Puppies!

We’ve been reduced to wandering the streets like lost puppies.

Our Swiss town shuts down on Sundays, so after a morning of lazing around doing nothing (reading books, surfing the internet in a brainless manner, organizing our single clothing armoire), we headed out to check the town’s movie theatres for listings.

We could just look them up on the web, but roaming the streets without some sort of purpose feels weird to we who are accustomed to striding hurriedly to our next destination, so we seized upon our task, pointless as it may have been.

All the theatres in our town seem to be owned by the same company, so each one’s front door is pasted in white pages that list its own movies, as well as all the other movie-houses’ showings.  There’s no need to check every individual theatre’s listings, but that’s what we do anyway.

If anyone had a bird’s-eye view of our Sunday morning roamings, they would assume we are idiots, going from theatre-to-theatre, checking the identical postings as though it mattered that we’re at the Lido, the Apollo, the Rex or the Beluga (its real name, don’t ask us to explain, we don’t know the answer).

If anyone could eavesdrop on us at every stop, they would hear us re-enact the exact same conversation at each one, puzzling over whether the movies are in English, German, Italian or French, or what manner of subtitle they have. I tell Dave every single time that “Alleman” means German, not “all-languages.”

That we can repeat the same conversation without breaking into hives is evidence of marital fog, a condition that allows us to forget what was said one to another only minutes earlier. This amnesic state preserves marital stability and social order. We would get checked for early signs of Alzheimers, but to this day, neither of us has thought to bring it up during doctor visits.

What was I saying?

Oh yes, we were wandering like panhandlers, minus the begging, when we happened upon two churches in a neighbourhood of old apartments fronted by wrought-iron fences and elaborate tiny gardens with unreliable-looking wood patio chairs. As we stood outside one church debating whether it was English, French or German and I reminded Dave again that “Alleman” does not mean “all-languages,” a couple emerged from the church, smiled at us and let loose a stream of what I can only assume was German.

“See, that’s ‘Alleman,'” I said, never missing a beat on my campaign to achieve ultimate know-it-allness.

As it happens, I was correct, but now we were on the street chatting with people who didn’t really speak our language and neither did we speak theirs. It could have been socially awkward, but we relaxed, comfortable in the knowledge we would forget about the exchange in a few minutes anyway.

That did not happen. Within seconds they retrieved a fluent English-speaking man from within, who invited us in for coffee and sweets. His name is Daniel, a multi-lingual Swiss missionary. Mercifully he did not introduce us to the 100 or so smiling German-Swiss inside, because it would be pretty tiring to explain repeatedly that we didn’t have a clue what they were saying and that we just hoped this wasn’t some kind of cult that would club us senseless before drugging us into shaving our heads, wearing robes and loitering about airports.

We left a little later, emails and phone numbers exchanged, along with a few plans for expanding our small little English enclave.

One could suppose that with a paucity of homeless people in Switzerland, churches have taken to combing the streets for foreigners, but in truth we had happened upon a particular hybrid – Swiss Christians – two very friendly groups mixed into one. It was inevitable that we would be drawn inside, caffeinated, fed with appropriate doses of sugary/buttery goods and then dusted off and returned to the wild. These are the people who brought the Red Cross to the world, so why not rescue a few Canadians?