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Wearing new sandals on a day that we would walk 16,538 steps was not really such a great idea, but it is too late to talk about it now. All I can do is soak my feet in saltwater, wrap them up and head out for another hike.

Farmer's market in Biel. Endless volumes of fresh produce, happy farmers, hordes of shoppers all packed into a medieval town setting. Not so bad.

I am in Switzerland. It is required I see new things everyday, even if there are blisters on top of my feet. This is true, by the way. I am afflicted with 360-degrees of blisters.

But enough about that. We  began our day by visiting Biel’s allegedly famous Nidaugasse farmer’s market. Nidaugasse may be the name for Biel’s old town, but I am not sure about that, just as I am unsure about everything owing to my cramped German/French language skills.

About 70 farmers and vendors transform Nidaugasse’s sloping grey cobbled streets into avenues of colour, while the air is filled with the aroma of apples and flowers. Maybe living in Switzerland will not be so bad. We stocked up.

Prices were relatively in line with North American farmer market prices, that is to say: They were high. The pain of the pay-up, however, is mitigated by the freshness and flavor of the produce. Real fresh vegetables are pretty much the same anywhere, but every region seems to have something that brings its own something to the table.

Banks of tulips fill the cobblestone streets of Biel's old-town.

In Manitoba, it is the acidic sweetness of giant beefsteak tomatoes, in Northwest Ontario wild blueberries are the jewels, in Victoria it’s Michell’s sweet strawberries and Silver Rill corn, and everything in Georgia. It’s true, Georgia, U.S.A. farmers markets kill in every produce category. Yum. But we’re not in Georgia now. We’re in Switzerland.

I have not determined the stand-out vegetable here, but it may be their giant red-leaf lettuce that is bowling-ball shaped with an apple-crisp base tipped with gossamer burgundy leaves. It tasted as though I had pulled it from the earth only moments before.

We avoided the line-up at the cheese wagon, however, learned later that was a mistake. As Regula, a local Swiss woman told us, “There’s a reason for the line-up,” and that reason is apparently “Corgemont Special” cheese. The market was packed with locals, probably the best indicator of the quality of the offerings. We decided to make the market a Saturday tradition.

After unloading our stuff at our apartment, we hoofed out to the train station for a 30-minute ride to Switzerland’s capital, Bern.  I’ll write more about that later. For now, I have to figure out how to bandage up my feet before today’s trip to Murten, a small medieval town about a 45-minute train ride southwest of Biel.

We woke up around 2 a.m. Saturday morning to the sound of a man snoring in our apartment.

This was not alarming until my jet-lagged brain realized that Dave was awake. We lay there in the dark, trying to imagine the breathing was coming from anywhere but inside our apartment. It was a weird snore – kind of airy like a woman’s, but too voluminous to be anything but male.

We tiptoed around and decided someone was sleeping up against our apartment door out in the hallway.

Our somewhat austere but very sunny flat.

What ensued was a quiet conversation on who to call about this – Switzerland doesn’t have 9-1-1 – they have some other number that we could not remember, but it didn’t matter because we don’t have a phone line, which raises the little-known fact that foreigners have some difficulty in getting local services – a timely blog topic.

The trouble lies in that a person’s credit rating does not necessarily travel with them, so to the Swiss we are like two unreliable 18-year-olds without any credit history. Utility and rental companies also don’t enter into contracts with foreigners until they have a residency permit, which we are still in the process of obtaining (it will take about 10 more days).

And so we do things differently where we can – for example, Dave’s employer is actually the lease-holder on our apartment. They also send a staffer with us on all official business to translate, negotiate and berate wherever necessary.

In this we are lucky – anyone relocating without the benefit of corporate support is really out on a limb, both linguistically and bureaucratically.

But none of that was helpful as we tried to get back to sleep while a potential drifter snoozed only a few yards away. Finally, I got out my mag-lite flashlight, but not the right one. I left the big prison-guard type one back in Canada. This was my mini-mag – roughly the size of three BIC pens taped together.

Dave on a 16th-Century street in Biel

Not that we had plans to assault anyone, even someone who was sound asleep. Despite the fact the government and utilities treat us like teenagers, we know we are over 50 and there are some things we just won’t do. Also, my mother is still alive and it would worry her to see headlines, “Middle-age Canadians in Melee with Swiss Homeless Man,” or the more likely headlines (because we are the outsiders here) “Hapless homeless man famous for saving cat from tree is attacked by unregistered foreigners.”

I worked in news;  I know this could very easily happen.

Like something out of a sitcom, only without the laughter, we leaned up against the door, brandishing our mini-flashlight and quickly opened the door to find … nothing. And yet, we could still hear the snoring as though someone were standing right next to us.

Further investigation led us to believe it was either the refrigerator venting (fridges here are different – as we learned when living in Spain, they have some strange gas-imbedded coolant system, the details of which I do not understand and therefore readers will be spared any further explanation).

And now it is Saturday morning and we are on our way to the open-air street market, and later to Bern where Dave thinks we will do some sightseeing, but I will, in fact, search for an IKEA.

Easter eggs a la Suisse. They're real eggs - we did not buy any to investigate whether the dye seeps through into the albumen.

In other not-so-exciting-as thinking-a-homeless-man-has-moved-into-the-hallway news:

• Our luggage arrived Thursday night, the green case looking a little worse for wear. I don’t want to say that anyone stomped on it, but it came back with black scuff marks that look like the bottom of a size 9 boot.  Nevertheless, even though it had obviously been opened, nothing was missing.
• Dave’s company rep made an appointment with the Swiss Police for us to take our photos and fingerprints. Anyone who has undergone a residency application process will know how shocking that last sentence was – that foreigners would actually be granted the courtesy of an appointment? Seemed too good to be true, but when we showed up about 15 minutes early, we were waved inside immediately. The clerk was polite, efficient and we were out of there without having to register DNA samples in no time, leading me to think pleasant thoughts about the Swiss.

I have had less than five hours sleep over the past 48 hours – or is it 60 hours? Who knows? Overseas travel has addled my brain, so please excuse any craziness in this post.

Yesterday, almost everything went wrong, just as expected. This is “travel” after all, a word very much like travail.

We saw early clues that things would not go as planned: A delayed flight caused us to miss our connection; then more ominously, when the Air Canada agent called down to baggage to pull our suitcases, no one answered.  Wherever the baggage handlers were, they must have stayed there for six hours – the length of time they had to reroute our baggage, which as I’ve already pointed out – they did not.

Finally, instead of giving us an electronic ticket for the new flight path, the agent handed us an old-fashioned paper ticket, at which point my over-planning, hyper-compulsive organizational neuroses snorted awake and kicked my adrenalin into gear, but I told it to go back to sleep. Stupid me.

That one little failure-to-react-to-administrative-bungling led to ruin,  and by ruin I mean ruined appearance. Our baggage stayed in Vancouver, and so for the moment, I’ve lost my make-up kit, my hair-styling toolbox, 98% of the clothing I packed for over here – the whole shebang.

Thusly, unsupported by all the implements that make me reasonably presentable, I am wandering around Switzerland in a troll-like state.  It’s okay. This is Europe, the land that brought the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale troll to the world, and so I fit right in. All that’s missing is a bridge to crawl under.

The real fun happened, however, when we arrived at the Swiss Air gate at Heathrow where a boarding agent refused to accept our Air Canada paper-issue ticket and boarding pass.

Dave went into speechless gasp mode; I went into ‘not-gonna-take-this’ mode, and launched into a “You may not care about us, but you’re violating your code-share contract with Air Canada and Star Alliance” argument. This must be done carefully, because it is a London airport and disgruntled passengers’ attitudes can be readjusted with the light application of a Taser.

I don’t actually know this. I just suspect it.

But to get back to the agent who was dismissive as only people who deliver devastating news can be: We held our ground until a manager came over and menacingly informed us that they had our credit card information and were prepared to use it.

What did he mean by that? We are nervously watching our credit card balance to see if he went out and bought a car at our expense, but really we are at the point where we don’t care – just as long as they let us on the plane, which they did eventually.

It makes one wonder if we were mere moments away from starting new lives as homeless people in London. Is this how it begins – a little bump off  aircraft in a foreign country, credit cards and all financial resources abducted by surly airline staff, followed inevitably by sleeping on cold pavement, eating in soup kitchens, wandering Hyde Park, that sort of thing.

In Zürich, Dave sailed through the passport check, as is normal. He has on-sight likability so even when his papers are not exactly correct or he fumbles, people smile warmly and wave him through.

Charming Biel/Bienne, which our hotel clerk says is a "dump," but we think it looks fine.

I, however, do not have this innate charm.  People glance over me once and know right away that I’m related to people who were shipped off to Siberia. Europeans in particular can sense this, and so the border official grilled me to well-done before stamping my passport.

Moments later we discovered our luggage was missing. It made sense and we felt a certain calm in the universal consistency that nothing was going according to plan.

Bereft of our earthly travel possessions (aforementioned make-up, hair styling implements, etc.) we made our way to customs, taking a wrong turn at the last moment and finding ourselves un-inspected and in Switzerland. This is a moment when everything goes right for Dave and he moseys along to his train. It is usually a moment where I get arrested/apprehended/turned-back/sent-to-Siberia for 25 years.

For once, that did not happen. We found the train, a few good shoe stores (to settle my nerves) and then our hotel.

For the first time in our lives, just minutes before boarding on a flight from London to Zurich, Swiss Air refused to board us. Drama!

Instead of our original sardine-can seats, Air Canada put us in the roomy emergency-exit row seating – which, by the way, costs $75 if you pre-book your seat. See. Delays are gooooooood.  Sadly, we didn’t rate an upgrade to executive class. Sigh.

What goes through my mind when I am on a plane.

Some days are meant for Prozac, and this is one of them.  After three flights and 14 hours plus one 90-minute train ride, we arrive in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland where we will be whisked away to a police station.

This is true. Before we can  rent a place, start work, order hamburgers, make our first attempts at yodeling, we have to get our residency permit from the local municipality, as represented by their police force.

The last time I had to visit a foreign police station, it was off a gritty Madrid alleyway. There, migrants waited for hours before getting inside the station where tense, gun-swinging officers patrolled a small waiting room that was  jammed with  people from nations where underarm deodorant  had not yet been introduced, which was a bad thing because it was over 35 C and we were packed in tight.

As one uniformed officer-or-soldier roughly herded a burqa-wearing woman and her startled kids through the crowd I tried to look like I had mistaken the station for the coffee shop next door. I was prepared to blurt out an order for coffee at the first sign of impending arrest or shooting, but my Spanish was poor, so I could just as easily have said, “Take me to your leader,” or “I have a gun.”

I’ve been under threat of arrest before, although I didn’t really believe it until afterwards when I inquired from a  police-friend and Crown prosecutor buddy, both of whom said, “Yup, he could have arrested you for (indecipherable legalese mumbo-jumbo).”

But that was when I was a reporter. So while the officer glared, I laughed brazenly, partly because he had once explained how he used glaring to maintain a  “command presence” at a crime/investigation scene, but mostly because I had seen him cower when his 12-year-old daughter walked in on an interview and put him in his place for forgetting to let her know he was working overtime. No cop can recover a “command presence” after that.

But I drift. The point is that just when I am at my worst (14-hours of white-knuckle flight-time plus more than 24-hours without sleep), I am going to try to be at my best so that the friendly Swiss police will lift the gate and let me in to their perfect country.

On one hand, I want it to go well, but on the other hand, if it doesn’t, I will have something interesting to write about – for once.

Today we make the 45-minute-drive, 45-minute-ferry-wait, 90-minute-ferry-ride, 40-minute-drive to the Consulate to get Dave’s visa.  It’s a cumbersome trip that starts with a 4  a.m. wake-up, but it’s necessary because the only alternative is to mail Dave’s  passport to them.

In other words, the passport, a document issued by a federal bureaucracy, would travel  via Canada Post, a second federally overseen bureaucracy, to a foreign federal bureaucracy for approval.  You may notice I used the terms “federal” and “bureaucracy three times.” Yes, mailing a passport would trigger the Bermuda Triangle Law of Bureaucracies, in other words, doom would inevitably follow.

Note: For this excursion, I get up at 4 a.m. Dave gets up at 4:45. This is one of the usual gender inequities of nature, that wherever a couple needs to go, the man can get ready in under five minutes. A woman, through no fault of her own, needs 90 minutes prep-time at a minimum. Am I wrong about this?

Let’s not discuss it now. It’s 5 a.m. as I write, and I’m a little growly, owing to the early hour and the fact that my own visa is nowhere in sight.

Starbucks in Bern.

…… have just learned that only Dave’s visa has been approved. Drama!

Murphy’s law: Just as I finished up the last post about “no news on the visa,” an email came in from the  Consulate. The visa is ready.

Visa-watch Day 3: Nothing.  Just as expected.

Our dog, certified for global travel by Canada, Spain, the U.S. and Australia. Thank you, Spanish immigration services, who by the way, never asked to see his documentation when we arrived in Madrid.

In 1998, Dave was offered work in Madrid, Spain. With assurances that a visa would take only four months to process, perhaps quicker because Dave’s employers hired “international transfer professionals” to hurry things along, we started packing, said good-bye to everyone in a flurry of farewell dinners, sent Boy-the-first over to school in Germany so we’d be on the same continent (he was university-age by then), and notified Boy-the-second’s school to prepare his transcripts for transfer.

And then waited another year before the visa was approved, raising suspicions that we harboured a seamy criminal past that was so unsavory even the Spanish couldn’t abide it.

And so as the year-long wait waxed on, exchanges of this sort grew: At the grocery store, a cashier asked, “Aren’t you supposed to be in Spain?” causing the other cashiers and a mob of shoppers to freeze, turn their eyes on me, waiting (hoping) for a public confession (small towns really operate on this “choral” level – live in one and you will know).

This happened when I filled up the car with gas, picked up Boy-the-second at school, showed up at committee meetings, ordered prescriptions, browsed books at the library, mowed the lawn, gathered my mail … you get the picture.

Meanwhile, Spanish bureaucrats had their fun with us, making us race around getting our dog certified by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for transport (the word “food” in the certification process raising our suspicions about the Spaniards’ intentions), getting police clearances from everywhere we had lived before, even for our sons who were minors on all our past relocations, getting our fingerprints at the RCMP station, and letters from our doctor swearing we didn’t suffer from psychosis, parasites or dreaded diseases (true – I just found those letters while clearing out some old files last week).

But what did we expect from a country famous for the Spanish Inquisition?