I have a day off today, only one, and so we tried to get as much stuff done as possible. Got up early to go see another potential apartment to rent. It wasn't worth it, but we didn't know that before hand. The apartment was off a pretty busy main thoroughfare here in Lucerne, in a suburb called Ebikon, very close to downtown. The street view from the building is shown to the right. It had a nice balcony facing the street, but it was just too noisy. The rest of the apartment was straight out of the Fifties, original linoleum floors, bathroom the size of a match book, ancient kitchen, and very old school layout. An old school layout for an apartment here in Switzerland is like this: You open the front door and encounter a hallway. Off of this central hallway are doors that lead to different rooms. For example, the first two doors on your left will be bedrooms, then the third door will be the living room, maybe with some built-in storage cabinets in between the doorways. The first door on your right will be the bathroom, perhaps more closet space, than the kitchen at the end of the hall. That's it, basically just very simple boxes within boxes. It was a definite No, but the basement was pretty cool. As I've mentioned before, all buildings even to this day in Switzerland must be built with a bomb shelter and kept stocked at all times with food and necessary living gear. This building's bomb shelter was hardcore. Just getting to the storage area we had to pass through three blast doors, and then the bomb shelter's main area was still below and accessible via a large manhole cover. I posted
a picture of the manhole cover to the bomb shelter in our own building here to show you what it's like. Pretty wicked. The Swiss just take it all in stride, they are totally used to having multiple layers of blast doors and bomb shelters in all of their buildings. There are also large community bomb shelters in all cities, towns, and villages for all those citizens who for one reason or another do not have their own bomb shelter, and you can occasionally see these built into the sides of hills, identifiable by massive concrete emplacements leading to large metal and concrete doors. I have also read accounts of anti-aircraft gun bunkers and hidden tank and other weapons installations positioned in fake barns and farmhouses and such in key places around the country. Don't know how effective these would be nowadays, but there you go.

We also went to a discount grocery store out in Kriens, another suburb area of Lucerne, called Aldi. Many grocery stores here in Switzerland, and I think much of the rest of Europe, would be considered to have strange design and traffic layout patterns by American standards. You can get in easily, but its hard to get out unless you're buying something! The entrances are separated from the exits by walls and one way automatic doors. The dedicated exit areas are only accessible by passing through the check out aisles.
So, if you have entered and then decided not to buy anything, you have to push and shove and excuse your way through full check out lanes to exit the building. Nice. On the other hand, if you've decided to buy some things, and it is more than a small amount , you can also find yourself in a pickle. In the picture close by, with Timi in it, you can see the "massive", and by "massive" I mean extremely tiny, space that is provided to bag your groceries. So, a very delicate and perfectly timed operation has to be performed, and it can't be done by only one person. Both must as quickly as possible remove the items from the grocery cart and place them on the conveyor belt whereafter the second person grabs the cart, flings it to the other side of the checkout clerk, positions it for maximum grocery packing efficiency, frantically opens the bags that must be brought from home because they don't provide bags at the store, and immediately starts jamming the groceries into said bags at breakneck spead.
Meanwhile, the sadistic checkout clerk, with a manic gleam in her eye, reveling in the only entertainment she gets all day, attempts to check the items out as quickly as possible, shoving them into the miniscule receiving area at the speed of sound and glaring at you when you inevitably choke, accidentally placing the oranges on top of the tomatoes, causing a repositioning delay that you cannot afford! Then, while smirking at your haplesness, she calls out the total bill, whereas your partner must whip out the money and pay before the people in line behind you start to complain. All in all, an interesting experience. Don't ask me why they don't provide more bagging space. Nobody knows. We asked a clerk one day, and she just said 'That is Aldi'. And I say, 'That is Switzerland'. Enough said.