SwissWatching

…is difficult to do. For weeks, we have been sealing the windows against buzzing plastic vuvuzelas and honking car processions.  The park behind our building has become a center of World Cup noise—boy, do kids loving blowing on those horns.  It was bad the night Switzerland beat Spain. Also, in our town of Balkan, Portugese, African, Turkish, and other immigrants, any win from Balkan or Portugese-speaking countries elicits rounds of buzzes and honks.  The apartment buildings are decked out in a wide variety of warring flags.  I kind of think spectator sports are generally ridiculous, particularly when they bring out everyone’s nationalist and sexist leanings. And even if I liked soccer and nationalism, we don’t own a TV and I don’t have time to watch. If I make leisure time, it’s going to go towards picking and baking strawberries, not watching men run around on a field in South Africa. I’m trying to finish my master’s thesis and prepare for a conference on the EU, here.

**complain**

Anyway, if you are trying to avoid the World Cup in this fine country, here are some tips?

1. Don’t live in a town with representatives from many nations.  If you do, head to the most isolated Alpine valley you can for the affected time period.
2. Keep your windows closed.  You never know when an important team to your neighbors might win.
3. Don’t take buses.  They have notices that their routes might be disturbed because of the World Cup.  I’m not sure how buses and the Cup are related.
4. Stay outta the street.  You might get flattened by people more intent on alerting their neighbors to the new World Cup status than on saving gas money.
5. Don’t talk to anyone other than Americans or students currently taking exams or finishing theses.  Everyone else will launch into a discussion of soccer.

Wait.  I hear buzzing and honking.  What just happened?  The Internet tubes tell me that Portugal just beat Korea.  Are our neighbors cheering for Portugal?  For Brazil beating Côte d’Ivoire?  In preparation for the upcoming match of Switzerland v. Chile?  Oh no, we’re going to Portugal on Wednesday…

There are not many fruits you can go pick yourself in this country.  The one widespread fruit-picking availability is strawberries, not apples like it is in the northeastern US.  Thus, even though we’ve been getting plenty of strawberries and cherries the last few weeks from our CSA, Adar and I decided we had to go picking.

Adar, Seth, and I agonized over where to go (using this helpful listing).  Adar called a bunch of places, found out about pesticide use, opening hours, and prices, and after we checked each place on sbb to see if we could get there by public transport, we settled on Fraises de Bussy.  They have an adorable pdf ad, the owner (Stéphane) was nice on the phone, the price was right (5 chf/kilo), picking was “non-stop” (no lunch break in a field!), and no pesticides used!  This was a much more casual, smaller, lawless, place, I think, than the type Swisstory’s Jessica blogged about.

We took a little local train up from Morges, on which you have to request a stop.  We stepped out into fields, and followed signs to the strawberry picking.  Then…the heavens opened.  Within seconds, we were drenched.  Only Seth’s high-tech rain jacket was sufficient protection, and that only went to his hips.  We sprinted towards the farm, Adar wheeling her vegetable cart at top speed.  A kind man stopped his car and asked if we’d like him to take us somewhere, but we turned down the offer and aimed for the tent-covered stand in the distance.  A few seconds later, the three of us ran under the tent, soaking, dripping wet.  Once we caught our breath, and in my case, wiped the drops off my glasses with a dryish patch of shirt, we laughed about how silly it was that we’d come and it started to pour.  Stéphane thought we were hilarious.

We stood under the tent, laughing and chatting with Stéphane. We took turns pushing the tent up to release the pooling water, took some photos, and since we were already wet, Seth and I ventured into the fields for a few minutes to grab at least a few fresh strawberries.  They were tasty.  Since the rain didn’t seem like it was letting up any time soon, Stéphane decided to just go home for the day, and he offered us a ride back to Lausanne plus two kilos of strawberries he had picked this morning.  We took him up on the offer.

As we drove away, a couple showed up to pick.  Stéphane graciously offered that they could help themselves in the fields.  They went out with their umbrellas.

Tonight: 2 kilos (well, a bit less…we’ve been eating them) of strawberries worth of baked goodies.  Yummm.

This week, tomorrow to Sunday, I’ll be performing in 5 concerts at the Theatre du Jorat in Mézières, a little country village about 15 minutes’ drive northeast of Lausanne.  Here is a link with info about our concert,  Choral Attitude.  The theater is in a gorgeously renovated, wooden barn.  If it was a bit easier to get to via public transportation, I would go there all the time for shows.  As it is, I take a bus to the Lausanne metro (M2), the metro to the end of the line (Croisette), and then a bus from Croisette to  Mézières (it works, but it is tedious).  Yesterday, during our dress rehearsal, the whole town had the distinct perfume of cow.

The concert features a yodleuse.  She is super cool.  She yodels, she dances ballet, she plays accordion, she speaks French with an awesome Swiss-German accent, and it turns out she can also conduct choirs should the need arise.  Also, she uses a pitch pipe; the only one I’ve ever seen in Switzerland…she had to explain to our conductor how to use it.  Probably the best part about being in this concert, at least as an American, is getting to be on stage with her and listen to her.

So, needless to say, our performance will be very Swiss.  Not traditional, but full of references to the traditional.  There is a percussionist on stage who has a full set of instruments meant to resemble Swiss sounds, like cowbells, hooves, and churchbells.  Oh, there are also a few choirs.  I think a lot must be lost on me, but it is still pretty exciting.

All of this is to say, if you are reading this, and you are in Switzerland, you should be buying your tickets now.

In other news, Seth just got a job.  Yay Seth!  He’ll be working at the World Health Organization, doing statistics and data analysis for a project on micronutrients.  Double commute to Geneva, here we come.  Anyone have an apartment to offer us in Geneva or near the gare in Lausanne?

We got Pentecost last weekend, instead.  However, it is window-washing season.

And in Estavayer-le-Lac, a lovely medieval town on the banks of Lac Neuchatel, things were looking a little froggy this weekend.

It took me a year of living in Switzerland before I found out from a fellow chorister munching away on a carac during a bus ride that there was fudgy chocolate hidden under that bright green exterior. The frog design makes them particularly cute at this bakery.

Switzerland is mainly known for its wintry sports scene, of which we sort of take part by snowshoeing and once-yearly terrified sliding down mountains, but wow, is summer amazing.  The sun just started to shine, our CSA provided us with a kilo of delicious strawberries last week, the public pools are open, the 2009 wine vintage is ready for drinking, and the fields of canola flowers are in bloom.  Since I can’t be an academic writing machine 24/7, I’ve decided I do need to take advantage of the season, so the past two weekends, we’ve gone on fun little day trips.

We went to the Caves Ouvertes in Valais (caves ouvertes=open wine cellars) with Adar and Horesh, buying plenty of wine from grape varieties I’ve seen only in Valais.  We were able to decide where to go by simply picking a village (Chamoson) off the map provided by the official web site that looked like it had  dense collection of vineyards, there turned out to be welcome tables and a free little shuttle around the town, it was busy but not crowded, there was as much free wine and raclette as we could down, and everyone was friendly.  What an odd setup for Switzerland; it was great.  I highly recommend it.

Building on such success, we decided we would go to the Caves Ouvertes in Vaud this past weekend.  Rather than choosing the Lavaux as our destination, we went for something more unusual and aimed for the  Bonvillars region alongside Lac Neuchâtel.  This was much less organized than our day in Valais…there were signs in the towns that announced the existence of caves ouvertes that weekend, but no signs, shuttles, or people directing visitors to said caves, and the vineyards weren’t especially evident from the road.  Fortunately, we’d decided to turn this into a bike expedition as well, making use of the second bike we’ve recently acquired.  We took the bikes on the train to Yverdon-les-Bains and planned our trip using the incredibly helpful veloland website.  As it turns out,  Lac Neuchâtel has flat, non-trafficky paths and roads alongside much of the lake, so it was gorgeous and easy going until we climbed into the hills towards the vineyards and my bike refused to switch into its lower gears.  Eventually, we found a winemaker in Concise who was happy to let us try and buy some wines, and we sipped away and munched on bread before turning around and heading back to Yverdon.  Given that I haven’t bike in a year, my legs were really sore, and I was too tired to do any work that night. But now I feel better and am hoping that maybe this weekend we can combine a bike ride and strawberry picking adventure as a break from studying human rights law (final exam next week…).

By the way, the winegrowers all seem to be saying that the 2009 vintage, while still young, will be incredible given a few more months, as the grapes were exceptionally sweet and healthy last fall, so stock up!

There’s a storefront that I often pass in Renens with a big picture of a pumpkin labeled “ludothèque.” I never gave it much thought, though I guess I would have concluded it was just a store that had closed down some past Halloween. (Jackie thought it was a daycare with a pumpkin theme). Not so! Natalie recently explained what a ludothèque is:

A toy library is a library from which toys, puzzles, and games are lent out, functioning like a lending library. Toy libraries offer play sessions for families and a wide range of toys appropriate for children at different stages in their development. Toy libraries provide children with new toys every week or two, saving parents money and keeping children from getting bored. Popular in the French-speaking world, toy libraries are called ludothèques.

Great idea, right? From what I can gather it’s a very common thing in France, Switzerland, and Quebec (where it’s called a joujouthèque!) It’s obviously good for the environment, and if libraries are already lending CDs and DVDs to big people, why not games, toys, and puzzles for the little ones? It was so great an idea, I decided it needed a Wikipedia page in order to popularize it outside of the Francophonie. So I went ahead and created a page for it, originally calling them “Toybraries” in English (based on the first one I found in the US, Toybrary, because it sort of approximates the construction of ludotheque as “ludo” = play and thèque from bibliothèque. Ludobrary sounds kind of weird I guess. Playbrary?). Eventually after doing research and turning up federations in the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand—all linked on the Wikipedia page, of course—I settled on the blander “Toy library.” The blockquote description above is from Wikipedia, or in other words, I just wrote it.

Of course what’s now needed on the Wikipedia page is a history section. Toy libraries have existed since at least 1935, according to a master’s thesis from 1995 by Julia E. Moore of Kent State University [PDF], when one was set up in Los Angeles. The idea apparently reemerged in the 60s and 70s with Head Start and other legislation. Interesting! Well, it’s back to real work for me (sorting photos from the weekend?) Hopefully a committed Wikipedia-er will pick up where I left off and summarize the 46 page thesis in a section called history, which I’ve just added.

P.S. By the way there’s a Swiss association online. They’re called Ludotheken in German.