What's that smell....? Oh yeah....it's Kuh Scheisse!!!!

Yes, Spring is in the air in Switzerland, and that means the pungent aroma of cow manure is everywhere, permeating every breath we take. Ahhhhh, so lovely. Actually....it's not that bad---I much prefer the smell of cow poop to the human variety. Maybe I've just learned to associate it with verdant, growing things.

For those of you who didn't know, much of Switzerland consists of beautiful, rolling hills, fields and snow-capped mountains of fantastic, surreal, green grass. This grass is heavily and constantly fertilized with the end product of the cow's digestive process, and with startling effect. Everything is green, green, green, even through the winter months. Combine this with the Swiss penchant for turning all of nature into a well-groomed park, and their seeming well-conceived focus on placing every fictional fairytale-designed house, barn, shed, church, village, tractor, stack of hay, tree, and pile of wood into the most visually pleasing arrangement possible, and you have the most beautiful country on earth. It is like Disneyland on an epic scale. The sheer beauty of everything numbs the senses, beggars credibility. You constantly wonder how the Swiss can keep everything looking so nice, so perfect, how every home is perfectly maintained, surrounded by nature that is perfectly groomed. What is going on here? These people are sick! Where are the mobile homes, the low-class trash with multiple broken-down cars sitting around their dilapidated trailer and out-buildings? Where are the clear cut forests, polluted parks and streams? Where is the abundance of trash lining all of the roadways and highways? The answer is...... it's not here. They have done away with all of that. How, you ask? I really don't know.

I will be sprinkling some pictures of the area and views around our new apartment throughout this blog. We have a pretty great location here, just a five minute walk from the lake shore, beaches, and lakefront parks, as well as some nice museums, IMAX theatre, and planetarium. We also front a bucolic little creek, and nature trails that connect to other nature trails, whereby we could probably explore all of Switzerland starting from our front door. The Swiss love nature trails, and they build them everywhere. It is very lovely. Other aspects of our new apartment aren't as nice. As I mentioned before, the average age of the other tenants is about 106, and they have all the habits and peculiarities of their age. They all go to bed around 6 o'clock in the evening, and expect everyone else to as well, meaning that they do not want any noises of living to be going on after this time. I repeat.......any noises. No walking about our apartment, no television watching, talking, laughing, water running, nothing that might disturb their slumber. They are preparing themselves for the 'Long Sleep', and do not want any reminders that they are still alive. Now, this building wasn't built with sound proof walls, so any noise of activity we make is transmitted through the walls to all of our neighbors, who promptly knock on their ceiling, or walls, or floors, to let us know that we our being unacceptably noisy. Now, those of you who know me know that I am not a noisy person, that I spend much of my home time reading or on the Internet, but these activities are far too noisy for the hyper-sensitive hearing of the fossils in our building. If we were planning on staying in Lucerne for a long time, we would already be putting in our notice to move. Neither of us want to live in a morgue, regardless of it's location.

With Swiss apartments, the parking space is a separate consideration, seeing as how many Swiss people do not have cars, and simply walk, ride their bike, or take public transportation everywhere they need to. So, we had to rent our parking space separately from our apartment for a monthly fee of $60. This was not a problem, but the location of our parking space was. It was just too far from our apartment, and in a very dark, remote part of the apartment complex, and we wanted to change it to a better location. This required us to right a formal letter requesting the change of our parking space, then another letter accepting our new parking space, then another letter cancelling our old parking space. What a frickin' waste of time. Reveling in arbitrary rules and formalities is the national Swiss past time.

An interesting difference between Switzerland (as well as the rest of mainland Europe), and the United States is that here there is less emphasis put on the differences between the sexes. There is much less 'Hypersexualization' of gender differences as seen in styles of dress, makeup, hairstyles, and general behavior and mannerisms compared to the U.S. I see straight men here wearing clothes that by American standards are so feminine that even gay men in the States wouldn't be caught dead in them, but here it's totally fine. Add to this the fact that many European men are very slender and slighter of build than American men, frequently sport shoulder-length hair, and often shave, or wax, their whole bodies, and all my standard observational indications go out the window! Women, on the other hand, often wear shorter, spiked hair, might not shave their armpits or legs, and frequently wear very little makeup. As an example, I might be working out at the gym, and glance at a person from behind, and be completely at a loss as to whether they are male or female. I'll think, "Hmmm, they're wearing white Capri pants with ankle socks and raspberry-colored athletic shoes, with a pink skin-tight synthetic sleeveless shirt. They have shoulder-length hair, hairless legs and arms, and they're very slender, so what are they?" "Oh, they're turning around, so now I can figure it out!.......Nope, still not sure."

An interesting little factoid: There are only three countries in the developed world that haven't banned smoking in public places to some degree. These three countries are Belarus, Turkey, and............yes, Switzerland. Way to go Switzerland! You are amongst some prestigious company. Keep on keepin' on. We were walking by a cafe the other day, and were lucky enough to witness a waitress taking an order from some customers.....with a cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth. 'We'd like some grits with that on the side, Flo. Thank ya very much.' Have we entered a time warp? Is Switzerland forever stuck in the Fifties?

Facial piercings are also very common here. Personally, I don't really see the appeal. A diamond stud stuck through a woman's nose or chin, or a spike through their eyebrows, doesn't really do it for me, but many here believe it enhances their attractiveness and uniqueness in some way. Is it really unique when all of your peers are doing it too? At some point, it ceases to be a counter cultural statement and becomes simple conformity.

Most people in Switzerland live in apartment buildings. The cost of real estate here is so prohibitive, and the rules and laws pertaining to such ownership so burdensome, that few people have the desire or ability to own a single-family dwelling. Even owning a basic apartment in a nice location can cost $500,000 and up. Also, the Swiss people, and the rest of Europeans to a somewhat lesser degree, loooooooooove to travel, and owning a house would seriously cramp their ability to take long, epic vacations every year(more on this later). So, most Swiss simply rent apartments in various sizes and styles of buildings, very different in size and style than most of those found in the States. Many apartment buildings might look just like a big, elegant home, but are actually 3or 4 homes. Others are huge complexes consisting of many multiple story buildings housing dozens of apartments and managed by one company or owner. Now, Swiss apartment buildings are usually laid out so that they cater to either old people, or younger people with families. As I've mentioned before, there are lots of old people in Switzerland, and being very proper, staid Swiss, these old people do not want the chaos or noise of children anywhere near them, except in the case of their own grandchildren on day visits. Therefore, many apartment buildings here forbid children, and others cater to families with children. This has lead to an interesting phenomenon. You can travel through entire neighborhoods and see nothing but ancient, doddering old people shuffling and wheeling around with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs, sitting on park benches and mumbling to themselves. I can't explain how creepy this is. And on the other hand, you can find apartment buildings and neighborhoods chock full of stay-at-home moms with their passels of kids running amok, toys and shoes scattered everywhere, children's drawings pinned to the walls in the corridors. This also creeps me out. I should also mention here that there are very few young mothers in Switzerland. Most of the mothers I see with young children are well into their thirties or forties. This is the norm here. Teen pregnancy and motherhood are virtually unknown, and women most often wait until much later to have children for several reasons. One, it is very expensive, and two, I think they just want to experience what life has to offer as an unfettered adult before settling into family life, and three, everyone just waits longer to get married here. Different culture, different priorities.

That's it for now. We're heading to Scotland tomorrow for ten days, I can't wait. It might be raining most of the time we're there, but just driving around the countryside and exploring the cities is going to be awesome. We'll be flying into Luton, England, then driving up to Carlisle for a night, then Edinburgh for two nights, then to Dundee and Glamis castle, then to Inverness and the famous Loch Ness for two nights, then to Eilean Donan castle, then back down to Glasgow for three nights, visiting some friends, then down to Nottingham, and finally back to Luton and back to Switzerland. I'll have plenty to write when I get back! Stay tuned. Below are some pics of our apartment, and I will post more later.

The "Great Move" is over, and life returns to "normal"

Woohoo! It has been a long time since I have posted any Blogs, and I really miss it! I may, as one of my friends from back in Vegas pointed out, sound like a 102 year old grumpy man when I'm complaining about 14 year old peach-fuzzed face whippersnappers chain-smoking hard core French cigarettes recycled from used Heroin needles and homeless men's underwear dipped in industrial sludge, but I still really like writing my Blog. Even with all my ranting, it's a kind of cathartic release from the day-to-day trials and tribulations of dealing with and learning about the alienness and jaw-dropping bizarreness of Swiss culture. Not that it is all bad, just straaaaange.

So, let's get started. I would like to say that moving sucks. I never want to move again. Someday, I just want to settle down somewhere, and never move again for the rest of my life....seriously. It is so much work, and so much disruption, and so much stress, I am just so happy that it is all over, and my life is slowly settling back and adjusting into new routines and habits. After all, I am definitely a creature of habits and routines. No matter where I go, what I do, no matter how alien my environment may be to what I am normally accustomed to, I am driven to establish new routines as soon as possible, and until I do, I can't rest. I also need to create my nest. Without a comfortable, clean, organized, soothing pad to come home to, I can't stop. Everything has to be unpacked and put in it's new place, every new storage item and piece of furniture has to be purchased, set up, and put into position. Cable, Internet, phone and all utilities have to be operational. If something is left undone, I obsess about it until I'm able to take care of it. I really blame my parents for this. After all, if not for their DNA and their brainwashing socialization tactics, why would I be like this? The only aberration is my brother, who couldn't be more different from me if he was Ethiopian. Same DNA, same socialization tactics, yet two completely different people, how do you figure that? I've stopped trying.

So, about our move. We have moved into the suburbs from the core of the city. This has had mixed results. Downtown was noisy at times, and now everything is quieter. We had a smaller apartment downtown that cost more, and now our apartment is bigger, has a balcony, a dishwasher, and costs less. On the other hand, living in downtown was much more convenient in terms of location. Walking distance from work, from shopping, from the grocery store and cafes, from the gym and the bank, from all the cultural offerings of the city. We miss that big time. Now we have to ride our bikes or drive our car to work or the gym or the grocery store, etc, etc. It's all about trade-offs. Whatever the differences, we have to make the best of our situation, get comfortable with it, and move on. I will be posting some pictures of our new pad probably in my next post.

I'd like to talk about our new apartment and the differences a little bit more. There are a lot of very 'strange by American standards' Swiss laws. Most of these were not enforced at our last apartment, but are here. First of all, it is illegal in Switzerland to wash clothes after 10 PM, or on Sundays, in an apartment building. This is because of the noise that it makes. The Swiss are very, very sensitive about noise. Even in a Casino. Anyone speaking above a normal, conversational tone in any public place is quickly and firmly stopped by management. Having fun above a normal conversational tone is severely frowned upon here. If anyone 'whoops' after a large win on Blackjack in our Casino, they are quickly censored by management and told that if they continue to make undue noise, that they will be forced to leave. Any verbal indication of someone having fun and enjoying themselves is severely punished here. It is also illegal to wash your car on Sundays. Again, too much noise. Illegal to flush the toilet after 10 PM. Too much noise. Illegal for men to urinate standing up after 10 PM. Insensitive to cultural sensitivities. Needless to say, we are chafing a bit under the somewhat, in our opinion, harsh restrictions placed upon our actions here in good old Switzerland. Not to mention that the average age of the other tenants in our apartment building is 106. At least in the downtown area, there were some young people. If the common retirement home resident in America came to visit our apartment building here, they would say "Damn, these folks are oooooolllld". I am thinking that some of the general backwardness and antiquated concepts and ideas of Swiss culture have their causal roots in the fact that most of the ruling class in Switzerland is frikin' old. Maybe this is what America will be like in 15 or 20 years, I don't know. What's going to happen here in 10 or 20 years, when all these people have passed on? I would say a population vacuum of immense proportions. Where will they get all their workers? Their taxpayers? Business owners, home owners, investors, innovators, and risk takers? From the Muslim world?, who seem to be popping out 10 kids for every one in the rest of the world? Sweet. Muslims, who drape their women in blankets from head to toe, live by laws that only remotely made sense in the time of Attila the Hun, and hold grudges from 1500 years ago to the death. Say 'Hello' to the end, Folks.

Let's go over some of the Swiss ideas of 'equality' among the sexes here, and imagine how these realities would work in America. First of all, my wife's paycheck is smaller than mine, even though she was hired before I was, does the same job I do, possesses all the same skills I do to perform the job, works the same hours with the same breaks, etc, etc. I take home about $150 more each month. Want to know why? Because she is a married woman without children. Married women without children are penalized and have to pay taxes at a higher rate than men. I am a married man without children, but I do not get penalized for this, because I am a Man, capital M. How do you like that?... Let's move on. Timi, my wife, and all the other women at work, must wear skirts. They cannot wear pants. My wife, being the corrupted, decadent American that she has become, questioned this. It gets cold in the Casino sometimes, and she would like the option of wearing pants. She was told by management that she must wear a skirt at all times because otherwise the Casino customers, who are mostly male, would not otherwise want to come and play at the Casino if they had to see the female dealers in pants. It is 'unwomanly' to want to wear pants. How do you like that?....Let's move on. Back in America, I was always the one to handle all the finances, paying bills, setting up and managing accounts, and so on. Because of this, and owing to the fact that Timi was the first to move to Switzerland and start setting everything up, she began to handle all of our day-to-day financial matters over here. This was fine with me, because I was sick and tired of having to handle all the mundane financial details of daily life, and I wanted my wife to get a little dose of it. No real problems at first, but interestingly, once all the companies learned that Timi had a husband, they started to address all correspondence to me, and when they called, they insisted on talking to me. Apparently, the Swiss simply don't think that a woman should be entrusted, or 'burdened', with the manly duties of taking care of the household finances. How do you like that?... Let's move on. We are given a certain amount of 'credits' each year for cleaning services. Each article of clothing is assigned a certain amount of points, one point for a shirt, 2 for pants, 3 for our vests, etc. For men, it is possible to pretty much have the casino do all of our dry cleaning and cleaning services throughout the year and keep within our allotted points. Not for women. Women are charged 3 point for every shirt, not one. The casino's justification for this is that women's shirts are ironed differently, and therefore require more work than a man's shirt. Therefore, women are charged three times what men are charged, and run out of points about a third of the way through the year. They can then choose to do all their own work laundry cleaning, or pay extra for the same services men get for free. But hey, doing laundry is women's work anyway, right? ....Right? How do you like that?.... Let's move on. A dealer/supervisor in our casino, from unrevealed Muslim country, who actually isn't too bad of a guy in most ways, has a tendency to flirt a bit too much with the ladies, as well as spend a lot of time on singles websites online, even though he is married. Being from a Muslim country, he undoubtedly has a fairly low, and dysfunctional, view of women. Although, come to think of it, his views probably aren't much different than the average Swiss man. Not too long ago, a couple of bar waitresses took offense to his 'flirting', which could easily be construed as sexual harassment on occasion, and complained to management. The waitresses were immediately fired. How do you like that? Looking forward to any comments on these revelations.

Have I mentioned that the Swiss are a bit anal? I may have, but I'll do it again. In some ways this can be good, but I have discovered that if taken too far, the negatives begin to outweigh the positives. Isn't this the way with everything? The Swiss wouldn't be Swiss without rules. They looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove rules, regardless of their logic or sensibility. If there isn't a rule in place for them to proceed with a certain action, then they are immobilized. What if the rule is completely arbitrary and has no basis in need? No problem, as long as it is there to tell them what to do. Rules for the Swiss are like warm, human-smelling blankets for a dog, it gives them the comfort of the womb to wrap themselves in. Now I fully realize that society and cultures of any shape and size need rules to live by. But let's imagine together for a moment that all of a sudden it mattered,......that it was of the utmost importance,.....which side of the bed you got up from in the morning; that it was then extremely important which foot you put down onto the floor first, and how long it took for you to place that foot on the floor, and whether or not you placed your toes first, or your heel; that it was then life or death whether you yawned for three seconds, or for four; whether or not you stretched you arms above your head or in front of you, and for how long; what color of underwear you were wearing, and for how long; how many steps it took you to get to the door of your bedroom, and which hand you used to open the door, and how long it took you to open the door, and whether or not the door touched the wall or not, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Am I getting my point across? I hope so. This is the Swiss. They cannot function without rules to guide their behavior and actions every minute of every day. Their need for "Authority" to rule them and provide guidance is heartbreaking. This reality is translated into a very clean, organized, proper Swiss society, but one that is gridlocked in it's own inability to imagine anything outside of their rules. It has completely lost it's ability to imagine new ideas, concepts, ways of doing things, to innovate. What have the Swiss created in the last 100 years? What new inventions have they come up with on their own? Let me know if you can thing of any. They are a society and culture in clean, organized, genteel decline. If this were Roman times, the Huns or Vandal hordes would already have sacked their capital. They have very little left to offer the world.

Harsh? Perhaps. Accurate? Depends on who you ask. On a different day, I probably wouldn't write these opinions in the same way or with the same acrimony. My wife, Timi, was speaking with a man the other day at work while on a roulette game. He was from Ireland, but lived in Switzerland and worked for a tobacco company. She commented that he must do very good business, seeing as how the entire population of Switzerland smokes, but that his opportunity for growing sales must be pretty limited, as the number of Swiss is declining. Must be pretty tough when the product you're selling is killing of your customer base. Anyway, the man mentioned that he believes the Swiss smoke so much because they are a deeply unhappy culture, that somewhere along the way they have lost the will to really live. That got me to thinking. Is the fact that the Swiss seem to have conquered, or at least contained, the majority of their social ills, actually a death knell for their society at large? Does the fact that they have created this country over the centuries that, by many definitions, would be considered ideal, a country with negligible crime, homelessness, or poverty, a top-notch education system, a well-trained population brainwashed to crave and follow all rules, a country with boundless natural and man made beauty, all well-groomed, polished, clean, and orderly, actually signal their doom in some way? Take America, where they have a huge amount of social problems, tons of crime, homelessness everywhere, poverty, ignorance, filth, and Republicans. And yet, it can certainly and easily be argued that America is a world leader in innovation, invention, and creativity in every arena, productivity, pop cultural influence, economic and political power, and downright pluckiness. Have I left anything out?

So, is a huge and constant stream of problems and challenges necessary for a culture and society to continue to thrive? To keep their personality, and to remain on the cutting edge of change? Do humans need grit and adversity to evolve, prosper, create, and maintain the will to live? Does having things too good lead to complacency, arrogance, decadence, and apathy? You be the judge. This Blog has become too long, so see ya later!