Here are the first batch of pics from our new home in Switzerland. In the interests of keeping our pictures ours, I am serving them from my host rather than putting them somewhere like Facebook (though they will be pulled to my Facebook vis RSS). If you are seeing this on Facebook, please go here to see the photos:
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/neuchatel1/
To comment on them, please visit the original blog post:
http://www.permanent-expatriate.com/?p=81
Saturday, January 16, 2010
After nearly 36 hours in this place, I have made note of the following things:
- I have yet to meet anyone without at least barebones English and the willingness to use it for the benefit of North American barbarians.
- There are lots of birds here; many more than I am used to seeing in January. This includes crows hanging out on the roofs of buildings as well as ducks and some type of gull happily swimming in the cold lake.
- Many of the residential buildings within sight of our hotel still have TV antennas on them.
- While walking around town, almost everyone smiles and says ‘Bonjour’ if you look at them as you pass by.
- Our hotel’s idea of complementary breakfast includes 9 different kinds of cereal, 4 different kinds of bread, 8 different kinds of jam, 10 different kinds of yogurt, cheese, ham, and made-on-demand espresso.
- From what I’ve seen so far, all of the non-tropical fruit in the big supermarkets here is actually grown in Switzerland.
- The viticulture they have going on here in #%@&-ing insane. I have never seen vineyards this size or on such steep slopes, and they’re everywhere along the lakeside.
- I have yet to locate a tobacconist, despite seeing multiple gentlemen walking around smoking pipes. (!)
- The great majority of items we’ve purchased thus far have been within +/- 10% of Toronto retail prices. Two big exceptions are diapers (where name brands are at least +25% of the Toronto price) and draft beer. (I paid Sfr. 8.50 today for a pint of Boddington’s, and the posted prices for other brands have been similar at other bars we’ve walked past.)
- The one local Pinot Noir we’ve tried so far was nice enough, but not spectacular.
More soon!
Friday, November 13, 2009
The long-delayed announcement can finally be made…
My family and I are relocating to Switzerland in the new year! My wife has secured employment with a large multinational corporation (who shall remain nameless on this forum) that is moving us across the Atlantic posthaste. We’ve been holding off on explicitly discussing this online until all the ducks are in their rows. Needless to say, we’re very excited. I am looking forward to taking young Samuel on day trips to explore the canton and see Rousseau-related sights. Who knows? Perhaps Sammy will grow up to guard the Pope? Â 😉 Â In the mean time, I am frantically brushing up on my French. Huzzah!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sammy: Being sick is awful.
Quentin: Indeed. It’s worse when we’re both sick, isn’t it?
Sammy: It certainly is. You’re much slower in feeding me, changing me, and tending to my various urgent needs. It doesn’t help matters at all.
Quentin: I know, Sammy, and I’m sorry.
Sammy: ‘Sorry’ doesn’t quite cut it, does it? I mean, what were you thinking? You could have at least made sure I wouldn’t have to deal with this before creating me.
Quentin: Deal with what — being sick?
Sammy: That is what were talking about, Dad.
Quentin: How was I supposed to deal with that, exactly?
Sammy: That is not my province or concern. You, sir, are the adult and parent here. I don’t see how you could responsibly bring me into this world if you knew I might get sick.
Quentin: I suppose I should have also dealt with the problems of scarcity, injustice, and mortality before bringing you into being while I was at it.
Sammy: Very much so. It would have at least indicated that you care.
Quentin: *sigh*
It’s been about a month, and the baby’s currently asleep, so time for another placeholder post.
Since my last ping, the little guy has been wrestling with various ailments. He had a moderately bad cold during the end of October. Just as he was recovering from that (and we got back to him sleeping through the night), he had his 4-month immunizations and reacted badly to them. Now he seems to have some kind of respiratory infection again, causing him to have troubled sleep while being in otherwise good spirits. We continue to watch him closely.
My wife and I received the H1N1 vaccine on Thursday, being in the high-priority group due to our infant son and sharing a house with someone who’s 8 months pregnant. Now both of us seem to have mild flu symptoms. Whether this is coincidence or not may never be truly known.
Other than dealing with seasonal disease, life continues in its current holding pattern. I read and make notes for writing projects when the boy allows. My wife is in the final days of thesis writing. Sammy continues to grow at an alarming rate. Patient contentment is the order of the day.
There is one item of news that is also worth relaying, but it hasn’t been fully cleared for public consumption yet. Expect an announcement in a day or two. Â 🙂
On the (questionable) principle that something is better than nothing, here is a quick post.
I was working on a longish post (which would amount to a shortish tract) on hypocrisy and envy as democratic vices, but my work-to-date is trapped on the hard drive of my now-dead laptop. This has renewed my interest in doing my serious writing strictly in longhand, and transcribing to digital as needed. As such, I am interested in whatever experience and insight you may have in quality notebooks and writing instruments.
My young son continues his weed-like growth. Our walking explorations of Toronto now range up to 3 kilometers away from home. As we walk through the rapidly-gentrifying neighbourhoods of my youth, I catch myself waxing nostalgic and telling what used to be there. Such foreshadowings of senility aside, I am pleased that Sammy is ever eager to see the city’s sights and able to sleep through even the loudest of urban noise.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Hello to anyone that still pays attention to this outlet, and to those who pay attention to this outlet automatically via RSS! After three chaotic months, I am in a position to begin devoting some attention to this project again. Here’s a very terse summary of what’s happened since my last post, in rough chronological order:
- I resumed working the local farmers’ market circuit for my father-in-law. This required moving my wife and I to the farm to live full-time.
- My wife and I put our house up for sale.
- My first child was born, and my wife endured a long and painful recovery from said birth.
- Awful weather ruined this year’s cherry crop and brought rain to over half the trips I made to made to market in July, making July a write-off for the farm.
- My son developed colic, making August an emotional abyss for my wife.
- My wife tried resuming work on her Ph.D. thesis, with poor results. (see above)
- My wife and I sold our house, spending a week in a mad whirlwind of packing and readying the house for the new owners.
- The farm underwent a food safety and traceability audit, for which I was responsible for preparing the farm. I now know more about this subject than I ever thought I would.
- A variety of these and other factors led my wife to insist that our situation at the farm is untenable. I ceased working at the farm and took over full-time parenting while my wife got a renewed handle on her thesis.
- Shortly thereafter, we moved out of the farm and back to Toronto, saved by the support of kind and generous friends.
So here I am, back living in one of the two cities I love with the flux and anxiety of the summer receding into the distance. My wife and son are both healthy and happy, and our near- and mid-term future appears stable. I’m hoping that this will allow me the leisure to begin posting here again on a regular basis. I guess we’ll see. Â 🙂
I have been making progress through A Fair Country while killing time in the waiting room of my wife’s OB/GYN. In two visits, I’m now over 1/3 of the way through. If my son continues to loiter, I may have it complete before he’s born.
As with everything of his that I’ve read to date, I am deeply impressed with Saul’s thesis and his execution of same. He defines Canada as a “Métis civilization” and identifies the long-denied yet deeply pervasive influence of Native thought at the “third pillar” of Canada. Saul spends the first section of A Fair Country (which is what I’ve read thus far) elaborating on and providing evidence for this definition, going so far as to state that our much-vaunted tradition of multiculturalism in Canada is not a recent invention in fact an implementation of an originally Native concept of inclusiveness. For these reasons and more, this is a book I wished I’d had while I was still in school, but I’d be afraid of citing due to Saul’s quite explicit and pointed criticism of the academy and formal, logocentric academic methods. (While reading this book and cheering internally, I’ve wondered not a few times whether my own personal love-hate relationship with academia makes me biased in Saul’s favour.)
Saul’s deeply interesting corollary to this main thesis is that we are a country in denial, and this denial is the source of all our pain. He argues that we pretend as if we are a “monolithic nation” (either of English, French, or American imperialist origins), and if we only embraced our original diversity/the Native aspect of ourselves then we would end our perpetual frustration as a country and as a culture. One would think that, as a supporter of the Great Books pedagogy, I would be a target of Saul’s critiques. However, Saul specifically and repeatedly focuses his critiques on modern ideas of English, French, and American nationalism, to such an extent that he defends classical Athens against the modern democracies’ attempts to claim lineage to her. This certainly does not make Saul a critic of modernity, but it seems that he’s sympathetic to my mode of thought — at least to an extent that we have common cause against a common foe. As of my reading to this point, it does not seem to much of a stretch to draw parallels between Saul’s ideas regarding Native communities and politics and those of antiquity that I study. (Specifically, there are interesting similarities between what Saul describes and Mary Nichols’ interpretation of Aristotle in her book Citizens and Statesmen.)
I will post more as I read more.
From today’s Toronto Star: Â “Tory leader chides city unions — Toronto strike galls taxpayers, Tim Hudak says in his first day on the job”
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If you liked living in Toronto with the political climate of the mid-1990’s, you’ll love what’s coming in a couple of years. Ontario’s political pendulum is swinging right again. People are getting frustrated at the Liberals’ half-assed attempts to undo the damage from the last time the Tories were in power. (See my earlier remarks regarding the Toronto strike.) As a result, they are champing at the bit for the Tories to come back and “fix” things again. It’ll be all the more fun to watch this time, though, since most of my friends who were on the shit end of the stick last time are now property-owning consumers more likely to care about lower taxes than a healthy social safety net.
In my most private, most cynical moments, I wonder how many people I know who proudly sported their “progressiveness” yesterday at Pride will be voting with their wallets in 2011 and make Hudak the next Premier of Ontario. In those moments, I am all-the-more glad I’m soon to leave this province for America, where the pendulum (for the moment, at least) is going the other way. If nothing else, the Americans make less pretense at social justice than folks around here, which makes the injustice a little less galling.