Happy Thanksgiving!!

So what does Thanksgiving in Switzerland feel like?

So first, I actually went to work - we had plans to go to a company sponsored holiday dinner, and so with nothing to actually cook, there was so real reason to stay at home. Everyone looked at me strange when I wished them a Happy Thanksgiving - but who can fault them? When was the last time you wished someone a Happy Swiss National Day (August 1st, for those who are interested)?

So after a busy day at work, I drove over to the company's "executive" dining room, where the relocation people had arranged a wonderful holiday dinner for all expats and their families, and I met up with Eric and the kids. So it was a very considerate and thoughtful event, and we actually had a great time. However, a few things came across as a bit strange:

When I got there, I hooked up with Eric only to ask: "where are the kids?" as they were no where to be seen and even not heard. It turns out they had done an incredible job of arranging games and activities for the kids in a separate wing on the same floor - which, I hear every parent out there applauding: what would be strange about that? So what was strange is that they made a separate dinner for them so they didn't even eat with us - basically having Thanksgiving without our kids...

The evening started with champagne and wine - and our company head of HR gave a quick speech to welcome us there and thank us for moving to Switzerland and promoting sharing and learning across the company, etc... this was great - except she spent most of her speech talking about the announcement the week before of headcount reductions at the company and the hard choices and the difficult times ahead, etc....

Really? At a holiday party? I guess you can't ignore it, but should it be most of your speech?

So then up next was a guy who organized the event, who explained the plan for the rest of the evening. He was the one who broke the news that we wouldn't have dinner with our kids; he also explained that they weren't going to serve turkey, but instead holiday dinner choices from Switzerland (veal stew), Portugal (fish stew), and Germany (weiners and potato salad). Now, I don't mean to be American-centric, but where is my turkey? The dinner was billed as a holiday dinner, but if you have it on Thanksgiving evening... Well, we were disappointed, but Eric later found out from a friend there that had been the year before that they had turkey and it was awful - so perhaps they learned from the previous mistake. But Thanksgiving without turkey (or some large bird) just feels a little wrong...

But the food was quite good, and the wine was plentiful (and quite nice) so the missing children and missing turkey were soon forgotten as we met new friends and shared the meal with old friends as well - just like Thanksgiving should be.

Well, we got home early (remember my birthday party: things end in Switzerland when they say they will end)and Eric and the boys watched Thunderball as they had vacation the next day, but with work the next morning I retired early and was fast asleep in short order.

The next thing I remember was being abruptly woken to the sound of screaming...

"SNOW!! SNOW!! SNOW!!!"

It was probably close to 10 pm, and Karl was screaming at the top of his lungs at our first ever snowfall since we have moved here - the boys and my first-in-our-lifetime for snowfall at our home. Eric dragged them outside in their pajamas to document the event. A white Thanksgiving - something to be quite thankful about.

So we woke up this morning to a beautiful white blanket of snow - enough to make snowballs in the backyard and coat the trees, but not enough to make it dangerous to get out and take a morning run. With the temperature at just freezing, it was just about as great as snow can be. We spent the morning renting my skis for the season, and then after Eric and the kids dropped me off at work, they went and got the rest of our winter necessities: sleds, snow boots (those little feet grow so fast!), shell jackets for skiing... Hey Winter: the Somervilles are ready for you!

However, best of all, waiting for me when I got home from work:

A turkey dinner, complete with garlic mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, and pickled red cabbage (we had to throw in a little bit of Switzerland)! It was heavenly - possibly the best turkey I have ever had. What made this also funny is that the original plan was to get a goose - but the only ones they had at the store were frozen, which Eric knew would not thaw in time for our one-day-late Thanksgiving. They did have one fresh turkey left over, but at 10 kilos was much more than we could ever eat - even if we invited over the whole block. So the butcher suggested cutting it in half - right down the middle... So we had 1/2 a turkey - maybe that was the trick that made it taste so good...

Asia out of nowhere!

Eric gave me a complete surprise today - the kind that seemed trivial and non-important to him that was really earth-moving for me:

We were sitting around this morning enjoying the nothing-to-do-ness of this Saturday, when I told Eric I had taken some time while he was shopping to post a blog. And then he says, out of nowhere:

"You know I have an electronic version of all the emails we sent when we went to Asia in 1999 - see, they are right here..."

What???!!!

I knew that two of our friends, Dana Mulligan and Jeanne Virca, had given us amazing gifts upon our return from Asia of binders with reprints of our emails from the trip. And I had also known that one of them (was it Jeanne? Dana don't get mad if it was you) had also included a disk with an electronic version of the letters. Now, in our perpetually disorganized life, my plan was to come across that disk when Eric and I were in our 80s clearing out the attic for our move into the retirement home. But no, Eric blows me away that they are in a file, on his computer, ready for viewing and posting.

And so, with a hot cup of tea, I just spent the last hour or so setting them up in their own blog:

http://ericandsue1999.blogspot.com/

Feel free to visit and read at your leisure. Hopefully it will inspire you to travel as well!

We are not in California anymore...

So Fall is here, with an explosion of color and leaves. At home, people always talked about the Fall colors on the East Coast, and I always felt we had our fair share of Fall action where we live in California - trees turn colors, leaves fall, etc... However the difference here is clear: leaves fall in epidemic proportions; you are ankle deep or more for weeks, and no one bothers to rake them because they are replaced the next day with more. The leaf drop is also partnered with crisp weather, so the mix of crunch beneath your feet and heavy coats really signals a season change.

Eric got a chance to go and visit his family in Ohio for a week, and I took over responsibility for getting the kids where they belonged, while getting my job done at the same time. Eric had left me a great schedule with support from our friends here, so it actually all worked out well.

While Eric was gone, the boys and I got a last minute visit from my Uncle Wolfgang and Aunt Dagmar who came down from Germany to spend a Sunday with us. We had hoped for good weather to go on a hike in the local hills, but we instead had a cold, wet day to contend with. We decided when they arrived to do a walking tour of the city which was quite pleasant until the kids got chilled and bored with window shopping. We stopped for a coffee / hot chocolate (two coffees, two hot chocolates, and one cappuccino for 25 CHF - lord help me, I will never get used to these prices...) but this only appeased the boys for the duration of the chocolate. So I made a bold decision.

Parents in California, please make sure you are sitting down.

I gave Karl the house keys and put them both (age 7 and 9) on the tram by themselves to go home. That is right - no parental supervision to make sure they get off on the right stop, no one to help them across the two streets they have to cross to get to our house, no one to supervise them when they got home that they didn't burn the house down.

And even better: I didn't worry at all that anything would go wrong. I didn't worry that people would stop them and ask where their parents are. This choice was totally normal for Switzerland, and actually when we describe the helicopter parenting of California, people here wonder what is wrong with us. I actually have thought about this a lot since being here, and need to do a bit more research - as kids we had the same freedom that kids have here, but something must have happened in the 70s in the US, because a shift took place that tightened control on our kids, stopped a lot of trick or treating, and drove a paranoia of child abduction and torture that has made us stop allowing our kids to grow up and take care of themselves. If you know or have an opinion, please drop a line...

My aunt and uncle then took our time strolling through the city, enjoying the sites and the shop windows, talking about life choices like where to live, what to accomplish, what really matters, etc. When we got home an hour or so later, they kids were comfy on the couch watching age appropriate TV, and everyone was happy and content. The visit with Dagmar and Wolfgang was really great, and we made plans to meet in the Black Forest in the future for hikes and outdoor fun along with getting Eric in the mix.

A few days after Eric returned, rested and energized, we got to celebrate my first birthday in Switzerland. We had a lot of anxiety - what was the appropriate ettiquette for who to invite, how to invite (would people open an Evite?), would it be too crowded, what to serve to eat, what to serve to drink - we set up the invite as an "apero" which is the Swiss equivalent of a cocktail party, so that the pressure to have a full dinner wouldn't be there. However we stocked the tables with open face sandwiches, butter pretzels, cut vegetables, a platter of cheeses and a pot of lentil stew on the stove. We haven't found a party rental place (yet) so it was plastic wine glasses and paper plates, but we felt well stocked for all possible outcomes. Eric even ordered a birthday cake from a local bakery (no way were we going to trust our continuous bad luck at cooking and baking on a cake).

So, unlike California, everyone arrived at 5:30 pm exactly - just like the invite said. There was actually a line out the door for people to come in. Lucky for us and our party anxiety we were ready on time, so the tsunami of guests was not problematic. We did hit some snags in that the guys who work in my group all wanted beer, where Eric and I decided it would be a wine and champagne party. We scrounged through our basement stock and came up with 12 or so beers, but the mistake was well noted for our next bash. People also commented on the blue birthday cake - I guess color is not common here - but it did not stop people from digging in.

The party then ended just as it started, with everyone streaming out at exactly 7:30 like the invite said - except the Americans who assumed that was only a suggestion - and some Americans who actually arrived at 7:30 to start the party... So we stayed up and partied further until 10:30 or so with a smaller more manageable crowd picking at the food leftovers, and the amazing apple pie our friend Terri brought over (complete with "Sue" cut into the crust).

Overall a great party - one of the highlights was the "clinical suppply" leckerlei cookies (very traditional Basel) I got from the global trial coordinators in my group at work. Find a Swiss person to help you translate the label - my favorite line is "keep out of reach of children and your husband"...

Herbstmesse

Fall is here, and in Basel that means the Herbstmesse (translation: Fall Fair). This is quite an event in this town - 7 locations throughout the city are set up for two weeks with carnival rides and food stands: from pony rides to the 66 meter drop Power Tower; from bratwurst to raclette to sauted liver; from cream fudge to chocolate covered fruit to cotton candy. It is quite literally every child's dream come true with all the neon and music pulsating, people screaming their heads off as multiple thrill rides run in close proximity, and a multitude of sweets is never more than a stones throw away. And like I said - this is all over town, so it just goes on, and on, and on..

Now like any good fair, you aren't going to get away without dropping some cash - but did I mention that a single ride can cost 12 CHF (that is over $12 in today's exchange rates!)? Luckily Karl and Bennett were too short to go on those rides so we stuck to the 3-6 CHF range. The corn in the picture is 6 CHF an ear - would you pay $6 for an ear of corn?? Work friends visiting from California went out with me and the kids one night, and for the rides we did go on, the whole heartedly agreed that no 7 year old would be allowed on them back at home. Ah, yes, we live in the land of few lawyers here...



It really has been a blast (once I let go of the money we were spending) - our favorite ride was the mini Power Tower - a 50 ft or so high tower that raises you up and then drops you in a free fall only to catch you and take you back up to do over and over again. Bennett surprised me with having a liking for the scary spin-me-around rides (isn't he a bit young for those?) and we got in a bit of bumper car action as well. Come to think of it, I haven't seen bumper cars in California in quite a while - this is the place to be for rides that have been banned in the United States...


Now the downside to the fair for me was that the main location was right outside my office building. Mostly that was actually quite cool, as I could look out my window on the 19th floor and space out on the rides going around and around when I needed a break from some intense Power Point - you could actually hear the screams from inside the building! No, the downside was that every day at lunch I would justify for myself why it was OK to again eat fair food for lunch. Bratwurst today,
raclette tomorrow - but walking by the sweets stands proved too much for my willpower, so I would take a bag of fudge or candied nuts with me back to my desk. "Only eat one..." would turn into "try and take some home" and for the most part it didn't happen. I need the fair to leave so I can STOP eating and start losing some weight in preparation for all the Christmas goodies...

And speaking of the holidays, we did get in some Haloween fun...



But the leaves are almost all off the trees - my guess is within the week they will all be done. And I heard there might be snow on the hills on Sunday - let the winter begin!

Canary Islands Part II: The Hotel Buffet and the Naked People

So the hotel we stayed at in the Canary Islands had a daily breakfast and dinner buffet, and so for a modest 80 euros we got breakfast and dinner for each of us for a whole week - we couldn't turn that deal down...

Well, it turns out, our children were OBSESSED with the buffet. It became the focus of their life - what could be better than their own control over what they eat and how much they eat - I am sure it is hard to remember what it was like to have someone decide for you what you eat and if you don't like it having them tell you that you can eat it or go hungry...

So every morning it was the same routine: do they get a pot of hot chocolate or tea?; Bennett would get cereal, followed by eggs (either made to order omelet or standard fried egg) where Karl would go straight to the crepes with chocolate sauce - I swear he ate at least 4 if not 8 every morning - and usually with a course of vanilla yogurt thrown in the middle. They loved to make a ceremony out of the tea or chocolate (I imagine it made them feel quite adult) and if we were lucky we snuck in a piece of fruit.

Toward the end of the trip, when I finally read the travel book, I tried a thing at the cereal buffet called Gofio - it is toasted grains ground into a flour: corn, wheat, barley, etc. - you mix it with milk to make a paste, and then add dried fruits for an incredibly filling breakfast. Bennett starting eating it too, as it kind of tasted like Wheatabix that we eat every morning at home - if you put it in the blender. So enamoroued that I had found a food I had never seen before, we bought up 4 kilos to take back with us to keep remembering the "vacation" experience. Apparently, the wonderful web has a bunch of different recipes to try, so we will be busy with Gofio for a while (caution if you come over to our house to eat, guinea pig...).

So that was breakfast. Dinnner was a bigger deal. First, Karl would whine incessantly all day if we could not go to the buffet at exactly 7 pm when it opened. I don't know if he had visions of food shortages and hoards of people eating everything up - I think most of it was just an excitement of all the possibilities... When we finally got there, the waiter would take drink orders, then the excitement would begin. Each night some of the selections changed, so each boy would stroll around looking at all the options: salad choices, pasta choices, grilled meats, hot dishes, vegetables, and of course a review of the dessert buffet to see how much room to keep. Bennett actually got quite organized and starting bringing down a note pad and pen, and would write down his "order" which upon returning to the table became my job to go get for him. Karl liked the system as well, and so by the last few nights I was doing it for both of them. As much as it sounds like I was their maid-servant, it actually was fun, and made me eat slower, so all was good. Karl was a straight pasta guy - Bennett, on the other hand, would get so creative: beets, cucumbers, pasta with butter, cheese with the orange rind, bread with butter, and a sliced apple...the boy knows what his body needs...

So one night, after serving the boys and having them finish well before me, Eric took them over to the disco to catch the daily awards show, and I sat with my red wine and slowly finished my dinner.

Watching the people that night was probably one of the highlights of my trip. The hotel guests ranged from honeymooning couples to young families to a lot of older middle age couples who left the kids at home, and then a fair showing of senior citizens. The nationalities were mostly English and Spanish, with some Italian and German thrown in - I am sure there were a few Dutch and Scandanavian as well, but probably too few to really count. What made this people-watching so fun was the diversity: I am sitting there in a old wrap skirt, Gap t-shirt, and flip-flops - probably normal fare for a Fairfax cafe; others had obviously packed their "resort wear" and were decked out in formal dresses complete with rhinestones and high heels. It is not that I was out of place - there was everyone on the continuum between me and them. I found the two inch stacked orthopedic flip flops with the rhinestone bling a fascinating choice; and of course all the women who have grown larger than their short skirts and low cut blouses...the tables ranged from couples sitting formally, virtually not talking (even the kids found it strange how many people just sat there and did not talk to each other) to loud boisterous parties of families traveling together. I just loved soaking up all the people and imagining what all their stories were...

One of the nights, two funny things happened:

We sat at a table next to the dessert buffet, and we saw a girl probably no older than three toddle up to the bar. Now, it was pretty clear that she should not have come there alone, but each family has different limits - and hence as it was past our limit, Eric and I could not take our eyes off of her, fearing something here may go wrong. So she takes the serving spoon to serve herself some of the strawberry mousse, and inadvertently puts a scoop the size of a bocce ball into her bowl. After evaluating the situation for a few seconds, she did what logically made sense to her: she took that bocce ball scoop of stawberry mousse in her hand and threw it back into the mousse bowl. Eric, horrified, jumped up and started to help her by taking the bocce ball scoop back out of the mousse bowl and back into her bowl, and then gently pushed her on her way.

Then, if that wasn't enough action at the dessert bar, Bennett went up to get some ice cream. He was very proud that he could scoop it himself, but unfortunately the toppings and sauces were a bit out of his reach. So before we could catch him, he had climbed up onto the dessert bar to serve himself to some chocolate sauce. What made it funnier was that before we could get up an older lady walked between us and the dessert bar, saw him up there, and then turned back toward us and said something in Spanish that I could interpret to be something like :"don't parent's have any limits anymore??"

Speaking of limits, the other funny thing about the vacation was the "naturalists" on all the beaches. Eric and I have both traveled a lot before, so running into topless sunbathers in Europe was no surprise. But we were a bit taken aback our first day at the beach to find so many TOTALLY naked people - and, as my friend Randy pointed out, it is not the people you want naked who have their clothes off. I would say easily 20-30% of the people were in their birthday suits, with most of them being over 50 and most being as brown and leathery as shoe leather. They played paddle ball naked, they went down to the tide pools to feed the fish naked - it was really not a pleasant site at all. Karl and Bennett noticed, but were mostly oblivious - definitely strange, but nothing to get goofy about (thank god). What was funny on our second day at the beach is that we were walking down trying to find a good spot to lay our towels, and every time we thought we found a good spot, there was a naked person next to us. Whoops - keep going, only to find the next spot with yet again a naked person there, too. Finally on about the 4th try we found a nice spot with only harmless topless people...

Alas, the vacation is over. Fall is full swing in Basel, and the leaves are rapidly falling off the trees - winter here we come...

Canary Islands: Land of Volcanos and Sand

So the kids had a week and a half break from school in October, so this summer we started talking about where we should go on vacation - something rich in culture and learning? Somewhere warm to get out of the oncoming Switzerland cold? Something with fantastic natural beauty? We wanted to pick a place that we normally wouldn't go from the US due to distance, taking advantage of our central Europe location. On the list, but didn't make the cut:

1. Ireland - after consultations with others, it was deemed to risky to be cold and wet the whole time
2. Kenya / African Safari - upon review (and again advice of others) it seems most tours with kids might not let them out of the jeep due to their "snack" size - which we thought might be frustrating for them and would be better off waiting until they are older
3. Egypt - now this seemed to fit the whole bill: a bit of history, a bit of sun and relaxation, some amazing natural and manmade beauty. However, due to our late planning, the plane tickets alone were going to cost something close to $8000 - ouch! So Egypt is still high on the list, but just postponed until we plan ahead next time.
4. Greece - we had just been there
5. Istanbul - heard it is better without the kids
6. Southern Italy - no guarantee it would be warm enough

So we began to be paralyzed by all the choices in the world - truly pathetic. I think in retrospect our attempt at making everything "perfect" was in turn narrowing us to such a small space that nothing could meet the requirements.

So we thought a little harder, and came up with the Canary Islands.

Now the Canary Islands is one of those places both Eric and I had heard about before, but if you had asked us to point to them on a map we would have been hard pressed. It is one of those places that we never thought we would ever go in our life. After a bit of research, and great prices due to a multitude of tour operators that send British people here for sun burns, we knew we had a great choice for a vacation.

Now a bit of geography and history for the often world-knowledge challenged Americans (no offense to any individual - but when eductated friends confused Switzerland and Sweden before we left the US, we knew we had trouble): Canary Islands are actually owned by Spain, and were a stopping off point for a lot of explorers on their way to the Americas (Columbus stopped here on his way). The name has nothing to do with birds, but actually is translated to be "Islands of the Dogs" - which was probably a reference to monk seals that no longer exist here due to overkilling from early settlers. They are 7 main islands, with the furthest east located about 100 km off of Africa, right at the Morrocco / Western Sahara border.

Eric, after much research, picked a resort in Fuerteventura, the most easterly island, for us to stay for the week. The mix of reviews and family friendly hotel advertisement made it seem suitable for us. All the islands are volcanic, but Fuerteventura, and its neighbor Lanzarote, are virtually void of all plant life - it looks like Mars. Eric and I have been loving the green of Switzerland, but we have to say that the remote, rugged landscape was really cool - gave us a whole new appreciation for the Southwest US and why people have such an attraction to the desert.

The resort has been quite comfortable, with nice rooms, pleasant pools, mini club for the kids, tennis and ping pong, swim lessons, and a nightly disco that proved to be the coolest thing ever for the kids. They got swimming certificates, Eric won the ping pong contest, and Sue just sat around the pool and did nothing - just like vacation should be.

We did journey out on occasion - we spent a whole day driving around Lanzarote - visiting a spectacular cactus garden as well as a cave with the best optical illusion Eric and I have ever seen (sworn to secrecy by the tour operator - you have to go there yourself to see it...). We even tucked in a very touristy camel ride - and for those of you who want to complain about animal cruetly hold your anger - these camels had muzzles and halters, where the camels we rode in India years ago were led around by piercings in their nose - ouch. So torture and cruelty are all relative...



We also got a chance to explore Fuerteventura (though getting the bum off the pool lounge chair wasn't easy). There is a whole set of big sand dunes just south of the town we were in that were just amazing. The story goes that the sand blows in from the Sahara due East, but there are differing opinions on the internet. Believe what you will, they were incredibly picturesque. The beach was equally beautiful, with enourmous sand dunes in the background of clean turquoise waters. Paradise found...

For next time: the great hotel buffet and all the naked people....

something bad finally happened (well, almost)

So when Eric and I traveled through Asia we sent email to our frends (1999 - this was in the days before blogs even existed) and our motto at the time was "the worse the situation, the better the story". So here in Switzerland I have been waiting for something "bad" to happen so I could tell a good story. And I have been waiting, and waiting... and life here has been, well - normal. We are making new friends (thanks to Eric, the social king), having people over for dinner, Sue goes to work, the kids play with kids in the neighborhood, the take piano lessons, and blah blah blah... So it has been hard to muster up a good story to tell without boring myself, much less someone else who would care even less (except the grandparents - they want to know everything).

Well last week I finally had my chance. Eric calls me on Tuesday to let me know that he can't find Bennett's passport. This would be OK, except for the fact that we are leaving on Saturday for vacation in the Canary Islands - and we can't go anywhere without that passport. So I tell him to remain calm, we will find it - a motto in our family is that "we always find everything" - which we do, though I think we are in contention for the "Most Lost Things" award. I swear we could get so much done if we just stopped having to always look for everything...

Now the fact that the passport was missing was not so strange in itself. Bennett, destined for life as a spy or a CIA agent, has been caught previously playing with it - making photo copies and crafting fake passports (that is along with photo copying money, which we explained is a federal offense). So he played with it, and we just have to ask him where he put it...

So with Bennett still at school, Eric, who always gets a bit anxious before we travel due to all the logistics, starts to really panic. He sends me emails during the day that he has looked everywhere; he called the consulate and found out we would have to go to Bern the next day to get a replacement with no guarantee of timing - and it would have to be all of us so I would have to skip work; and then he finds out that we would need to have a police report to file for a replacment which means we need the police to come over on Tuesday night... so I, who really believe that we find everything, start to panic myself a bit. I send him a list of places to look for the passport: in the kitchen drawer, under Bennett's bed, in the kid's safe, under the carpet in their room - I am coming up with anything I can think of, because I know if Eric can't find it quickly he will just explode with stress.

No luck, no passport found by early afternoon. So Eric is off to school to pick up the kids, and I reassure him that Bennett will know where he put it. I sit at my desk at work and start speed dialing Eric at 3:20 so I can hear that all is well and Bennett knows exactly where it is... I finally get through, only to find out that Bennett does not know where it is.

So now I start to panic.

I have been looking forward to this vacation for months - a warm beach break from increasingly cold Basel. I am starting to mentally rearrange my meetings for the next morning so we can go to Bern - and then there is figuring out how we find the police department that is open late so we can file the police report - all the time knowing if we just look further we will find it. But what if we don't??

I had a pretty intense work meeting from 4 to 6 pm - but the whole time I am distractetd on what we are going to do if we don't find this passport. I want to get home so I can help look and get this behind us. And all during the meeting I keep checking my email in the event that Eric's luck turns.

And the email comes: "Found it. I am a loser."

Relief floods my whole body - vacation is on! It turns out it was exactly where it should be: in the desk drawer. It turns out in his haste, Eric did not see the passport as it was separate from the others and tucked between two pieces of paper.

Moral of the story: We always find everything...

Next stop: Canary Islands....