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.

A new place? Keepin' our fingers crossed.

I think, hopefully, that we just found and won a new apartment to rent today. I mean 'won', because finding a decent apartment in Lucerne is like winning the lottery. There is much more demand than supply, and in a country where discriminating against anyone who isn't Swiss is perfectly legal, acceptable, and even expected, we are apparently very lucky indeed. We just checked out the apartment today, and I don't have any pictures of it yet, but I do have pictures of the view from its small balcony and will include those at some point in this Post. It is a two bedroom, one bath, not much bigger than our current apartment, but it does have a dishwasher (hurray!!) and a balcony, as already mentioned. The bathroom is actually smaller than the one we have now, but beggars,--- or outlanders,---can't be choosers. It is in a very nice location, not far down the road from the Casino we work at, although farther than we currently live, and a five minute walk from the lake shore and beach areas. Once the weather improves, we will be able to commute to work easily with bikes. Also, the rent will be cheaper than we pay now by about $350 a month, very cool, and we will still be close enough to town and the lake to enjoy what it has to offer without having to deal with the accompanying noise from traffic and the Church of Hells Bells. Yea for us!

I also wanted to mention that we took a four day trip to Hungary a week or so ago to hang out and visit Timi's parents. We had a good time, I played tennis with Timi's dad and he kicked my ass, and then we played billiards and I kicked his. All those years of having a pool table in our living room paid off! We also ate a lot of grubbin', and cheap, food, and I shopped for, and found, two awesome coats for half what they would have cost here. I like Budapest, it is so 'Old School Europe', the people just seem to be more 'real', and the city is filled with thousands of old, grand, Baroque-style buildings, some renewed, but most in various states of decay, a tattered hearkening back to an age of elegance, refinement, formality, tasteful opulence and grace. Sure, Budapest is grittier, dirtier, more ragged, with more crime and poverty than Switzerland, but Switzerland has never endured 40 plus years of a corrupt, fatally flawed political and economic system, and previously brutalized and/or invaded by one bully country after another. The Hungarian people, even with all their disadvantages, seem to be more creative, and enjoy life more than 'super serious Switzerland' does. Switzerland is without a doubt more prosperous, cleaner, shinier, and safer, with incredible natural resources, and that is nice and admirable; we like it here in many ways. But, at the same time, it's culture seems to lack a certain something in the personality category, maybe as a result of a lack of any real adversity for the last 500 years? I will get to my thoughts on this in a later post. That's all for now, I'm going to eat some store bought pizza(made in Austria), that Timi is sprucing up for us, then get ready for work! See ya. Check out the pics below of scenes around town. You can click on them to expand.

Is it a Gym, or a Library?

Thanks, Anthony, for your comments, and to everyone else, please post any comments, thoughts, or questions you might have, no matter how bad. I really appreciate them, and they encourage me to write more. And doesn't everyone want to read more of my rants on Switzerland?! I do.

Just got back from a gym workout, Timi's at the hairstylist, so I thought I would write a little more. I've mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again, gyms in Switzerland are not like gyms in America. I walked into the cardio area today for my warm up, and what was on the TV's, you might ask? The Welsh Open Snooker tournament. And what music was playing over the loudspeakers(or maybe I should say quietspeakers)? 'Ebony and Ivory' by Paul McCartney. Now I know what you're thinking, 'Oh my God, Marty, don't you know that the combination of Snooker playing Welshmen and the song 'Ebony and Ivory' can be deadly!? That it can elevate your pulse rate and adrenal levels so quickly that your head could explode!? Well, don't worry, I quickly put my Ipod earphones on, and averted my eyes from the rousing game of Welsh Snooker on the television. Anyway, you really had to focus your ears to hear the music. If it's much above conscious sound-awareness levels, the Swiss will quickly raise issue. Gym atmosphere here is required to be more suitable to a library than a place of physical fitness, or it is deemed inappropriate.

So maybe someone could enlighten me as to what is up with black socks here? Timi has tried in the past, but I still don't understand. I do understand that one should wear black socks in combination with black, or probably any other dark color, of pants, but here they wear black socks with everything! Light-colored pants? Black socks. All types of jeans? Black socks. Dress or casual shorts? Black socks. Athletic pants or shorts? Black socks. White shoes? Black socks! And they are usually calf-high socks pulled up as far as they can be. Are Europeans aware that there are other colors of socks? They must be, so what is up with this? I should mention here that the concept of 'Nerd' does not exist in Europe. This is because almost everyone here would be classified as one if the term did exist. Unfortunately, here Nerds rarely grow up to be highly creative and innovative CEO's of their own technology companies. I would also like to mention here that the stereotypical arrogant, conceited, full of themselves American Lawyer/Businessman/Doctor/StockBroker/Succesfull Professional of any kind does not really have it's Swiss counterpart. It's hard to be full of yourself when you 're driving around in a car the size of a bathtub and when it accelerates sounds like a bee on speed, or have to shlep downstairs to do your laundry in the basement bomb shelter. The supreme confidence and sometimes arrogance exhibited by many American men doesn't really exist here. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad one. Maybe a little of both. Enough for now, signing off, Bye!