Gruezi!
That is how you greet someone in Switzerland (well, it ought to have an umlaut, but I can’t get one to appear). It is what people chirp at you when you enter a shop or a restaurant, and I got quite good at chirping it back, if I do say so myself. You roll the “r” a bit, which is a particular talent of mine. I became so proficient with my Gruezi, shop people often mistook me for a native and followed it with a rapid-fire stream of Swiss German, but their mistake was swiftly corrected by my glazed look and obvious lack of comprehension.
While we are on the subject, the German language has some serious problems with boundaries. Why have three words when you could mangle them infuriatingly into one? it asks, and an answer comes there none. Perhaps a teutonic desire to streamline simply got out of hand, but for heaven’s sake, it is not a CRIME to allow an adjective to have a little SPACE, now and then. I remember reading Being and Time my first year at Sarah Mawr, and because it was translated from the German, there were all these hyphenates, meant to stand in for an entire concept that in the original was one long, consonant-heavy word.
But never mind that.
SUNDAY:
I woke up feeling physically confused. No longer on Minnesota time, not yet fully acclimated to False European Time, and frankly I had probably walked more the day before in Zurich than I had during the whole of the recently ended six months of RSV season. We decided a relaxy day was in order, and after a leisurely breakfast of coffee, soft-boiled eggs, and toast with quark—a delectable dairy product somewhere between cream cheese and sour cream, to which I could easily devote an entire entry—I took a bath in my mother’s sinfully long tub.
For lunch we walked down the block to a restaurant the name of which I cannot remember, possibly because it was always referred to simply as “The Fish Place.” It is right on the water, and we sat outside overlooking the Zuger See.
I had the fish.
I also witnessed a Swiss woman eating a hamburger with a knife and fork, and my mother informs me that many people, over there, eat their FRENCH FRIES with a fork as well. I suppose this should not surprise me.
The fries in Switzerland are uniformly excellent—by which I do not mean only that they are excellent everywhere, though they are, but that each is uniformly crisp, uniformly salted, uniformly uniform in every way.
Which brings me, of course, to The Potato Council.
{Or would, if my writing time weren’t up. Like one of those sailboats-in-a-bottle, the only way to get this story out is in pieces. Many, tiny pieces. I think you all know who to blame for that.}
{Hint: Bald, stands about two feet tall, bites}
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Potato Council …. intriguing!
Your hair is awesome.
That is all.
the potato council? i can’t wait to hear about that. my husband maintains that the swiss (his ‘studies of the swiss people’ is mainly limited to me) are obsessed with potatoes. i like potatoes very much but i am not obsessed with them. however i have been paying closer attention to this phenomenon and i am beginning to think my husband may be right about switzerland being potato obsessed.
Yes, I used the men’s room in the hostel in Geneva the entire time I was there, and no one said anything. They just politely accepted my mistake and went about their business.
Then there was this incident where I plugged my curling iron in and the barrel melted off and I threw it out the window and well. I am not Swiss, clearly.
My favorite German word (taught to me by my husband, who was an exchange student there; not learned by me, who lived there for a year when I was seven): Aubgefucked.
I am weepy over leisurely breakfasts and lunches and baths. Such sin could only exist in hell. Remind me where you were again?
Ah, yes. I did the foreign exchange student thing to France and realized one evening that the mom of the family I was living with was lecturing the two year old twins on the horror and chaos that resulted from their eating their french fries with their — brace yourself — fingers! And this was the carefree French (albeit with considerable German influence as I was in Alsace); I shudder to think how the orderly Swiss must feel about this issue.
bites?
I can’t wait to hear more. Sounds like a fabulous time so far.
You had me at French Fries.
quark! i had a short love affair with that stuff when i lived in germany last summer. it sounds like you had a wonderful time, can’t wait to hear more!
well- bald, stands about two feet tall, bites- must be a dwarf, or a kind of garden gnome? The German variety, with a red hat and a garden fork?
Just kidding.
Highly entertaining… I discovered your blog recently and have been following your Swiss vacation with interest. (Your mother’s apartment is awesome!)
I think you’ll find that people in most countries will eat their fries and burgers with knives and forks in a restaurant. We certainly do here is South Africa, and everywhere I’ve traveled, except the USA.
Can’t wait for the next installment!
Bites?! Oh, SIMONE!
Agog for the next scrap of travelog.
Thanks for a good laugh – and leaving us with a cliff hanger waiting for more! I’m glad you had a great trip!
Hey I’m the Potatoe Queen can’t wait for the Potatoe Council. Love your shades, soooo Hollywood!
I was an exchange student in Southern Germany, where a spectacularly horrific dialect is spoken, and I still remember the pain of trying to ask for sinusitis medication at the chemist’s – and that sums up German nicely, you take a perfectly nice Latin word like ‘sinusitis’ and turn it into ‘nebenhoehlenentzuendung’ (inflammation of the adjacent holes) and laugh at the poor foreigners. I also remember a German explaining they had no choice but to be polite in conversations because the verbs come at the end. That would cause the whole of Portugal to die of shock in about 15 minutes, I reckon.
I’m not sure whether the Germanics literally have more time or if they have more time because they are more productive (I tend towards the latter) but what I remember from my time there and the trips to Switzerland and Liechtenstein is, they seem to live better. Less stress, more life-gazeing of the good sort. I miss that, and the green parks everywhere and the lovely buildings. Oh, and the rosemary potatoes. POTATOES! I’m a crisp addict, can’t wait for the next installment.
Gruezi! I mastered “Gross Gott” for a visit to Vienna, and the shopkeepers were similarly fooled by me until confusion settled on my face as they tried to strike up a conversation! I spent several extra minutes at a grocery store cash register trying to figure out what the cashier was saying to me. Finally she just threw the receipt at me and went on to the next customer. She was just asking if I wanted the receipt or not!
I love hearing about your trip! I love that part of the world!
For umlauts and other diacritics: On a Mac, press option/u, then your letter. For PC, you hold down the left “ALT” key, then enter 0235 using your numeric keypad (the one on the far right). My daughter’s name is Zoë, so I’m always rocking out with the double-dot… though in her case, it’s called a trema, not an umlaut. No umlauts on e’s. Anyway.
I do believe that while eating frites and burgers with one’s fingers is strictly verboten, one *is* allowed — nay, encouraged — to eat asparagus sans utensils. (Hmmm, I wonder if free-wheeling consumption of l’asperge is where the phrase “casting aspersions” comes from?)
Here is an ü for you. You can cut and paste it into your Grüezi.
If you need ä, ö or ß, there you are :-)
She’s not bald! Can’t speak to the alleged biting, though.