestingly enough, it seems to derive from pre-Christian pagan festivals that occurred around the same time of year and seemed to involve driving out demons that would abduct children. The Christians tried to Catholicize these rituals by tossing the bishop figure St. Nicholas into the mix. source

The weirdness does not end there, however. Those of you thinking ahead may be wondering who is coming on Christmas if Samichlaus already did his parading and house visiting on Dec. 6. The answer is a character called the Christkind. Which literally translates to Christ child. Aha, you may be thinking, that makes sense, it’s the original religious meaning of the holiday. But in fact, this is what the “Christkind” looks like:

Yes, that is a girl. No, no Swiss person has been able to satisfactorily explain this to me. This is the creature that allegedly brings all the gifts at Christmas time, although it is considered very bad form I guess to try to see her. By the way, my google image search for the above brought to my attention that Christkind costumes seem to be very popular…now trying to figure out when one would wear one of these:

I have actually only really unpacked this in its entirety as of this weekend, as I was selling sausages as part of the Samichlaus celebration party in St. Urban, which of course comes after the Samichlaus parade with all the village children carrying lanterns and looking generally adorable. Anyway, it involved a lot of Samichlaus/Schmutzli exposure and I realized that, as usual, I had no idea what was going on.

Why I was selling sausages is another story entirely. Upcoming blogpost.

I write from a cool (!) Baden, where I am working from home on the first day under 30c for the past month. It has been an interesting summer thus far for many reasons- I’ve logged possibly the most swimming time ever (there was also no rain in that time period in my parts of Switzerland) and on the negative side had some really unproductive afternoons of melting in my office chair while Basel hit 35C. Yesterday, as it finally began cooling down, the high was only 31C and it felt practically arctic. I needed a blanket to hang out on the balcony at 22C, so unused to cold temps am I now.

The poor fish seem to be enjoying the heatwave rather less than me: fish refugees. As parts of the Rhein river reach 27.5C, they have begun actually relocating the fish. I don’t know why I am so fascinated by this.

Enough of this boring weather talk. I also went to Tanzania! It was a combination of an intense work period (Dar es Salaam & Bagamoyo) and a supremely enjoyable vacation that was desperately needed. I finished the 4 days of meetings in Dar es Salaam with lots of interesting impressions and also completely overwhelmed, and unsure why. I did a lot of thinking and realized that in my post-PhD life I have been trying way too hard to be perfect, and not make any mistakes. Such an attitude leads to a defensive way of conducting business, e.g. avoiding situations where one might get caught out as not knowing what to do. The thing is, there is a whole lot I don’t know how to do. I haven’t even been to Africa before and operating in these settings is totally new to me! It’s better to do a whole lot of stuff and have people potentially get mad than to sit back and be passive. This change in attitude sounds small but it has led to a HUGE improvement in my feelings about my work in the past month. And also strangely a huge reduction in stress.

Back to the fun part- vacation! Because of said-overwhelmedness I was a bit of a mess on the vacation, but luckily there was only a minimum of things to do since I had booked a company to do all the safari stuff. They did everything from pick us up at the airport to provide us with all our meals, and this type of kick back and enjoy the scenery type vacation was much appreciated. And my god what scenery!!! I have to put up our photos but seeing animals so up close was more amazing than I ever would have thought as a non-animal person. We went to quite some parks, the most famous of course being the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater, and the feeling of being totally lost in these endless savannahs with just the animals for company was by far my favorite.

Funny story #1

We were camping out in the Serengeti for a couple nights and this wound up being much scarier than expected. I kind of thought we would be “glamping” or something but this was definitely NOT the case. There’s literally no protection or anything and the animals can just walk right through the campsite. The guide told us a few stories about things like the Italian couple who put a watermelon in their tent and then found themselves and their entire tent aloft on the trunk of a water desperate elephant, or the time they woke up and found lions sleeping in the open breakfast area.

Anyway, I’m all primed with these stories when we go to sleep the first night. I fall asleep briefly, but am woken up by what sounds like hoofbeats all around me. OMG, there is a herd of terrifying water buffalo all around!! I even saw one when we were driving up to the campsite, so this is not far off. After 10 minutes of twitching in terror, I roll over and start hissing, “Bennoooooooooo!!!” No dice, this guy is like trying to wake the dead. I try to calm down and tell myself not to be that girl, people camp out in the Serengeti all the time. But 20 minutes later the noises are getting stronger!! The same process repeats. Finally after lying awake frozen in terror for like an hour I mount a really determined effort to awake Benno.

He told me later that at first he was scared, too, but god bless his calm soul he kept his head despite a girlfriend practically reduced to gibberish at this point. He said it was probably the wind. Which it probably was. It totally sounded bizarre, though.

The next night I fell asleep after some deep breath practice and was woken up by what sounded like lions roaring. However, I did some calm self talk and told myself not to bother Benno again with my hysterics. I managed to fall asleep after a minimum of panic.

The next morning at breakfast the first thing the guide asked is if we’d heard all the lions roaring last night!

Funny story #2

I lost my phone on safari. There are two possible pathways to the end result that they definitely ended up with the monkeys. We pulled up to a nice scenic overlook where the guide warned us that there were lots of thieving monkeys. I accidentally left the window on my side open and when we got back the monkeys had made off with all the trail mix buried inside our luggage (seriously, they are sneaky buggers) and possibly also my shiny phone. The other alternative is that I remember in the same area taking a photo with my phone and then putting it down on the roof of the jeep to take a photo with the real camera. Regardless, this area belonged to the monkeys and I am very disappointed I have not received any chimp selfies.

My favorite part of all of this is that my phone was set to play Brahm’s lullaby every morning at 6:30am. I really enjoyed imagining how they handled that.

The not so funny follow up to this story is that I went home, bought a brand new iphone, and made the mistake of trusting a wet bag with it while river floating. My wet bag apparently let in just enough water to destroy the new phone 😦 I am not sure what to do now, as buying ANOTHER new phone just feels completely ridiculous.

OK, more than enough for now, as I am off shortly for an “open air” aka a weekend of camping at a festival like a dirty hippy. Embrace those summer feels, friends!

German is scary & Summer kickoff

I’m a firm believer in the whole “do something that scares you” once a week type mantra, but it seems to inevitably lead to me also being stressed out and annoyed with myself that I am such a terminal signer-upper. All leading me to say…I gave my first talk in German! The event photographer just sent me a few impressions (see below).

It went alright. I have given approximately 4,000 oodles of talks in the course of my academic career so far, and really thought I was over getting nervous, but this turned out to be a new frontier. Honestly, what made me the most nervous was a conversation with one of Benno’s friends at 3am Friday night at the Baden casino (long story, but just know that the World Cup fever deserves its own post), where he made fun of how bad my written German is. It made me realize that I have mostly learned German from speaking on the streets. People understand me just fine, but I make a fair amount of errors. The most egregious is that I ALWAYS get impatient and forget to put the second half of my verb at the end of the sentence, instead putting it with the rest of the verb (WHERE IT RIGHTFULLY BELONGS YOU CRAZY GERMAN SPEAKERS). People can’t always tell I am American from the way I speak, but it is immediately clear I am a foreigner.

Anyway, I ended up looking at my notes a lot more than I usually do during a talk in the hopes of getting those darn verbs in the right place, and lost a little bit of my normal connection with the audience. They still laughed in all the right places, but I was not really satisfied. Next time I think I will just say grammar be damned and speak spontaneously. Multiple people now, including my old boss who asked me to do this, have told me that the mistakes I make are “cute,” which I am not sure how to interpret but at least I am getting the feedback that people are not angry I am butchering their language.

Afterward there was lots of apero schmoozing in German which was somehow also stressful- it’s not like I can just give the talk and go. At least I could inhale a deserved glass of prosecco. When I hit the apartment at night I was suddenly too tired to even eat dinner, and just headed straight to bed.

I have done several other things that scared me this week, including dealing with US TAXES, but for now I will just say that I am in great need of some vacation time and R&R. Luckily it is coming up JUST.IN.TIME. I am so ready for summer, y’all. A quick preview of summer 2018:

• Upcoming (in 2 days!!!) trip to Tanzania for the kick-off of our study in country. I fly out Sunday AM to reunite with our Tanzanian PhD and other partners, and attend the kick-off meeting with some key stakeholders in country. Will be a meeting and experience intense five or so days, I am sure. After that Benno is flying down to Dar es Salaam to meet me and we are heading together on safari in the Serengeti/Ngorogoro Crater/Manyara Park and then for some relaxation on Zanzibar Island.
• July long weekend in Scotland with a good friend to hike the West Highland Way. Can’t wait to get my highlander on and finally do another long(er) hike.
• Heitere Open Air in August. Long weekend outdoor camping festival where all of Benno’s friends go every year. I’m a little scared for this one based on photographs of past festivals.
• Hut hikes with my dad in the Bernese Oberland!

Other than that, I have tried really hard to minimize travel and instead focus on beautiful Switzerland in the summertime. There is no better place.

The Swiss Sense of Humor

The longer I live in Switzerland, the more I start to notice the deeper, more subtle differences in cultural norms in my adopted home. Recent migrators may comment on the funny German, or how clean the streets are, or about how we can’t throw away our recycling on Sundays, but that’s kind of old hat within a couple months. They are surface differences you can get past quickly. The deeper things are harder to write or talk about and sometimes I just avoid them entirely- they are easy to get wrong or to describe without causing offense.

Nevertheless, I want to tackle my thoughts on one of those topics this fine Friday afternoon as I take a break from my literature review. The Swiss sense of humor. How can one describe a sense of humor? Yet it is one of the most fundamental things our culture imparts to us, the more I think about it. Even between cultures with a shared language, like British and American, there are significant differences. Sure, there’s some overlap, but our slapstick sense of physical humor, especially in Hollywood movies, has no parallel across the pond. Mister Bean may make us laugh, but it is still a fundamentally foreign sense of humor for most Americans, in my very generalized experience.

So how do the Swiss differ? It is a little difficult to describe, but I will do my best (remembering always that I see the world through an American lens, and that a population of course varies widely). Firstly, it can be pretty dark. Lots of gallows humor, the kind that Americans keep well hidden away from the workplace, for example. Second, it is very sarcastic in an outward focused way (as opposed to British humor, which I think is often very ironic, but almost always self-directed). This is the part of Swiss humor I find the most difficult to negotiate- such jokes can often feel very confrontational to my ears, and if the recipient “doesn’t get the joke,” I often find myself worrying about offense being taken.

My first encounter with this brand of humor began, really, with my Swiss ex Michel while I was still in the US. I always thought it was particular to him that occasionally I just didn’t get the joke, but I do remember one time in particular that I had an aha moment. His family had come to visit him in NYC and they saw some terrible musical that they all hated. If this were my family, we would have probably laughed a bit about it and let the topic drop, regretting the waste of money. For his family, this became a HUGE laugh and something they talked about even during subsequent get togethers. Seriously, they would sit around fondly talking about how terrible this musical was for ages and getting serious enjoyment out of describing exactly HOW and WHY and WHEN this musical was terrible. The complaining was a bonding experience and great source of hilarity!

Now that I have lived here a while I get it more. The Swiss do not like to boast like perhaps some of my American compatriots could be accused of. They like to complain. They have the number 1 or 2 on time train system in the world, but they are by far number 1 in complaints about timeliness. If you ask them about their holiday more times than not the first thing you will hear about are the bugs or the terrible food that one night. Sometimes I even find myself falling into this pattern, and remembering with amusement my childhood lessons that if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. This could not be more opposite to Swiss values.

I have always secretly somewhat enjoyed dark humor, although I rarely engage in it myself, so I often find myself laughing (with some large, very un-entertained exceptions). The exception, though, is when I have a visitor from the US. We have a different culture and sometimes…jokes just don’t translate properly. And then dark jokes with strangers, in my opinion, are like unexploded land mines. It’s just not worth tripping through the fields at night. Luckily most Swiss reserve their spiciest jokes for their own language, from what I’ve noticed.

Alright, I’m ready to get torn apart by my Swiss readers, but unless you have some decisive contrary points I stand by my words. Warning ahead of time.

P.S. One thing- Chuck Norris jokes are apparently universal 🙂

 

“settling down”

I’ve been kind of puzzled by myself lately. I feel like I’m fighting a constant mild-mannered battle between two selves- the restless person who has moved no less than 13 times in the past 10 years (!!) and the person who is admiring my strawberry plants and spending Saturday mornings buying soil and fertilizer at the local home goods store. In some ways,  I made my decision on the way I want to live my life when I finished my PhD and decided to start genuinely putting down roots in Switzerland. There’s this whole other life I could be living doing field research in Thailand and trotting around Asia on the weekend, but I turned it down and felt nothing but relief. However, that doesn’t seem to stop me from daydreaming about exotic locations, from finally hiking to Mount Everest in Nepal to marveling at the pyramids in Egypt and scaling volcanoes in Borneo.

Is this just a weird in between phase everyone goes through? Or am I doomed to a lifetime of wondering what is going on on the other side of the world? I read an interesting book a while ago, The Fifth Extinction. The book posits that our need to explore is one of the defining characteristics of the human species (and also, coincidentally, what makes us so environmentally destructive). No other animal roams with the sheer scope and whimsy of a human. Birds might migrate long distances but they tend to stay on a defined path, barring changes in climate or natural disaster. We are the only ones with the urge to get into a boat and float off over the horizon. It was just an aside in a book otherwise focused on other things, but it has stuck with me.

The thing is, I am really happy in Switzerland. I love skiing and the Alps and the climate and hiking and my friends and work and my boyfriend, etc. There are things I don’t love, realistically (see recent post), but overall it is a good fit. But I just can’t scratch that itch to experience new places. And I don’t mean necessarily a two week holiday, but really dive deep into a totally new culture, learn the language and feel a little uncomfortable and learn some new stuff about the world. In fact, I’ve been feeling a bit disenchanted with the world of whirlwind weekend trips and superficial traveling of late. I hope to get to a point with my career where I can take prolonged sabbaticals at research institutes in other countries- I think that might be the best way to keep on exploring without losing a home base that I love so much. Meanwhile, I will practice being still(er).

When the honeymoon is over.

This week I got something done that I’ve dreading for quite some time- the much hated Swiss “Grundreinigung.”  See, when you hand over an apartment here, you are expected to leave it clean.  Not “Besenrein” (=broom clean), but CLEAN CLEAN. They give you a checklist that includes removing the faucets and decaulking them, polishing the baseboards, cleaning and replacing the filters and general moving parts, repainting, and just generally scouring between every possible crevice that exists.  They’ve got you, too, because deposits are normally 3x monthly rent, which for me was almost 4,000 CHF, and you sure aren’t getting that back if you leave it Besenrein.  It took me SEVEN HOURS after my subtenant left to get it cleaned, and that’s just for my tiny studio.  Next time I am definitely paying someone to do it.  It costs around 1,000CHF, but man is that a lot of work and time.  Our current much larger apartment gives me literal hives even thinking about doing that level of cleaning.

All this was just the latest stage in my ponderings, though, about the process of moving to a new country.  There is a pretty well established literature about the stages of adjustment to a new culture (see the graphic below.  I don’t know how scientifically rigorous it is, but you see this type of graph everywhere.

There was a honeymoon period for me with Switzerland for sure- everything is great and perfect and heavenly and there’s Alps!- and then a minor dip as I got frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t even navigate minor interactions in German and generally had no idea how to do anything from buying fruit at the grocery store to figuring out health insurance. Then I made friends, I became familiar with the rhythms of Swiss life, I felt like I had things Figured Out in my life in Zurich.

Then I started dating Benno and moved to Baden.  MAN, do I now relate to the whole second dip of “confronting deeper cultural/personal issues.”

In a way, I realized I was living a very specific type of life in Switzerland.  I was learning German, but the bulk of my socializing was being done in English.  It was just a fun hobby, really. Sure, I had lots of local Swiss and international friends, and often met their parents or friends on the weekend, and traveled all over the country, but the people I met living in Zurich and in big cities in general are systematically different from people on the countryside.  They are used to dealing with foreigners, and generally their lives are not such a different shape from my own life in Boston or NYC.

All of this has culminated in a (for me) extremely unexpected sense of culture shock since moving to Baden.  It also coincided with my illness and moving in with Benno and an extremely stressful time at work, so perhaps part of it is that I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with these changes.  The problems I have been having are utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things- run ins that would normally roll off my back.  But I was just so freaking unexpectedly FRUSTRATED ALL OF THE TIME.

A few petty examples- since taking my new job and setting up shop more semi-permanently in Switzerland, I decided I needed to start doing all my medical stuff in the country I live in.  I started with contact lenses.  I attempted to set up an eye test FOUR TIMES- I won’t bore you with the details, but it was a combination of their incompetence and my lack of understanding of the medical system here.  Each time I lost a little work time and patience.  Finally the last time I walk out frustrated and decide that I am going to set up an eye appointment RIGHT NOW come hell or high water.  I had all of one weeks left of contacts anyway.  The first shop I call in Baden had a receptionist that just COULD NOT understand my accent (in my own defense, I regularly navigate much more difficult situations in German, and Benno said I was perfectly understandable.  She just didn’t seem to be able to understand any kind of accent that wasn’t Swiss).  I’m getting more and more frustrated, Benno hears my struggles and comes and grabs the phone and sets up the appointment.  Meanwhile I have embarrassingly dissolved into tears.  It just sucks to sometimes feel like I am a child instead of the full blown competent PhD holding adult that I am. (Note: I was able to have the eye test immediately and the doctor had NO TROUBLES conducting the entire examination in German with me.  It was literally just this receptionist).

Another evening I was really tired from work and the lingering effects of my illness and went out with Benno and another Swiss couple.  It was the first time that Benno had met this friend’s new SO and they all kept switching to Swiss German without realizing it.  This is common in the countryside, especially among older people- they probably haven’t spoken High German since their young schooling.  I still don’t understand a lot of Swiss German, and in particular have troubles with the dialect from Benno’s area, and that night I was too tired to even try to keep up or keep asking to speak high German.  Sure, they could have been more careful to include me, and usually Benno’s friends are, but it’s just hard.  Imagine speaking basically a foreign language without slang 100% of the time with your oldest friends or family.  Naturally you would fall inevitably back into old habits.  They were making a lot of jokes as well, and Swiss humor can be very dark and different from American humor.  I just felt very…foreign.

I could go on, but there have been a whole sequence of these minor frustrations writ large.  Part of the reason I can write about this clearly is that I now see the way forward- clearly I must learn to at least understand Swiss German in order to live the kind of social and independent life I want to live.  Period.  The rest of it will come.

There are some pros to the rose-colored glasses with my new(ish) country being off.  I can still say with certainty all the things that I love- the fact that I still think it probably has the most natural beauty per square inch of anywhere I have ever seen, the efficiency, the generous work-life balance, the general sense of cosmopolitan internationality.  The cappuccinos and cheese.

But like any country, there are negatives.  Efficiency can also translate to rigidity.  Swiss German is a nightmare to learn.  Emotions are more subdued (whether this is a positive or a negative might depend on the foreigner :P).  They make you clean your apartment like a crazy person.  But I still do love this country, and I love my life here.  It’s just starting to take a shape I never expected.

In my positive coping upswing, I have implemented several changes.  Benno and I have labeled items around the house with post-its with their Swiss German name.  I can practice the word for mirror while brushing my teeth (=”Spiegu”).  We’ve also started having two Swiss German dinners a week where I speak High German and he speaks very slow Swiss German to me, and stops to answer all my questions.  It’s really helping!

This entry is an attempt to keep it real with myself and the four people reading this blog about what moving to a new country is really like, or at least what it’s like for me.  I’ve always felt like the best things are worth working for, though, so for me this is all part of a larger satisfying process of integrating into a different culture.

It’s (mostly) not all chocolate and cheese.