random

Vrrrr-VROOOOOMM…purrrrrr…ka-THUNK, ka-THUNK….vrrr-vrrOOOOMMM!!! Vrrrr-VROOOOOMM…purrrrrr…ka-THUNK, ka-THUNK….vrrr-vrrOOOOMMM!!!

Watching a Maserati go over speedbumps is kind of like watching someone cut vegetables with a weed whacker--- can anyone say overkill?

And does anyone know what:

NO POGOS

ONLY THE REALS DANCING

--thank you

could possibly mean? It’s on the entryway to a club; usually, that location houses a “no smoking” sign, until it was recently replaced by this one.

Banana me...

This might just be the most hilarious thing that has ever happened to me, and I almost fell off my bike laughing when it happened (although it was slightly less amusing as I was carrying my bike home…). In any case, it all started out one not so fine and not particularly sunny day when I, in a dearth of pretty much anything edible whatsoever in my little monk’s cell, determined to go grocery shopping on my way back from an appointment I was convinced I had but actually didn’t. I managed to collect the essentials (or ‘the usual’, as I pretty much always buy the same things…), pay, and in true German style pack everything in my backpack before the checker was done checking (if you’ve ever been to Aldi and in danger of having your purchases more or less pushed off the counter for not being fast enough, you’ll know what I mean). Everything fit except the bananas and the baguette; I had managed to stow the heavy, indestructible objects a the bottom of my backpack, the box of fresh figs on top (PS, for those of you in Switzerland, currently ‘en action’ at Migros this week), and in true German fashion had even brought my own plastic shopping bag in case it didn’t all fit in the backpack (again, veterans of deutsche Discountmärkte will know that additional bags cost money). Under the weight of my several kilos of müsli, coffee, carrots, milk, and god knows what else I bought I stagger outside, unlock my bike, push the bike across the street so I am set up to start riding in the direction, jump on, start riding and…

…that’s when it happens. I often boast of being able to transport much of anything on a bicycle, as if dangling all manner of baggage and accoutrements looking like I’m carrying all my earthly possessions in one go is some kind of virtue despite looking utterly ridiculous. So I figure one backpack, one plastic shopping bag would be no problem. And it usually isn’t: ask me about transporting a flat of strawberries, several watermelons, or bottles of wine and we can talk about ‘difficult’. In any case, I start off, and in the first five or so yards as I am gaining equilibrium, the bag dangling from my handlebars keeps touching the spokes, generally just making a terrible noise and damaging the bag for which I at one point paid money. All of the sudden, pendulating as it was, the bag suddenly swung into the spokes with enough force that the bag was essentially grabbed and swallowed by the front wheel like a wood chipper, as my bike manages somehow, in the space of about 8.2 seconds, to puree five bananas and half a baguette before I could get stopped and sort it all out. Unfortunately, this had already broken a bracket on my fender and managed to wedge the thingie holding on to the bracket under the front wheel, meaning I had to literally carry the bicycle—dripping banana—home in heels.

LATER THAT DAY: I did manage to fix my bike, but it involved taking off the brakes to get to the fender to get to the bracket to put it all back together again. Go me. And I have no bananas left ☹

Je voudrais que quelqu'un....

My new pet peeve has become: upon someone finding out I’m American, they immediately ask “have you voted yet?” to which I reply, “I’m still waiting for my ballot.” To which they hysterically screech “but you need to VOTE!!!” As if I had any effect on my ballot not being there. Yes, I damn well KNOW I have to vote—you think I want a repeat of the last time around? You Europeans seem half convinced I voted for Bush the last time…

Americans find it off-putting abroad that pretty much everyone and their grandmother wants to know your voting preference. Money, religion and politics are not subjects openly discussed, I suppose, and I would never consider asking another American how they voted / are going to vote. Germans have no problems asking that, nor how much we earn, nor what religion we are (though the concept of religion in Germany has less serious connotations than in the States, excepting Bavaria…). It also perturbs most Americans that your average European knows more about American politics than the Americans do…

Other new pet peeves include:
- paying ridiculous amounts of money for nearly everything;
- the cleaning ladies who absolutely have to clean our kitchen at the exact same time as I need to make my sandwich for lunch, regardless of what time of the day or night;
- the crackheads at cité at 2 AM on weekends (explanation: the seediest club in Geneva—where people go when nothing else is open or they can’t get in anywhere else—is located under my residence, conveniently right next to the bicycle room in the basement. That means I have to pass through clouds of weed smoke and drunk kids to put my bike away if I come home on weekends);
- people who automatically switch to English when we start to speak and think they’re doing me a favor
- 6:30 AM plus Garbage men = me not much sleep
- not having enough coffee (am sadly back to being coffee dependent… welcome to grad school)
- having the linguistical ability of your average eight-year-old—if that.

Mais en effet, ca va. Parfois.

En Suisse

Frequent comment: “Are you going to take your bike?” (incredulous look at either the weather or what I’m wearing; I have a penchant for skirts and heels). “Of course I’m biking. I always take my bike.” (that would be why I am standing here holding the bike….) The next morning: “Did you make it home okay?” “Sure, I was home in 10 minutes, you?” “I hiked for 45 because I missed the last bus/tram and couldn’t find the night bus.” “HAHAHAHAHA…sucker.” Buy a bike, people, it makes your life worthwhile.



Europe is fun for its internationalism: there are so many little tiny countries all over the place. It’s like you can barely sneeze without it landing on someone from a different linguistic group. In the distance from California to Kansas City you could drive from Stockholm to Rome, New Mexico is about as far away from New York as Poland is from Portugal, and Colorado has 75% the land area of Germany, and 1/16th the population. I like to try to impress people with my a) basic math skills, b) tenuous grasp of geography, and c) conviction that spending eighteen hours in a car to go on vacation is FUN. It’s considered quite bad form to make fun of the Luxembourgians, Andorrans, Liechtensteinians, or for that matter the Dutch of the Belgians for how unbelievably tiny their countries are. Luxembourg, for example, has as a population comparable to a mid-sized city—and that’s the whole country! Somehow they still feel compelled to have three official languages—and one of their own!



I am an equal opportunity offender, so I try to spare no punches, (particularly in light of the crap I get about my own country, about which everyone is a self-styled expert without the most of them having spent more than a two-week vacation in either New York or Las Vegas/California.) Super tiny country jokes always go over well with these citizens, as well as the accusation that their language, be it Dutch, Flemish or Luxemborgish, is actually an f’ed up dialect of German. Asking the Swiss (or Bavarians for that matter) if they speak “normal German” is something they might take from me but never from an actual German. I think for both of them (the Belgians, the Dutch and the Swiss, and certainly the Austrians) the Germans are just annoying and overbearing, and nothing would be better than beating them at football or being able to definitively prove that one’s own country has the best cheese or chocolate. Because noting else matters. Beating the Germans at football (soccer) wouldn’t be bad either. From the German perspective, the Dutch make cheese and live in trailers, the French make cheese and complain a lot, the Austrians just talk funny, the Swiss are arrogant and the Belgians are supposed to be nice but a bit linguistically and politically confused, and they have good beer, and apparently the cities are pretty as well but you wouldn’t know because Germans don’t ever go to Belgium. I was greeted with outright incredulity when I said I went to Belgium on holiday, as if I had suddenly become a head case. Conversely, the Dutch and Belgians I had met had pretty much never been to Germany either, except perhaps as a child with the family in one of the aforementioned trailers.

This all has absolutely nothing to do with the Swiss, for the sole fact that the Swiss don’t much notice that the rest of Europe exists. They have large quantities of melty bubbly cheese which smells of feet, they have chocolate to rival the Belgians, and yes everything is horrendously overpriced but they are living in the best country on earth, so there. For the rest of Europe, though, they are serious (more so than the Germans) and rich. That’s bad enough, they speak funny German, slow French, Italian, and something else which no one can remember what it’s called.

Q: What does the postcard from a Swiss vacationer say?
A: Having a wonderful time. Where am I?

Q: What do you get when you cross a Swiss and a lawyer?
A: Well…there are some things even a Swiss won't do.

Q: Did you hear about the new epidemic among the Swiss?
A: It's called MAIDS - if they don't get one, they die.

A Swiss guy, looking for directions, pulls up at a bus stop where two Englishmen are waiting. "Entschuldigung, können Sie Deutsch sprechen?" He asks. The two Englishmen just stare at him. "Excusez-moi, parlez-vous français?" The two continue to stare. "Parlate italiano?" No response. "Hablan Ustedes espagnol?" Still nothing. The Swiss guy drives off, extremely disgusted.

The first Englishman turns to the second and says: "Y'know, maybe we should learn a foreign language…"

"Why?" says the other, "that bloke knew four languages, and it didn't do him any good."



In Heaven the cooks are French, the policemen are English, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, the bankers are Swiss. In Hell the cooks are English, the policemen are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and the bankers are Italian.