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.
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1 comment:
You certainly are in a cultural mixing bowl. Too bad they all look down on each other. Speaks to how unified the EU can ever become. I like the last joke the best. m
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