SwissWatching

Today, as I approached the platform in the train station on the way to class, I saw a crowd curiously gathered around a group of men in orange reflective vests, surrounding the trash can on the platform.  Turns out the trash can was a diversion.  The three men in vests, employees of “RailClean,” the part of the SBB that cleans train stations, were busy cleaning.  One was taking notes on his clipboard, using the shiny-as-usual trash can as a desk.  The other one was standing there, watching.  The third, and this was the exciting part, was cleaning.

What was he cleaning?  Oh yes.  He was cleaning the cement rail/arm rest on the side of a bench on the platform.  More precisely, he was removing the heart that had been tagged on said cement rail with what looked like a permanent marker.  Even the other Swiss people, who normally walk by RailClean employees scrubbing trash cans without a blink, were excited by this one.  So I stood along with the crowd and looked on in amazement.

The guy had a glass box, which you can see in the photo above, which he was fitting, open side down, on top of the enemy heart.  He was slowly destroying the heart by way of blasting the power hose, which entered through the top of the box, at it.  The box was only useful in so far as it allowed said power washing to take place in broad daylight in a busy train station without getting more than a square 10 inches wet.  Maybe the box had a vacuum, too?  Or maybe it was not water at all?  In any case, it was very effective; by the time my train came and I thought to snap this picture, two minutes after he started, the little heart was almost gone and the cement rail was looking sparkling (well, as sparkling as cement gets) new.

Ah, the jobs that the US could create…inventing specialized cleaning machines, paying people to clean, paying people to take notes on people cleaning…

Starting in January, we became members of the Jardins D’Ouchy CSA. By now, we have gone to 4 pickups of our large basket of vegetables, full of local winter goodies,which is essentially about 3 bags full of root vegetables. Fortunately, with the exception of celeriac, which has the unpleasant taste of celery, we like winter vegetables. But we can’t wait until spring and summer veggies, particularly the strawberries, which is a specialty of the farm which supplies the fruit (for now, we’re talking apples, jam, and this week, locally grown kiwis!).

I wish we had thought to join a CSA (or, as they are known around here, une association pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne, AMAP) earlier. They first began in Switzerland, and they are still very popular here. We thought to join one last summer, but had to hang out on waiting lists until January. If you are living in Lausanne and looking to join a CSA/AMAP, look at Jardins du Flon and Jardin Potager as well, but I know ours (again, Jardins D’Ouchy) is currently looking to expand and is accepting applications to join in May.  Also, by the way, if you’re looking for a more direct relationship with your local farmers and vegetables than Migros or even the market, but not quite up for the commitment of a CSA, I would also recommend trying out Marché Durable, which already has several groups established in the Lausanne region.

We get a basket twice a month in winter, once a week or so in summer, and we get what is in season right here.  And when I say right here, I mean RIGHT HERE.  Now, almost all of the food we eat comes from fewer than four miles away.  !!!!  What we like about our CSA:

• Local.  So local.  So fresh.  We do not have to go to the market or store and try to figure out what is in season and where the food was grown; that work is already accomplished for us!
• Every week, when we go to pick up our vegetables, there is at least one of the Jardins d’Ouchy farmers around.  We can ask them questions and talk to them.  We are getting to know who grows our food!  At some point, they will organize an open house at the vegetable farm, and I think we can go volunteer there in general should we so desire.
• The pickup ritual.  We bring our own reusable bags and we measure out our own veggies.  We are told how many grams of each kind of vegetable we are to take, and it is up to us to weigh them as precisely as we possibly can.  I am slowly developing a better sense for how many endives make a kilo, for example.  This is useful, but probably not for the people who have to wait behind me in line as I slowly attempt to hone in on the right weight.  Also, I like that everyone in the Jardins D’Ouchy community trusts one another enough to let each person weigh his/her own vegetables carefully and not cheat.
• While we had to shell out a lot of money up front (although paying in installments is possible), based on our calculations, the money we spend on vegetables should come out about the same as when we were going to the market every week.  And in reducing the middle-man costs and providing farmers with money and customers up front, the farmers can plan a more stable and equitable life.
• The challenge.  While we are unlikely to discover many new vegetables at this point, as we already bought and cooked every unfamiliar we could find in Switzerland last year, which is generally a selling point for CSAs, we will get more carrots, more beets, and more celery root than we’d ever imagined.  Cooking to fit the season, which we have already been doing, has just been made more challenging, because we now cook in proportion to the available quantities of the vegetables that are in season.  We have little choice in the vegetables we receive, and we are determined not to waste, so we’ve been eating some things that we’d not otherwise have made, or at least not so often.  If we’re really desperate, we can usually find a couple people willing to take vegetables off our hands.  And we can always supplement our given vegetables with a few extras from the market.
• We can also buy fresh eggs straight from the chicken and raw milk straight from the cow.  We haven’t gotten milk, but the eggs are really nice.  No more worrying about making sense of the labels on the egg cartons in the store!  And the dairy farmer can be paid a fair wage for his cows’ milk.
• We are now part of a little community.  It would not be crazy that this type of community could, say, result in friends at some point.

CSAs are not just a Swiss thing anymore.  We are hoping to join one back in the USA at some point, too!  Or even help to organize one, should none exist.  There are a lot of resources out there on the Internet, and even the American Jewish community seems to be jumping on the CSA and local, sustainable food movement bandwagon.  See Local Harvest, Hazon, and the Just Table, Green Table URJ initiative for just some examples.

Jackie had a choir rehearsal today, so she couldn’t come to our biweekly Yiddish class. At around 8pm the power went off in the building briefly, then came back on, and we continued. About half an hour later, the power went off, this time for good. At first we thought maybe it was just the Jewish community center but then we realized it was the whole neighborhood, so everyone packed up to leave. I was at my most helpful and resourceful, thanks to a flashlight app on my cell phone (no joke).

Emergency lights were on in the hallway, and we all made our way out to the street where some street lights were on, but no traffic lights and no lights in any of the buildings. We all looked around and inquired apprehensively about how everyone was planning to get home as my bus (or maybe the technical term is tram—they’re run on electricity) slowly and loudly made its way up the hill. It came to a slow halt, I got on, and it crawled up the rest of the hill powered by some mysteriously loud source of backup energy. At the top of the hill I got off to transfer to another bus. While the traffic lights were still out the information screens for the buses were still working (!), helpfully reporting that my bus was severely delayed. I checked the trains on my phone (which was low on batteries…uh oh), which seemed to be unaffected, and ran back down a different, much steeper hill, to catch a train to Renens.

Now that I’m back I see that, indeed, there is a major power outage affecting parts of Lausanne and the canton of Vaud. But none of the news sources have much to report beyond that:

• 20 minutes reports some residents heard a déflagration—an explosion
• tsr reports that the police say people are trapped in elevators.
• 24 heures quotes several officials. Jean-Yves Pidoux from the industrial services of Lausanne says, «Comment ne pourrais-je pas être au courant de la panne. Je suis resté dans mon bureau pour travailler et j’y suis désormais coincé. La porte fonctionne avec un déclencheur électrique…», roughly “How could I not know of the blackout. I stayed in my office to work and now I’m stuck. The door functions with an electric trigger.” (These electric door release systems are dangerous! One trapped us in our apartment building in Paris last summer.)

Jackie’s on her way home now—the power went out at her rehearsal but then came back on ten minutes later. Interesting…

Update: reports seem to indicate that around 11pm power started to return to some areas, and work continues.

We’ve complained about ads in Switzerland before and posted a clip of Jon Stewart mocking them, so we were pleasantly surprised when we recently came across some hilarious and original ads for the Swiss Federal Railways. (Ads for Switzerland are another matter—we’ve seen some good ones, including the Swiss Mountain Cleaners, which you may remember, and more recently, “We do whatever it takes to make your holiday perfect.”) Just like the Swiss Federal Railways’ official names, which appear on trains in German, French, and Italian (respectively SBB, CFF, FFS—read more on Wikipedia), the ads feature three characters: Sergio, Benoît, and Beat. Sergio sounds Italian, Benoît sounds French, so I guess Beat is a Swiss-German name?

In fact, it is! As their website says: “Sergio from Ticino, French-Swiss Benoît and German-Swiss Beat are the three friendly faces of the new SBB leisure time campaign.” And according to Wikipedia: Beat is pronounced BEH-awe-t. It derives from the Latin beatusmaximus. It is not popular in the rest of the German-speaking world. It is popular in Switzerland because of Beatus of Lungern, the Apostle of Switzerland. I’m not sure if Sergio or Benoît have similarly specific Swiss-French or Ticinese connotations.

Anyway, we’ve been seeing billboards featuring this trio and Jackie saw a video online of them playing in the snow, advertising the railways’ winter deals. The concept is that the three are testing out different deals offered by the train company, and the ads feature them in a variety of settings, including train travel on your birthday with the “Happy Birthday travelpass”:

The first video is now gone, it seems, which is too bad (when I finish this post I’m going to use their comment form to ask them to put it back online.) But another video featuring them in a museum is online. watch it here:

There’s a form setup so you can be alerted by text message when a new ad becomes available. Jackie signed me up, so I’ll be sure to let you know.

We don’t have a television or a television subscription.  Neither do we have Hulu.  Normally this is fine (except maybe the Hulu part), but it’s the Olympics!  While we’re not such sports fans, I do like watching figure skating and random other winter sports once every four years.

When Michelle visited last week, we went to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (did you all know the Olympic Committee is headquartered in Lausanne, of all places?). While it is a bit pricey and usually probably pretty boring, it was a good time to go.  It had three temporary exhibits on the Vancouver games: on the “greening” of the Olympics and its venues, on the contribution of the local First Nations and an exhibition of some of their gorgeous contemporary art, and on the graphic design of the Olympics.  While the museum obviously shows only the positive of the Olympics, both historically and right now, at least it does it well.  The displays are top notch, the text translated into flawless English, it has a good mix of media, etc.  It was a little weird to be learning about Vancouver from Lausanne.  What it successfully accomplished is reminding that I do, actually, want to watch some of the events.  See (almost) what we saw, here.

We have not quite figured out how we’re attacking the problem of actually watching the Olympics.  We’ve already missed all qualifying rounds of everything, so we’re starting a little behind.  Furthermore, with the time difference being what it is, the Opening Ceremonies are at like 3 am, which isn’t so useful for live viewing.  We are open to suggestions on how to watch, including invitations to your TV rooms.  We are currently pursuing two paths:

1. Zattoo.  With this legal, Swisscom-endorsed Internet service, we have low-quality, live access to many boring channels across Europe.  Television Suisse Romande is airing much of the Olympics, in French, which we can understand well enough.  Better than the German options, at least.  Sadly, the BBC channel that is covering the Olympics does not get shown on Zattoo.
2. NBC.  Only a bit of content is available to “international viewers.”  With crafty use of a VPN and someone’s cable subscription passwords, we just might be able to watch all of the content, live, as it were.  Anyone have passwords to offer up?

Go Teams!

Update, Sat 13: We managed to watch the Opening Ceremonies in their entirety on Television Suisse Romande via Zattoo this afternoon (btw, we paid for hi-def this month).  They were pretty awesome and would have been awesomer could we but hear the poetry and speeches and such without them being dubbed over in French.  Also, a Swiss guy won the first Olympic gold!  Not that I’ve heard of him before, but apparently he looks like Harry Potter.  Hmm.  Aaannnnnd, we watched some “biathlon” (code for cross country skiing plus rifle shooting).  Any of you seen this sport before?  Women, all European and blond-haired, skiing and shooting rifles.  Does this even get TV air time in the US?  Yikes.  Isn’t the Olympics supposed to be promoting peace, not war and paramilitary training?

The easiest criticism of Twitter is the “what do I care that you just ate half a bagel?” complaint. So I hope you’ll indulge me as I describe my hilarious, very Swiss, meals this past week. I spent Monday through Friday (today) in Champéry, in the Swiss Alps, near France, at a tutorial on game theory and computer science. PhD students came from all over French-speaking Switzerland to attend, and breakfast and dinners were included every day. There were talks in the morning, a break from noon to 5pm for skiing (or other activities, I guess), and more talks in the evening, followed by dinner at a different restaurant in Champéry each night. Aware of the perils of trying to eat vegetarian and lactose-free in Switzerland, I didn’t come unprepared—a good part of my luggage was food, including butter and soy yogurt I planned to refrigerate by leaving outside on my balcony (a great solution until it rained on the last day!)

Monday

Dinner

Before the first dinner, the organizers ask if anyone is vegetarian. Two (!) hands go up, out of the fifty or so people there. My extreme minority position leads me to not try to further marginalize myself by informing them of my lactose intolerance. That night, at the restaurant, a waitress comes around to find the vegetarians and at this point I ask about non-cheese options. She tells me not to worry, and I end up eating a salad plus salmon. I’m not so unhappy, all things considered. So far, so good.

Day 2

Breakfast

I go down to the buffet breakfast  at the hotel and see a sign next to the super-liquidy scrambled eggs saying that eggs can be prepared to order. I immediately inquire if eggs can be made for me without butter, with oil instead. Asked how I’d like them prepared I’m at a loss (later I recalled that scrambled eggs are called “mish-mash” eggs in French) so I just say that the way the super-liquidy ones were prepared is fine. And, having been taken at my word, a few minutes later I am presented with an unappetizing liquidy mush of eggs, presumably cooked in oil. Why should I have expected otherwise? When I taste them I decide they’re undercooked or swimming in oil. Or both. Needless to say, I don’t order eggs any of the days that follow.

Lunch

I am informed that Coop (the supermarket in town) is closed at lunch time, so my plan to buy ingredients  and make my own lunch is dashed. Instead, I go to a restaurant advertising a lunch special (only 15 CHF or about $15) and order penne all’arrabiata. It’s not bad—except in retrospect when I describe it to Jackie and she points out that it sounds like they went to the store, bought penne and canned arrabiata sauce, and well, you can picture the rest. And then they charged me 15 CHF.

Later I get coffee at a cheese shop (I went in because they were advertising homemade hot chocolate—but the chocolate itself was made with milk, alas). After ordering and speaking French to the proprietor I hear her take a phone call and speak in perfect English. On my way out I check out the cheeses and find cheddar. Excited (and still committed to my French) I ask her about where it’s from. But then when I get to the word for the name of the cheese, I stumble: should I pronounce it “shed-air” or will that make me sound like a jerk? I cough and then pronounce it like they do in Wisconsin instead. The cheddar is from Britain and I buy some, planning to keep it on my balcony.

Dinner

We go to a fondue restaurant. A big pot of cheese isn’t as bad for me as it sounds—they usually use aged cheese so I can have a few bites. And they usually also have rösti (big Swiss latke) on their menu. When I walk in I find a waiter and inquire about vegetarian options, informing him of my lactose intolerance. A few minutes later, a waiter comes to say they’ve figured something out! “Spaghetti bolognaise?” “Non, non. Je suis végétarien.” “Oh! Pardon.” Later they returned to find out if pasta with vegetables would be okay. This turned out to be exactly what they said—pasta with steamed vegetables and a tiny bit of sauce. Why should I have expected otherwise?

During the inevitable conversation about my lactose intolerance that ensues at the table someone asks if I can eat pasta. “Sure, why not?” “Well, doesn’t it have milk as an ingredient?” “No. Just eggs.” “Eggs? Really?” Instead of arguing (or checking Wikipedia) I turn to an Italian student who hasn’t been paying attention to the conversation. “Not to be racist,” I start, and am immediately called out for my typical American behavior. He is not offended—and he is very knowledgeable about pasta, even about making it oneself. (There are often eggs in pasta.)

Day 3

Breakfast

I bring down my jar of peanut  butter and eat PB&J. The Eastern Europeans I am sitting with this find this hilarious and once again I am called out for my Americanness.

Lunch

I go into a bakery and buy my Swiss food of last resort: a tuna-fish sandwich. (See Jackie’s extensive run-down of Swiss sandwichery.)

Dinner

As on the previous days, I ask a waiter about vegetarian options. “Fish?” they say. OK, I guess. A strange looking salad comes for everyone, including me. It’s a cold fish salad with one leaf of lettuce (no joke), including lox and some other types I can’t identify. And then the main dish comes. More fish. Recall that we’re in a Swiss skiing resort, a village covered in snow up in the Alps, in the middle of a land-locked country. How did the fish even get here? But we’re at a fish restaurant, so I guess I have no cause to complain about the food I’m being served, just about the very existence of the restaurant. Also, I don’t really like eating fish.

Day 4

Breakfast

Having made it to the supermarket to buy more soy yogurt, I eat it with granola. Very Swiss.

Lunch

I go skiing for the first time, and find out what everyone who’d been skiing the whole week had been eating for lunch: nothing. After the workshop ends at noon, they immediately grab their skis and head to the slopes, and later they worry about food. Further evidence that Swiss people don’t really eat. I eat part of a Cliff bar during the ride in the cable car. After skiing, I try to find food in the restaurant at the top of the mountain. No luck—I eat chips and beer instead and then bread with cheddar when I get back to the hotel.

Dinner

We eat in a meat restaurant. Not “meat” as in fleishik but a restaurant with a menu consisting only of meat. As an appetizer everyone is brought meat broth. I get cream of tomato soup (which is good—I eat it with lactaid pills). Then, while everyone else eats slabs of beef (?) I am served a surprisingly diverse set of vegetables plus morels (a type of mushroom). And they do something with the veggies that’s not just steaming them. I was happy. As were the meat eaters, because a short while after serving us, a waiter comes around with a platter of meat offering seconds. I ask a Swiss person about it and he claims that this is typical of fancy restaurants. Uh huh.

Day 5

Breakfast

More soy yogurt with granola.

Lunch

The conference ends at noon so we head to the train station. With a little time to kill we investigate lunch options. Four of us go into a restaurant with a few people in it, though  none seem to be eating anything. But it’s 12:30—they must be serving food, right? After seating ourselves and waiting for a few minutes without anyone coming to talk to us I get up and go to the bar and inquire if they’re serving food. Nope! Just drinks. They point us in the direction of one of the restaurants we already went to, but first we try the Migros (the other supermarket). Closed at lunch time! In the other restaurant they have two types of sandwiches for sale: ham and salami.

On the train I’m currently eating my bread and cheese, and dry fruits, and chips, and peanut butter. I said I came prepared, right?

P.S. After another discussion about the relationship between lunch and laundry, I have news to share on the question of why Swiss laundry machines get a lunch break: back in the day (speculation was in the post-war era but people were vague on this point) women who didn’t work outside the house began to cook for their families around 10:30am or 11am. As a result, in order to ensure that circuit breakers didn’t trip due to the surge in electricity usage, laundry machines were set to automatically shut off for an hour. This is consistent with the fact that our laundry machine was off around 11am. But lunch isn’t until 12pm. But if you want to cook lunch for 12pm you need to start earlier! Case closed?