“If you receive this message, then your father and I are dead ….”  is a wonderful way to start a video clip, don’t you think? It grips one’s mind in a way that home movies of kids blowing out birthday candles can  not.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Switzerland's Appenzellerland is quintessential Swiss, in so much as it looks as foreigners would expect Switzerland to appear with dairy cows, trimmed pastures and garden gnomes.

We set out for Appenzellerland at the eastern edge of Switzerland on Saturday morning. The first two hours of the train-ride from Switzerland’s Bernese region, where we live, to Switzerland’s east feels as though it is on straight rails, such is its swiftness, but the tone changes on the last train switch. There, the train moseys over rails that bend through a valley, perched up mid-slope with a steep pitch bottoming out in rivers and creeks below.

Cattle appear in the landscape in greater numbers, including a few in what looks like exceedingly tiny farmyards or generous back lawns.

We took a brief stop at Kronberg to try out the bobsled ride. It is a short pit stop of a place and our first introduction to Switzerland’s German region where we quickly learned that English was more welcome than French.

Despite the worldwide-held view that Switzerland is a happy multicultural land, close-up things look a little different. The French, Italian, German and Romanesque populations abide one another in a strange state of suspended animation where nationally they are welded as one, but locally, are in dozens of little pieces, each asserting cultural superiority over the other, like Manitobans over Saskatchewanites.

We’ve heard rumblings about this before – how the Germans resent the French for refusing to learn German, although almost every German speaks French, or so we were told. It turns out that is not true. At Kronberg, the Swiss-German pointedly did not speak French, and any attempts to speak French to them produced scowls that suggested we had walked into a room where the occupants were pausing from a heated argument, but would recommence the minute we left.

We started off with French at the Kronberg bobsled ticket desk, but the clerk looked at us as if we had just said, “Nabadaba ding dong, ala laga bingo!” – which we might have.  Our French is still very rough,  and so we switched to English. The man took our money, but when we asked where to go next, he gave a general wave to his right and said, “Just go around there, it will be obvious.”

If that had been true, we would not have first tried to board the bobsled at the end of the track instead of at the beginning.

When we muddled our way to the correct location, we discovered that each ‘sled’ had its own hand-brakes – in other words, only our own strength would keep us from careening down the mountain at hyper-speed. Adding to the excitement was the fact that the loading operator did not speak French or English, and for all we could tell, might have been mute.

He indicated a set of sled-handles to us, but could not, or maybe would not, elaborate on whether applying or releasing the handles would produce the desired braking action. It seems a small point, but an important one, especially because of our mounting panic as we saw that  our bobsled was moving down a line-up toward launch.

Dave yanked away at the handles, trying to figure them out, and in his confusion suddenly became fluent in French.

“Arretez? Arretez? Does this mean stop???” he exclaimed more than asked, to which the operator returned a blank gaze and so the machinery clicked in and off we went up to the mountainside without any degree of confidence we would make it down in an intact state.

That’s when I turned on the video to deliver that last message to our sons in Canada.

As the sled rounded the top, Dave mucked about with the handles until he was pretty sure he had them figured out, but then was forced to abort that exercise when we realized the next bobsled was approaching behind us. It wasn’t very close yet, but when one is about to embrace earth’s gravitational pull down a mountainside on a sleek steel track, the maximum amount of distance between bobsleds is most desirable.

As a consequence of all this, we rode down in a conservative manner, braking mightily before every curve, wondering aloud whether anyone had ever flung themselves off the tracks, which appeared not only possible, but inevitable given than the curved portions were banked with safety nets.

We made it down to the bottom safely, but as no operator was stationed at the finishing point to catch the sled or tell us what to do next, we scrambled out while the sled was still moving, a view enjoyed by a slew of Swiss-German families who captured our awkward departure on their cameras. Maybe befuddled tourists are the real attraction at Kronberg.

If you go:

Cost: $9 Canadian

Duration of ride:  2.5 minutes

Ride thrill: Variable. Our ride was quite mundane owing to the above-mentioned uncertainties, but a ride without leaning on the brakes could be considerably more interesting.

If you careen off the rails: You will land in a steep slope of pasture, possibly hitting a cow. The ride is at the foot of the mountain, so is not as perilous as to cause dismemberment or immediate death. A bad landing could result in some severe bone breaks.

Could you miss it and still feel you had lived a life worth a postcard or two home? Yes.

Learn more about the sled ride by clicking here.

Dave tries to blend in as a wedding guest? Maybe not.

Every now and then as a reporter, I would stumble into an event that was fleeting – something was happening that I knew I would not see again and that had I arrived moments earlier, I would not have known was about to happen. Those moments seem divine, as though God is showing off.

Yesterday, we took a train across Switzerland to the end of the line – yes, the tracks really stopped there. Then we took a 5,380-foot gondola ride up the side of this mountain, picked our way along a cliff-side trail, plunged into the mountain through a winding cave that spiraled down until it opened to an ancient hermit cabin, then along another short cliff-hugging trail to find an enormous cave filled with people – it was a wedding, and then suddenly from the shadows, voices singing “Heaven is a wonderful place.” This video isn’t very good quality – the cave was quite dark, but it captures a rare moment. It doesn’t do justice to the acoustics of the small group of  a capella singers’ voices echoing off the ancient stone walls.

Click here to watch the video. Tomorrow: More photos, more Ebenalp wanderings.

I'm not scared, why do you ask?

We biked around the circumference of Lake Biel, which sounds like a relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon, but it turned into a grueling 55-kilometre marathon in the hot sun. Nevertheless, we’re glad we did it, if only so that we could earn the respect of the Swiss. Click on photos to enlarge them, although there is one that I am sure you will wish you never laid eyes on.

What kind of resident was American Jack Donaghy when his wife delivered their baby in a Canadian hospital? I will say: Deemed non-resident. That is, bureuacrats would not look at him, having deemed him to not be where he physically was. I wish I was a bureaucrat.

I live on two continents. Not physically, that would be impossible, unless my ice cream taste-testing spurs new horizons of bodily expansion.

That has not happened. Not yet. But I am going to give it a try. In the meantime, while I am physically here in Switzerland, I am still a resident of Canada, according to the government. I’ll say it another way: So far as the pencil-pushers in my nation’s capital city of Ottawa are concerned, I am there, even when I am here.

The government offers four kinds of residency: Factual, deemed, non-resident or “deemed non-resident.”

I would like to see what it is like to be a “deemed non-resident.” I bet it means I can stand at the corner of Portage and Main in Winnipeg and spit at passersby without getting arrested for it, because I am “deemed,” to not be there. That is, the actual physical fact of my location will not in any way correspond to my government’s view on my whereabouts.

This is why it appears politicians lie – they are living inside a “deemed” reality, constructed by bureaucrats hidden deep within the bowels of Ottawa, and I mean it when I say bowels. Bureaucrats certainly give off that bowel-ish odour.

I would shy away from making such a sweeping pejorative statement about an entire group of humanity, but who will attack me for saying it? Nobody. Does this not support my point?

I meet the requirements of the first residency status, that is, I am a “factual” resident, when in fact, I am not there. How do the bureaucrats do this? It is a marvel. They are building their own virtual world as far as Canada’s citizenry is concerned.

Why does the government want to say I am there when I am here? Here’s why: So they can tax me.

It gets more complicated. While I am factually in Canada under its tax definitions (I half expect my Victoria neighbour Dan to look out his window right now to see if I am doing anything about the weed growth in my front yard), I am also a resident in Switzerland under its tax treaty.

This means Switzerland gets to tax me as well.

See all the fun the bureaucrats are having, picking me apart, tax-wise.

Oooooh Canada, where am I?

While bureaucrats blur the lines around reality by penning amazingly long and complex guidelines, they are eloquently articulate about getting money from me. They say “we tax your income.” A wonderful statement in its brevity and clarity.

Things have improved somewhat since we last lived outside of the country (not factually, just physically). At that time, the government was equally clear that they would tax us, however, we were not allowed access to any government-funded programs.

We don’t use a lot, so it didn’t bother us much until we returned and discovered that we would have no health care for four months.

It created a bit of a fuss at the Canadian doctor’s office when I tried to pay cash. I felt like the fictional Jack Donaghy of  NBC’s sitcom 30Rock when his wife delivered a baby in Canada and the staff told him the health services were free, only in this case, the situation was reversed.

I was still paying for the health services; I just wouldn’t get any.

That has changed apparently, and we will be able to get healthcare when we return to Canada, but then that is what the bureaucrats say today. We won’t know factually for sure until we get back home.

Ice cream, oh wonderful ice cream that sustains us through our worst hormonally induced mood swings!

To listen to food mavens the world over, the best food is that grown or made close to home.

How we got to this place where geography supplants sugar and butter-content in relation to food quality is beyond me,  and  I would do some serious journalistic work to track this progression if I was not so lazy.

It is this kind of thinking that led me to risk $10 on a 1,000 ml carton of local chocolate ice cream.

I am risk-averse in the extreme. For years I ordered the same kind of food in the same kind of restaurants until my friends, thinking that chicken fingers might be forming crusts in my extremities, took me to an international dining establishment and forced me to eat food that even today I cannot name, such was the trauma of ingesting foreign cuisine. The restaurant might have been a Taco Bells.

But to get back to the 1,000 ml of local-to-Switzerland chocolate ice cream: Why do they say “1,000 ml” on the tub instead of one-litre? Here’s why: $10 for 1,000 units of anything looks like a good deal, while $10 for one unit of anything seems to be not so much. This was my first clue that the ice cream may be more about “brand” and marketing than it about the serious work of arterial clogging.

The Schokoladen/Chocolate ice cream “Polarfuchs” (I didn’t name it, I just bought it), is made of milk, sugar, cream, egg yolk, chocolate, “Mars,” binding and carob bean.

Until it hits the word “Mars,” for which I can find no German translation, the recipe is the same as mine, except that I would never put milk in ice cream.  Ice cream should carry an air of danger that invigorates the consumer with the breathtaking possibilities of keeling over from a heart-attack or stroke before making it to the bottom of the dish. Milk alone will never accomplish this. Cream is needed, Devonshire cream if it is handy.

Moving further down the list, “binding” triggers suspicion. I’ve never had any problem getting ice cream to bind to my thighs. Why add more? Am I not thick enough? And carob bean – pah, who puts carob bean in a quality chocolate product?

Nevertheless, it is “local,” made about a 20-minute bike ride from my home.  It even comes in a cute non-sophisticated white container and has a homespun website that, despite its simplicity, I can tell they must have paid good money for because homespun does not necessarily come cheap in the electronic world.

I don’t want to pick on an upstart ice cream manufacturer based on one sampling of its product line, but this ice cream stinks, with so little chocolate in it as to render it almost tasteless.

And yet, according to food magazine writers, this should be the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted. It’s dairy comes from Swiss cows. I’m in Switzerland. It’s chocolate comes from Swiss chocolatiers. Again, I am in Switzerland. The manufacturer even names the families who supply their ingredients. I’m close enough. I’ll bet I could find those families. Wouldn’t they be surprised?

On the upside: It’s consistency is quite pleasant and might be just the thing for people who find North American brands’ flavorings a little overwhelming. Also, it beats the last local sorbet I tasted in 2003. That was in Sooke and the sorbet was made from locally harvested seaweed. I did not spit out the spoonful of this stuff at the time because I was painfully aware of my own palate’s limitations, but in hindsight, it was another frozen dessert travesty.

I don’t blame the little Swiss company for all of this. I blame food gurus who fooled me into thinking this might be better than the Ben & Jerry’s that was just six inches away from this bucket.

Next: I will give Polarfuchs (remember, I didn’t name it) another chance and try out their local-strawberry ice cream.

Will carefully attired T-shirt man ever turn around and notice designer-handbag girl seated behind him?

English 101 in a foreign land consists of watching your mouth, as I was reminded last night on our evening stroll.

At a store something like The Bay or Macy’s, a young otherwise-normal-looking man dressed up in a boyish sailor outfit topped off with a white sailor cap a la “Popeye” stood in the women’s cosmetics department, where he was engaged in the competing tasks of  trying to attract customers to his kiosk without drawing attention to himself or more specifically his ‘uniform.’

Manhunting is best done in packs. Note stilettos: They both attract a potential mate, and serve as a significant sharp-edged weapon should the woman wish to repel him. See the guys in the background who have snagged a few gals - is that Jersey Shore's "The Situation" in the ball cap?

Quite smug in the conviction he did not speak English, I commented as I sauntered past him,  “Do they pay you extra for wearing the hat?”

“As a matter of fact, they don’t, but they should,” he replied in very good English.

He seemed relieved to commiserate with someone about his grave misfortune. I say this on the grounds that he followed me a few steps whinging about his lousy job. I don’t think he was looking for the right moment to smack me in the back of the head.

At least, that is what I tell myself in order to assuage my guilt for openly mocking him when I thought I was safe in the confines of a linguistic silo.

But that is not what I am writing about. I’m writing about the Thursday night “meat market.”

Thursdays are special in Biel, and for all I know, in all of Switzerland. It is the night that stores stay open until 9 p.m.

Every other night, they are closed before seven. It is inconvenient for shoppers, but on the whole it is a good idea in that retail staff don’t have to give up their evenings for their low-wage jobs.

Also, it saves sailor-boy from having to spend a few extra evening hours in costume when his college buddies might show up with their girlfriends, ensuring that he would never have a girlfriend himself.

This young woman has snagged a few males, but she knows she can do better. She's still shopping the crowd.

The later store hours give the town’s young single population an excuse to take over the streets for another type of wares-browsing: Boyfriend/girlfriend shopping.

The girls/women dress up way above the grade required for a casual shopping excursion. They stride past the males clustered at the street corners, none of whom, by the way, I think are worth the effort.

“Go to school,” I want to tell them. “Don’t settle for the kind of guy who aspires to Jersey Shore fashion levels and street-corner posturing.

Here are the photos from last night. Am I wrong?

Note: Apologies for the photo quality. I took these on the sly, not wanting to have someone challenge me, grab my camera, demand answers, although that would have led to a much more interesting blog post.

Gender fashion inequities apparent on the street: She worked hard in front of the mirror for hours to achieve this look. The guy in the background carrying a gray sweater has only seen his reflection in passing glances in storefront windows since 2007. He does not own a mirror.

This is definitely a catch-and-release fishing pond.

This woman is back looking to refund the guy she picked up here years ago.

Women hunt in pairs so as to appear to not be looking at the loitering males. Do you think these two are looking at one another? They are not. Their eyes are gazing past each other, surveying the prospects. This prevents them from being branded with the dreaded "desperate for a date" syndrome" - a death knell for females no matter how good-looking they may be.

Trolling must sometimes be concealed by feigning interest in shoes.

This may fascinate no one but me, but I couldn’t believe the Simplon paddlewheel deck was open to their engine room. Falling in would undoubtedly be fatal, or at least, could reassemble one’s limbs in an unpleasant fashion. Click here to see it.

We also watched a dance troupe perform for a music video at the Biel train station. I think the smaller girl may have dislocated her hips. Click here to watch.

The Simplon's aft-deck: Lovely, even in the rain.

Chateau de Chillon (francy French name for Castle Chillon) is a 10-minute boat ride or 60-minute walk from Montreux, which might make it sound like a can-be-missed side-trip to this luscious region that was the trade nexus for France, Switzerland and Italy. That would be a mistake.

We decided to take the castle tour before walking around Montreux’s old town because  we could imagine coming to the end of the day and shrugging it off. We’re backwards that way. Do the least appealing thing first. This is because we were both born on the prairies and so are accustomed to the bad coming before the good, like winter before spring. That is who we are.

From the train station, we wove down Montreux’s streets until we found ourselves at the promenade skirting Lac Geneva (locally known as Lac Leman). I say “found” ourselves because we definitely got lost in this short hike, due to differing opinions on the directions we received at the train ticket desk (which we pretended was a tourist office  – that might have been the beginning of our problem).

Noisy, crowded, panicked crew - all part of the fun.

Dave said the agent said to go one direction, but I was certain she had pointed in the other. So we rambled around a little bit. It added to our aching legs and sore feet at the end of the day, but as I said, we are prairie people at heart. Too much inconvenience and physical discomfort is just about right.

We decided to take the boat to Chillon, and purchased two first class tickets – we felt rather rich about it, but they were only $2 more than regular fare, and even at that we only paid $8 a pop. The clerk laughed along with us as we joked over our minor extravagance. In hindsight, she was not so much laughing with us, as at us. It is really hard to tell the difference until later.

The boat arrived, a genuine paddlewheel named “Simplon,” horns blaring such that my eardrums are still fixed in a concave position. It swept  up to the wharf a in a hurried fashion, a little behind schedule, which may explain why the crew did not so much guide the deboarding passengers off as evacuate them, then pull us in as though the wharf were ablaze.

The crew shouted something about first class going upstairs, and it was our arrival there that made us understand the ticket gal’s happy demeanor. We had been suckered. First-class meant you could go upstairs and as upstairs only cost $2 more than downstairs, everybody jumped at it. It was packed and decidedly more uncomfortable than the life being enjoyed by the second-class cheapos lounging around on the lower decks. We rejoined the not-so-huddled masses, where we really belong.

Approaching Castle Chillon.

But not before taking in the athleticism of the top-deck wait-staff. Most of the boat, up and down, is a restaurant, packed to the gunwales with crowded tables that the waiters raced to and from the kitchen that was set amidships. The waiters lined up like Olympic sprinters, rocking on their feet nervously, shaking out their legs. When their dishes were called, they plunged into the steaming kitchen and emerged at full speed, defying the laws of physics as they darted among the throng of strolling passengers, the waiters’ arms concealed beneath a half-dozen teetering plates. It was worth the two bucks just to see  this.

From across the lake, we could see a white mist approaching. It was not a mist, it was a monsoon that chased the outer decks indoors, giving the boat the air of an over-packed refugee ship. I half-expected to see the fog unfurl the shores of Vancouver Island before us, with a Canada Armed Forces escort leading the way.

And so we arrived at Chateau de Chillon, somewhat wet, amused and already ripped off. We sighed in satisfaction.

Tomorrow: The castle

Off to Montreux, home of Shania Twain, on the shores of Lake Geneva.

This photo was taken with some risk. Store clerks massed around me saying in Italian, French and German that I wasn't allowed to take photos in the store. Good thing I only speak English.

I’ve always been a fan of refrigeration, which is why living in Europe puts me into a perpetual  gag of food-safe horror.

In Spain, refrigeration is looked on as optional, as evidenced by the reek that emanates from the grocer’s meat section.  Room-temperature hogs heads, goat legs, and eggs stacked up in random aisles, these are the things that float to the surface when recalling Spanish-style food-storage.

I expected something different here in Switzerland, what with their awareness of the passing of time, which in the case of uncooled meat corresponds to decay, but I was wrong about that. Mercifully, the Swiss do not hang massive hog-heads to boast their meat supply (I almost posted a photo of a typical Spanish meat department’s hog head display, but decided against it. I am not Stephen King).

They do, however, have the hairy, hoofed goat leg on a spit display, along with a deck of fat hamhocks hanging from the ceiling, giving their meat department the aroma of death… although not as much as the Spanish meat department which we ventured into only with the greatest of speed in order to escape the inevitable projectile-vomiting phenomenon that would follow should we linger.

Store clerks were also unhappy about this photo. I take this as evidence they are ashamed of their unrefrigerated meat practices.

This leaving-meat-out-to-decay could be a matter of economics – refrigeration saps a lot of energy, but more likely it is the backwash of tradition, the sort that in earlier centuries made the weak-stomached look over the ocean toward America and decide a better life and fresher meat waited over there, even if that meant contending with a vigorous population of fanged carnivores, which could lead to becoming meat oneself.

In the meantime, I’m contending with a refrigerator the size of a camping cooler, so I’ve taken to shopping daily for our dinner.

It sounds so quaint to take my little shopping cart, and stroll through cobble-stoned alleys to get our supper, but it’s a real pain. Food-gurus in North America make it sound like this practice ensures the freshest possible supply of food, but it really only applies to bread. The reason Europeans shop daily is because the food-transportation system here ensures that produce will spoil within 24 hours of purchase. I’ve yet to have a pack of strawberries stay overnight in the fridge without waking up to find a few wearing fuzzy white coats, probably because they are unaccustomed to the chill.

In the spirit of fairness, however, it has to be said that so far, Europe’s out-of-season strawberries lack the cardboard texture associated with their North American cousins.

Our Swiss refrigerator - Costco Coleman coolers are larger. The freezer compartment could hold an Oxford dictionary and that is not saying much.

This is, of course, good news for the competing farmers street markets, which are an absolute delight here. I cannot complain about them, although I’ve made several attempts in this direction. I can’t do it. It’s very frustrating.

Nevertheless, this tidbit-shopping-regimen goes against my North American prairie-bred siege-shopping mentality. I was trained to consider my family  to be teetering on the edge of starvation if my house held anything less than a 16-cubic-foot freezer packed to the rim and a basement pantry of shelves sagging under the weight of canned goods. In winter, we added to our food stores by using the barbecue to store frozen turkeys and large roasts. In a pinch, we stowed banks of frozen bread loaves in our car trunks.

No doubt, somewhere a European-living-in-North-America is right now writing a blog about Canadian and American’s ridiculous food-hoarding and refrigeration habits.

A note to that European: We do it because a sudden snowstorm can render us shut-ins for days, floods transform our yards into moats around our homes overnight, and earthquakes can chew up our infrastructure in minutes.

And now I must go eat a bucket of strawberries that haven’t spoiled yet.

I’ve been sneaking around Switzerland feigning interest in adopting a second language, but I got caught yesterday, not once but twice.

Back to the books!

I studied French in the months leading up to our move here on the grounds that our Swiss town is formally bilingual in German and French, suggesting that all things are equal between these two languages.

And then my French vocabulary outnumbers my German: Bonjour, je voudrais, et, j’ai, nous somme, vous etes and adieu and the always handy “sacre bleue!” (which I have since learned is mostly a product of Hollywood stereotyping – the French here don’t use it, at least not around me). This is not to mention a few phrases I picked up from my French Canadian relatives when they were really upset, but I will spare you that.

The only words I know in German are “Achtung!” and “Ober-fuhrer.” The latter is the name by which my long-ago German manager Alf Buelow addressed me, his then-secretary. Yes, I was pushy even in the 80’s.

Since arriving here, I realized that I chose poorly: There is much more German spoken than French, and then came the revelation that most people here speak some English, with many being quite fluent. And finally, every time I try to speak French, some Spanish shakes loose (an after-effect of living in Madrid), rendering me unintelligible in a freaky triangle-shaped dialect understandable only to me. That formally makes whatever I say gibberish.

My motivation hit rock-bottom, and so I’ve taken on the practice of greeting people with “Bonjour, hello,” to signal that I’m not a complete cretin and I am trying to learn their language while simultaneously indicating that I am an Anglophone. After this, I say in French “J’apprendre le francais, mais je ne parle pas bien,” which means “I’m learning French, but I don’t speak it well.” Having thus satisfied the requirements of attempted multilingualism, I then switch to English.

This has worked beautifully, up til yesterday when I made the mistake of shopping at 1:30 p.m. when the store traffic hit a lull, giving the clerks some free time. Ordinarily, they are in a hurry. They smile, they say something in English, take my money and get me out of their way.

That did not happen yesterday. Instead, the helpful Swiss took me on.

Beware the helpful counter staff.

First up was the lady at the cosmetics counter who smiled sweetly when I gave her my line about learning French. She then gave me a vocabulary/grammar lesson that left me reeling, pulling me into a protracted French conversation that I still am not sure I completely understood, but it is possible that $895 of Estee Lauder goods are going to be delivered to our hotel room sometime later this week. She was being helpful. What could I do but succumb?

Mentally fatigued from this exercise, I went upstairs to purchase a soap dish (live large when in Europe), and found myself face-to-face with a semi-snotty Swiss Francophone 20-year-old male cashier who had no one in line behind me, and so took great pains to explain French sentence structure and did not give me my goods/change back until I had properly learned how to say that I did not have the store card because the application is in French, which I am only just learning.

I returned home and collapsed, my brain frayed from the amount of new language tracks laid in only the space of 30 minutes.

And now I must stop writing and turn to studying French verb charts, lest I run into those clerks again and don’t show any progress in my language skills. There just might be a test.

These shoes were clearly designed by an architect-school reject.

Shoes. Before 2001, I never thought much of them.

That year, I met Carolyn, a Times Colonist editor who did not so much talk about shoes as that she floated about on a wide variety of them, most of which that were hard to miss. Everyday was a new tutorial in the subtle art of foot fashion. Shoes that I once scoffed at, suddenly seemed possible.

For her, that is. Not for me. I don’t have ankles, and showy shoes would only draw attention to that fact.

I bring this up now because in the days leading up to our move to Switzerland, I read that the Swiss gauge strangers by their footwear. I scoffed, of course, because that is how I treat all new information.

Being derisive of new things/trends is tough in the short-haul, but has its pay-offs.

For example: I  eschewed the bottled-water phenomenon and greeted with delight the turn of public opinion (on May 17, 2008), deriding bottled water as environmentally unsound and not any different from tap water, which is what I, the bottled-water-Luddite, said all along.

It was satisfying to find myself swimming not only with the tide but even slightly ahead of it, although I had to wait about eight years for this to occur. My satisfaction was short-lived when I realized that I could not  point out my foresight to anyone without looking like a know-it-all twerp.

That is why I’m so happy to mention it now, as if it has anything to do with shoes. See how the two really have no relation, but I manage to worm it in anyway.

I ramble. Back to shoes …

I came to Switzerland with a pair of Clark’s sandals that I ordered online from the U.S. and that I haven’t seen here yet. Clark’s, by the way, cost a heck of a lot more here than they do in Canada/U.S.  I got these babies for $70; whereas in Zürich similar fare starts at $156. I could go on about shoe-price comparisons – I’ve done a lot of research in this area over the past month, but I sense that would only draw me away from my point, which is pretty weak anyway, but here goes.

I’ve been watching people watching me as I stumble about the cobblestone in my unique, although not fashion-forward, sandals. My conclusion: The Swiss-shoe thing appears to be true. I can’t be sure, because I can’t exactly collar people on the street, and demand answers of them, shouting, “Hey! You! You looked at my shoes! What do you think of me now?”  What I can say is that women here do glance downwards first, and then hold their gaze on my shoes until we have passed.

My shoes are not that worthy of attention, ie. they are not freak-shoes – I don’t have the balance to contend with anything that elevates me to normal-height, or is remotely stilleto-esque.

It is possible the Swiss stare because they’re wondering how I get around on stump-legs bereft of ankles, or maybe they’re just glaring in retaliation, because I can’t stop watching what they’re wearing. I’ve made mention of it before, but Swiss women strap on adventure when they put on their footwear.

At a sidewalk cafe on Sunday, a woman the next table over was wearing four-inch heels with platforms that appeared to be made of frozen bubbles. How they could support an adult’s weight was something I wanted to see, but they outstayed us, so I never got to see her stand in them. I suspect she sat there all day, looking fashionable, waiting for evening, so her boyfriend could carry her home under cover of darkness.

And now I will stop thinking of and writing about shoes.

Bomb sniffer puppy!

We’ve just learned that a train headed for Switzerland was evacuated because of possible terrorist action. Associated Press reports the high-speed train was in Frieberg, Germany and scheduled to go to the Interlaken Region in Switzerland, which is south of us.

The train was searched; no explosives were found. Nevertheless, that puts a damper on our train-travel plans this weekend.

Stupid Al Qaeda.

Apartment for rent

In almost three decades of marriage, we have owned only three houses (and a cottage).  That’s not much moving, so we don’t think of ourselves as the nomadic type, until we count the number of times we have shuttered those houses to take up residency elsewhere – and that would be four, or five, depending on how you count it.

At one point, we had keys to four homes on three different continents, and I could have told you where the can opener was in every kitchen but the one that I happened to be standing in.

This comes to mind now because I woke up this morning with the urge to surf apartment rental websites. I don’t know why I want to do this. Our hotel is quiet, close to everything and compared to tying ourselves to a lease, very flexible.

And yet, here I am, looking at apartments.