When we first moved here, several things were immediately novel. These aren’t necessarily things big enough to affect how you live in Switzerland – that would include differences like not owning a car and using trains instead, or shopping daily since our refrigerator is small and freezer is not big enough to hold a bag of my beloved french fries! No, these are little things, plain and simple novelties. For example, life doesn’t change just because you push an overhead light on instead of flicking it on. Now that I think about it, we call the device that you use to turn on a light a “lightswitch” – it isn’t a switch here so what do you call it? Maybe one of our Swiss or German friends can help – do you can the button a “lightbutton” or a “lightpush” or a "lightclicker"...?
Doors deserve mentioning also. I still mutter to myself on occasion “Pull, don’t push…” when I go to push a door and find it needs to be pulled instead. I checked in with another American early on and found she had the same experience... good, it wasn’t just me. There has to be something about the orientation of the handle and the direction the door opens in Switzerland that is opposite to door orientation and functioning in the US. Again, nothing that really affects your life, but you do loose the cool factor with friends when time and time again, you don’t quite have doors figured out. While I am on the subject of doors, most front doors don’t have a handy-dandy knob that you can turn to lock a door from the inside. Instead, you do the very practical thing of locking your door from the inside with your key. Our Swiss friend early on showed us the advantage of this. When you leave your key in the door (Note to Darrell: leave the key in the inside doorknob, not outside!), you know where it is when it is time to go (no more searching for keys) and it is pretty hard to forget your keys since you have to use it to get out of the apartment in the morning (no more frantic calls to your honey that you locked yourself out of the apartment).
Moving on to the bedroom… Flat sheets? Who needs them anyway!!! There are no flat sheets here… one of our Swiss friends said she thinks that was something her grandmother used. Another younger friend just looked at me in surprise when I asked her about flat sheets and pondered why on earth you would need another sheet…. The Swiss solution to an icky blanket touching your night-time skin is a duvet cover – everyone has a duvet cover (in fact, we have TWO). In case clarification is needed, the order of your Swiss bed is as follows: mattress, fitted sheet, blanket covered in a duvet – that is all you need. I have to say, I have gotten used to this - bed making in the morning is VERY EASY! Shake the blanket covered in the duvet so it is mostly flat on the bed and voilà – your bed is made.
The final thing we have noticed is that there are very few above ground parking lots. There are plenty of parking spaces for cars, with most apartment buildings having underground parking. This is an expensive proposition to build underground parking, and cost prohibitive as our American building lobbyists may lead you to believe in the US. With that perspective, we naturally thought this had to be a requirement of the cantonal government… of course, it has to be that the builders are forced against their will to add that expensive underground parking to a project so that unsightly above ground parking lots won’t scar the Swiss landscape. An American friend living here for several years enlightened us though, by pointing out what is likely the real reason. Land is just plain ‘ole expensive here and why on earth would you waste it on asphalt? Knowing a little bit about how much an apartment costs to rent or purchase here, I think our American friend had the right answer. It doesn’t change anything about our life, but it does change the feel of our village. It feels different than our Bellingham home. It is nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment