Geneva, It's Not You, It's Me

Hoping not to be banished from Geneva for this, my latest piece for Newly Swissed.

Where Every Expat Lives

Yesterday, just as I was sending an email to a Dutch woman living in Geneva, asking her questions about expat life in Switzerland for a magazine story I'm writing, I received an email from a Ukrainian journalist asking me questions about expat life in Switzerland for a magazine story she's writing.

Weird as this convergence was, it's sort of what expat life is like all the time. All the time you are living as an outsider in an interesting place, always soaking it up, while people keep asking you how you like it.

I like it.

Hey Paris, Get Your Shit Together!

I fell in love with Paris about 5 minutes after I arrived the first time as a teenager in 1969. Since then I've visited the city numerous times, and lived there for seven months. Now that I live in western Switzerland, Paris is just over 3 hours away by train. I returned from my latest visit a few days ago.

I'm still smitten with Paris. Shockingly, my adoration remains unrequited.

Still smitten, yet less enchanted. On this trip, strolling the 8th and 9th arrondissements, sometimes it just felt like being in the non-descript part of a big West European city.

Less enchanted too because, even after all these years, dog walkers still leave Fifi's and Fido's (pronounced Feedo's) shit on the sidewalks. I use to find this charming because of their reverse Marie-Antoinette "let them eat shit" attitude. And it seemed a rite of passage newcomers had to take -- coming home without stinky smudged shoes. Now it just seems tired, stupid and utterly devoid of respect for others.

See what living in Switzerland has done to me?

A Note from Swiss Heaven

Here's a new piece of surreal silliness from me, "A Note from Swiss Heaven," on Newly Swissed.

Merci BeauCoop!

Just a quick note to all my brother and sister wine-loving cheapskates: get thee to Neuchâtel tout de suite for a tasting of some 300 wines from around the world. For free. In style.

 As anyone living in Switzerland knows, Coop is one of the two huge grocery store chains here, and always has a generous amount of floor space devoted to wines from around the world. The other grocery giant, Migros, doesn’t even carry wine or any alcohol on its shelves, thanks to its late teetotalling founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler, the poor benighted soul.

Right now until Sunday night, in my town, Neuchâtel, Coop is presenting its 9^th annual Foire aux Vins, Rois du vin. Anyone with a Coop card (we’ve all got one, right?) can board one of the boats in the harbor at no charge to sample wines from almost every continent except Atlantis.

You get dizzy just thinking about it, right? Well, wait until you’ve tried a few of these heady wines.

In one hour, strolling the covered decks of two of the handsome ferryboats that crisscross Lac Neuchâtel during summer, I stopped at wine stands set up by region, and tasted about 15 wines from Switzerland, California, Spain, Portugal and France. Four stands are devoted just to France, five to Italy. The pourers are charming. The gentleman with curly waxed moustaches wouldn’t tell me which Bordeaux he was pouring until after I tasted each one. He waited until I made a few comments before he showed me the bottle.

Then I sat down to a tasting event of six wines paired with amuses bouche. Our bouches were amused (somewhat) by chunks of fish with guacamole; garlic buffalo mozzarella dabbed with raspberry jam; pork pieces in a ginger-honey sauce; foccacia spread with minced olives, mushrooms, tomato, arugula and cheese; and a desert of jellied grapefruit with crispy crêpe flakes. The wines were from Switzerland (including Neuchâtel, of course), California, France and Italy. This is not free, and reservations are required. 

Everyone seemed happy to be there.

 All wines are for sale by order at discounted prices. For your own good, you can’t take any home with you that night. Even though, you, smart person that you are, won’t drive, but take the train.

And if you can’t get to Neuchâtel by Sunday night, the party moves across the lake to Estavayer-le-lac on Monday and Tuesday evening, and then to Crissier outside of Lausanne. Did I mention it’s free with your Coop card?

If you go, I think you might join me in saying merci beauCoop!

Swiss Sub-Atomic Particle Monetization

Here are my deep thoughts, published on Newly Swissed, on how Switzerland can monetize sub-atomic particles.

Basel Winter Carnival

Leave it to the Swiss to start a wild, crazy parade for the biggest winter carnival in the country precisely on time.

Beginning at 1:30 on the dot as advertised, this was the first afternoon's parade at Basel Fasnachts. An estimated 12,000 participants decked out in all manner of bizarre costumes soon filled the streets, playing piccolos, drums, trumpets, trombones and tubas. There were even several guys in kilts honking bagpipes.

I wouldn’t have thought there were this many piccolos (or trombones or monster masks) in all of Switzerland.

It was a kaleidoscope of color and music, along with flying fruit, flowers and candy. Thousands of spectators lined the streets, sharing bottles of wine, eating fat steaming sausages dipped in mustard or the traditional beef-broth-flour-onion soup (tastes how it sounds, but it’s hot and cheap, so who cares?). 

The masks ranged from the merely monstrous (gaping mouths and long witchy noses), to the silly (a band of monkeys whose conductor was, of course, a gorilla) to the surreal (pineapple helmets, baking pan faceplates, masks that looked like testicles).

 Some groups of musicians numbered 50 or more, other troupes were more humble, like the trio consisting of a glum little boy who’d clearly been conscripted, a guy in a Peruvian hat and poncho playing piccolo, and a drummer in a bathrobe of many colors, who may have been searching for his brothers.

Basel’s Fasnachts is one of several winter carnivals that take place around Switzerland. In Basel it’s celebrated for exactly three days, beginning perversely at 4 a.m., just to see who is serious about crazy fun, when all the city-center’s lights are extinguished and a parade of lanterns winds its way through the streets.

The festival here dates from the 14^th century. Legend has it that a row between citizens and noblemen at a jousting tournament ended with four of the nobles dead. Retribution fell with the beheading of 12 citizens and Emperor Charles IV declaring Basel a banned city.

So of course, the Basel citizenry said, “Let’s have a festival to commemorate this auspicious day!”

Today, those citizens’ descendents continue their irreverent ways by using Fasnachts to ridicule events from the past year. One wagon in the parade made fun of the Swiss government’s recent purchase of Swedish fighter jets. 

Meanwhile, various groups passed out colorful strips of paper with satirical poems, and troupes in bars and cafés performed sardonic songs that are probably hysterical but are incomprehensible to outsiders because they’re in the local baseldeutsch dialect.

One sign atop a wagon read Alles Kääs, which appears to mean “everything cheese.” But they were tossing oranges. 

That certainly needs no explaining.

But ultimately, Basel Fasnachts isn't about explaining at all.