Permanent Expatriate

Our Internet here at the hotel has been spotty for several days. If you’ve emailed me and I haven’t responded yet, that’s why. This is also the reason why there’s been no significant blog post since last week, though Sammy’s continued teething has also played a role.

• While one of the major supermarket chains here is fully stocked with bottom to middle-shelf wine, beer and liquour, it’s taken some effort to find higher-end booze in this town. This past week, we finally succeeded. There are two very small shops in the city centre that cater to my needs. One stocks a wide variety of quality beer (focusing on Belgian) and top-shelf whiskeys, along with a smattering of high-end wine and rum. The other is hidden inside the interior courtyard of some the blocks in the city centre, and is solely wine-focused. I am extremely happy to have discovered both. The only unfortunate aspect of this discovery is that these stores are only from 2pm-6:30pm, Tuesday through Saturday. This makes timing kind of tricky, especially when I’m working around Sammy’s erratic schedule.
• Last week, Sammy and I went on our longest and most arduous walk yet: nearly 4km up the mountain. (We’ve gone on much longer walks along the lakeshore where it’s nice and level, but this was by far our longest walk uphill.) I already uploaded some pics from this jaunt. It’s one thing to academically know that it’s a lot colder and snowier just a bit up the mountain. It’s another to walk for less than an hour and suddenly feel like you’re in a different country altogether. The only place I’ve been to which I can compare it is San Francisco, but here it is much more drastic of a shift.
• In our two weeks here thus far, we have seen all of three persons who might be construed as being homeless. Martha recently commented on this to one of her co-workers, who confirmed that there are no homeless people in Switzerland. If a Swiss citizen is out of work and destitute, then they are provided with an apartment and money to live on by the government — including additional money to feed their pets. (Martha’s co-worker noted that this leads to Swiss people on welfare having many pets.) When Martha asked if anyone panhandled for extra money, her co-worker did not even understand the concept and needed the basic logistics of street begging explained to her. Once she understood, Martha’s scandalized co-worker was emphatic that such things did not happen in Switzerland, for it was against the law. Martha then asked what would happen if the police found a person begging on the street. Her co-worker replied that the police would take the person back to his government-provided apartment.
  So, don’t get caught panhandling in Switzerland — or else the cops will give you a ride home.  😉  This, of course, applies only to citizens. If I were to try asking for spare francs on the street, I’d be deported faster than you can say “Heidi”.
• I failed in last week’s effort to get a haircut, mostly due to poor timing and my insecurity about the language. I will bone up on the critical terms (Internet permitting), and try again this week. I’m not sure when this will happen, though. Tomorrow we’re off to Bern to deal with expatriate bureaucracy, and Friday we’re being taken out by our relocation people to see apartments. This needs to happen soon. I’m getting shaggy…

Apologies for no post yesterday. Sammy’s been having a hard time over the past few days.

• Every parking complex in which we’ve been thus far has had electric signage at the entrance and at every level telling you how many empty parking spots are left on each level. What’s more, the parking complex in the big mall down the road actually has red & green LEDs above each individual parking space to you can see if that particular spot is empty from any part of that level.
• Today we went to the closest IKEA to Neuchâtel (about 70km away, outside of Bern). It was comforting that, in the face of so much that’s different, IKEA is the same everywhere.
• There are very few traffic lights here. Most of the intersections are controlled by roundabouts. This makes for quick driving when there’s no traffic volume, but everything grinds to a halt once there’s any traffic whatsoever.
• We have yet to do any cliché Swiss stuff like go out for fondue or raclette. This may be our big project for tomorrow, however, since there’s nothing else to do. All retail commerce in Neuchâtel besides the restaurants and bars closes at 17:00 Saturday afternoon and doesn’t re-open until 13:00 Monday afternoon. The sole exception is the train station, which effectively has its own mall and food court contained therein and is open continuously.

• I’ve been wondering why people look at me funny when I walk around town. I’ve isolated the following possible contributing factors, and feel that any or all of them could be playing a role:
  • A man pushing a baby stroller by himself. (The Swiss are entertainingly sexist about these things. Many people have commented on how “modern” our family arrangement is.)
  • The above stroller being black and very large compared to most.
  • My big black coat.
  • My black New Era cap. (Few besides the young riffraff seem to wear ball caps here.)
  • My tendency to whistle and talk to Sammy in English while walking.
• The Ville de Neuchâtel police cruisers are silver with large cartoonish pictures of owls on the sides. I have a photo of one that will be uploaded with the next batch, if you don’t believe me.
• In addition to the tram lines, trolleybuses and autobuses that cover every part of the city and canton, Transports Publics du Littoral Neuchâtelois includes two funicular lines for getting up and down the mountain with ease. These may be the key to us living anywhere besides the immediate city centre and the lake shore. I spent yesterday afternoon going up and down the mountainside with Sammy, and it doesn’t make for pleasant walking.
• Having a baby here seems to provoke less uninvited questions and gratuitous advice that it does in North America (or the factors listed above could be playing a role here, too), but it still happens. Yesterday, I had an old woman in a store start talking to me about Sammy. I was able to answer her question about how old he is, but little else. When I told her, “Pardon, mais je suis nouveau ici et je ne parle pas francais très bien,” she smiled, nodded and started telling me how she speaks German and Italian but not English. She nonetheless then said some more stuff about Sammy that I didn’t understand at all, but seemed pleased when I smiled and chuckled when she smiled and chuckled.
• In Toronto, it would only be me and the local derelicts who’d be in the liquor store buying booze first thing in the morning. Here, I was one person in a line of six (including the above-mentioned old woman), all buying booze from the grocery store at 09:30.