My Incredibly Stupid Swiss Landlady

Can you believe it she thinks that in Switzerland if you have an electric oven it is liable to lose power if other people in the apartment block are using electricity.......ummm hello! wake up and smell the coffee...it's not a third world country here...you are talking out of your arse woman. It's Switzerland not Swaziland.

I think I need a stiff drink and a punchbag and its not even 11am.....these people!






Spot the difference?

Impending Doom........

Or how I can be awake at 5.25 and having to get up as I've already run through all the nightmare scenarios that I can cope with for one morning! Let's see the oven isn't working properly and in my nightmare version of events the best case scenario is that the engineer doesn't turn up to fix it as the landlady is swiss and therefore ineffectual, and so the whole family has to eat out on Christmas day, which means McDonalds as nothing else is open...worst case, we're all suffering from e-coli/salmonella on boxing day because I trusted the oven to cook the goose and it failed me, despite trying its best for over 6 hours....

I just know that something is going to go dreadfully wrong, I considered demarcating a line on the kitchen floor this morning and setting the "don't cross the line" rule early so as to avoid a banshee like response when someone gets in my way once to often when retrieving themselves a beer from the fridge.

The only really decent restaurant in this hellhole is shut on Christmas Eve, so now it looks like another battle with the oven and potential botulism or should that be "botchulism" or a trek into Geneva taking in mass there instead of in the strangely pyramid-like structure that passes for a catholic church in Nyon. (One can only think that faced with a plot of land between a chateau and a roman ampitheatre the architect thought - "Aha! I know...I'm going to do something Egyptian..It'll fit perfectly!")

I've lost all sense of Christmas cheer this year and would happily run away somewhere, only knowing my luck it'd be shut! Instead I am plotting how to give the best impression of being a domestic godess without ending up a gibbering wreck in the corner....hence the cunning plan of baking biscuits (pre-mixed dough and no need for rolling pins, just chuck a little flour about the place for effect) before I pick them up from the airport. Perhaps the "do not cross" line isn't the best approach if this is my goal??

My lists are no longer a source of comfort to me, instead they travel through my mind in the early hours of the morning, suggesting disaster, after catastophe, after major emergency.....some involving medical attention, others just on the scale of a diplomatic incident. And to add insult to injury my bloody christmas crackers haven't arrived yet, prompting images of a new christmas tradition having to be created just to get shot of the tat I was going to put in them, maybe a table based basket-ball themed game? Points for hitting the bin and not each other?

Or may be I should just admit defeat early, not clean the house, ignore the ironing, cancel the washing, and in so doing, confirm to myself that hosting Christmas was the worst idea and possibly most stupid idea I have ever had. Why didn't we just book flights home and if need be eat two dinners in one day to avoid any preferential treatment of either set of parents?
There is no simple answer. The only things worth bearing in mind at this late date is that rain is Jesus's wee-wee and that snowman you made won't go walking in the air with you because you're a stupid benny.

There is hope...a nice person in Switzerland!!!

I know I didn't think it was possible, and in a way I am loathed to admit it, but it seemed only fair to publicise the fact that contrary to popular belief and all my experiences here......there is actually a nice and perfectly reasonable person, who even made eye-contact.....

But just so that you don't think that this is me going mad, I promise that this person is really the only nice person so far and I am not just becoming inured to their anti-social and bureaucratic ways.

Saturday afternoon saw us venturing into Geneva to laugh at the locals who seem to think that it is "fun" to spend a cold afternoon running up and down a hill in Geneva in a competitive fashion to commemerate some important battle or other that took place hundreds of years ago, and which for some reason now lost to the mists of time needs to culminate in the smashing of chocolate cauldrons....yeah quite, don't ask, I don't know why someone thought that would be an appropriate way to celebrate a military victory.

Anyway in order that we might laugh at the locals we had to secure a parking place in the world's most expensive car-park, how difficult can that be eh?? Well this car-park does benfit from a clever little system of lights and pressure points that mean that above each occupied space is a red light and yes you guessed it above each vacant space a green one. But in true swiss fashion this "efficient" system doesn't account for the way that the swiss drive, or park for that matter and so what may look to the untrained eye like a green light winking at you after 10mins of cruising the parking garage is not actually a space, but a large mercedes parked over two spaces and cleverly avoiding any of the pressure pads!

Much swearing at locals and laughing at the rest we set off towards the airport to start our own battle with baggage handling. British Airways having managed to wrench the handle clean off a rather handy and expensive suitbag on Tuesday night. Anyway we turn up at the airport, parking in the arrivals car park as we were expecting this to take some time and a great many forms. However once ushered through to the bit between customs and passport control, where you have to feel that you really shouldn't be as you aren't arriving off a flight we get to the office of the baggage handlers, which to all intents and purposes is empty....not a soul there. I was about to exclaim how useful this was, much like the banks being shut at lunchtime to make it impossible for you to nip in during your lunch hour...when there he was (al though we weren't at this stage aware of his status) the only nice person in Switzerland!!!!

I proceeded to hand over the broken bag explaining I had called Berne and Bremen on Wednesday and had been told we had to come and file a report...he looks at the bag and disappears into the back office from whence he came, and a short while later reemerges with another bag. I thought he was confused and thought we'd lost a bag, although quite why I'd show him a bag to explain this, only God knows. But no, in fact he was very reasonably and most unexpectedly offering to give us a brand new bag, of the same make and in fact of quite possibly twice the value, and no it was not one that they had stolen from an unsuspecting traveller!

Not only this but he only asked for a few personal details, required no forms to be filled in and no signatures or ID to be shown! The man is waging a war against red-tape and it would seem that he is winning, or it was his first day and may be his last? Which reminds me the swiss don't use the word "unemployed," no if you haven't got a job here then officially you are in fact "unemployable."

Bah Humbug!

I really do wish that it wasn't December. I mean apart from the cold (we finally had some snow) and the Christmas shopping to do (I can thankfully stick two fingers up at Swiss airlines now as I have found someone brave enough to ship crackers to me here) it also means that my next door neighbour now feels compelled to change the decorations in the hallway....How do I know this given that I haven't been out yet today? Well the banging about in the hallway was just too much to ignore and so I had to spy through the hole in the door. Now, I haven't seen the finished product from the full-frontal aspect yet, but just from the small glimpse I got through the door, its ugly....its very silver (think an international tinsel incident) and very tacky. It is also rather distracting as it appears that she may realise that I don't appreciate her interior design skills and is therefore securing it with 9,000 nails!! Or should that be 9 inch nails?

But hey ho at least some skiing may get done soon as the snow is making its way down the mountains. In the meanwhile well there's freezing rain and slushy roads to enjoy. Oh and the disturbed kid two doors up who seems convinced that free-styling a snowman is the way forward, hence blair-witchesque style offerings on the back lawn.

There is a theme here I think....swiss people and twisted ideas on decor? They just start from a very early age here I guess, bad taste in the blood may be? Does anyone from anywhere else in the world marry a swiss person? Or is that why this whole thing came about? A long history of inbreeding producing a nation of the completely tasteless and aesthetically stunted? As a theory I don't think its a particularly bad one - the only famous swiss artists I have managed to find are Giacometti and Klee and neither of them stayed in Switzerland so may be that's why they managed to achieve what they did?

Anyway going to go and take some pictures of the monstrosity outside the front door, I suppose at least we should be thankful for small mercies...tinsel burns rather well and very easily......
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