15 Oktober

Here it is noon and I have gotten nothing done. And I can tell you why; I have learned something new that I can complain about:

How to Order a Delivery in Switzerland

1. Do not expect that delivery people know the heights of underpasses in their delivery region. That is your responsibility. If you do not know these numbers, you must go out and measure (heights are conveniently posted).
2. If someone says she is around for the morning, but not the afternoon, do not expect her to be working at 11:30AM as that clearly constitutes “afternoon”.
3. If you can no longer reach the initial contact person, (because, for example, she has left for the afternoon during the morning), do not expect anyone else in the business to be able to schedule a delivery as that is clearly a highly complicated task that only one person among the 50 employees can do.

14 Oktober

How to Receive a Delivery in Switzerland

Before I impart this wisdom, I need to review a few basic Swiss banking processes. First of all, it seems that the personal check is not used here. When someone wants your money, they send or give you a red or orange invoice (the latter has a reference number of some sort but otherwise I don’t know if there is a difference between the two.) Then you take said invoice to the bank or post office and give the agent there the cash equivalent to the invoice. Just be sure to go early before the brontosaurus traffic jam! If you’re really modern and high-falutin (like me) you can input all 500 bits of information from the invoice into a website and square your bills electronically. Don’t tell too many Swiss people about this or their heads may explode.

Thus far, everything I have ordered (about 30 items) have arrived either with, or followed by, said invoice. In fact, even the painter handed me one in person. The following information is for those who seek more ambitious delivery options.

1. First you must read minds to know that a certain delivery is cash only. I received two deliveries today with no such advance warning. Clearly, this is to be intuited in advance.
2. When the delivery person arrives, have exact change ready for delivery people do not carry change. If you do not have the proper change then you did not intuit the amount properly in advance and you need to practice step 1 further.
3. When making a delivery, it is reasonable for the delivery people to expect payment before the goods have actually been handed over. This holds true even when the deliverer needs to “go elsewhere to collect goods for the second part of the delivery.” Payment in full is expected upon arrival. You can double check inventory after you have paid – if the deliverer and the goods are still around.
4. It is reasonable for the deliverer to expect payment in full regardless of the amount to be paid. If you have ordered, for example, over 1000 kilograms of furniture, you should have the required amount of cash lying about.
5. You should be prepared that your credit card may suddenly only have 5% of its usual limit. This is normal and clearly your fault and you shouldn’t expect your bank should be able to rectify this within the next week.
6. If you have failed at steps 1-5 you should be happy to drive to the nearest bank, even if it is 30 minutes across a lake (for example).
7. Do not assume that said bank can give you the money in your account and do not make such unreasonable demands. Your money belongs to the bank. Do not expect to get money out of the ATM – it is there to make the bank look official, not to dispense cash.
8. It is reasonable for the bank teller to have to call your personal advisor and her assistant in Zürich to verify you can access your money. If said personal advisor and her assistant are out to lunch, do not expect to access your money until they get back. If they are out or the bank in which you are making your ridiculous demands needs to close for a ninety minute lunch, then you are welcome to return afterwards.
9. If the deliverer chooses not to wait and would rather pack all the inventory back into the truck and then send you a bill for the whole process afterwards, you should greet said bill with great joy.

If you properly follow these Nine Simple Steps, then YOU TOO can receive deliveries in Switzerland!

5 Oktober

My dad makes friends with the locals.


Last Sunday we took a little trip to Indemini. Francie was talking about it a few weeks ago as an old smugglers’ hideaway as it is nestled up in the mountains between Switzerland and Italy. I’m a sucker for medieval towns so I talked my dad into going to see it. It wasn’t a hard sell. It takes about an hour up the switchbacks and over the pass to get there even though it’s only about 5 km away as the bird flies. But it was well worth the trip and I had a great time wandering around the old alleys winding around the mountainside. They were also having a chestnut festival so we sat around, had a beer and joined them for some smoked chestnuts. Europeans seem to have a knack for making up excuses on Sundays to sit around outside together while drinking beer. Its pretty smart if you ask me. And since you’re reading my blog, you are asking me.

8 October

Another full day crashes to its weary end. It started with my discovery of my phone not working. It turns out that when Swisscom sent me five copies of my internet contract, one of them was actually a phone contract – identical in every way except for the one word near the top. I threw it away assuming it was the overzealous Swiss bureaucracy at work while I was on vacation (that’s how they here refer to my time in the US). Once this was all untangled, I exhumed the document, scanned and emailed it to said bureaucrats.

From there we hurried off to Ikea, with a quick swing by Lugano for sightseeing waylaid by snarly traffic. Our Swedish sausage lunch highlight was the pregnant girl standing at the standing table next to us. I swear she was about 12 and definitely pregnant. She was there with her 10 year old sister and mother who was younger than I. I would have sworn she were prepubescent but I remember enough ninth grade biology to know that pregnancy is a strong counter-indicator. These kids nowadays! We ripped through the kitchen section in record time, fully equipping two kitchens in under half an hour. But once we hit the curtains we came to a full stop. After staring at the assorted samples for way too long and wondering why they were all 3 meters long when no window is that high, we agreed that we are not genetically equipped to buy curtains and immediately began thinking of women we could cajole into going to Ikea to pick them out.

It was when we got home, however, that the real craziness began. I had scheduled an electrician to come tomorrow morning but then my dad pointed out that Hannes could probably do whatever the electrician was going to charge 100 CHF an hour to do. I called Hannes quickly to make sure before calling the electrician. Since my phone wasn’t working, this involved a combination of cell phone and computer to make the calls. Mmeanwhile, the contractors started descending. Firstly, Signor Nicola, a painter came by. He was talking to my dad while I was on the phone. I couldn’t tell what was going on with his linguistic skills as he was speaking a German that was both broken and in a very heavy dialect. He must have been taught only a little German and by someone high in the mountains. He and my father barely understood each other. It turned out that Italian was far easier as he was a jolly and patient man, willing to say some things twice. He spent about an hour, asking all kinds of questions that Leandro never did, getting into all kinds of nuances like the ceiling above the balcony. Towards the end he called up a coworker (I think who works for the paint company) who burned a tiny patch of the house and then peered at it through a magnifying glass. Then he poured water on the house and measured how far the water spilled and tested its Ph balance. I’m not sure how scientific it all was, but it looked pretty cool. Nicola will get me an estimate by Friday but he gave me to believe it would be about half of what Leandro bid. I really don’t understand how these bids can vary so widely.

Meanwhile the stoner gardener from Croatia showed up. Wasic has long blonde hair and wore a leather jacket and responded to anything I said about 3 seconds after most people would. Dude, wo ist dein Auto? I showed him the yard and he would point at certain plants and say their names (which usually I didn’t understand) and then tell me what needed to happen to them. I got a pretty decent sense of what he would do both now to prepare for spring and then next year over the course of the year. But the bottom line seemed to be that next year, over the course of the “season” (which is 8 months), he would come by twice a month for two hours each time for 2500 CHF. As far as I could figure it, this would be about 78 CHF per hour! That seems a bit much for gardening.

Meanwhile Mauro came home. This is the first time he’s been here since we’ve been here. As the contractors faded away into the dusk, Mauro came upstairs as my dad and I were making dinner. He joined us for our sausages, pasta, salad, and insanely good bread that Ines turned us on to. (And now we know where to buy it!) I had to carry the conversation at first, but it’s amazing how wine improved Mauro’s English and German and my dad’s Italian. By the end I think they were debating strategies for addressing the financial crisis.

8 October

The view out my window early morning and late afternoon.



Today I made a big discovery. I was getting the shovel out of the toolshed in order to replant some palm trees and I found a stack of tiles. It’s a big stack, maybe half a meter high. Of course I had noticed them before, but somehow it hadn’t registered. Maybe now because I’ve been looking for tiles for the kitchens, bathrooms, and balconies, I’m more tile-sensitive. I was very excited and forced my dad to come look and help me sort through them all. There are about 10 types and most are not hideously awful – as you might expect from tiles stashed in a corner of a toolshed of an old house.

I suppose this is an apt bellwether of my state when a tile discovery makes the highlight list.

In other news, we found a great sign a couple days ago. We were cruising around Pfister, the high end furniture store where the average sofa costs 5000 CHF, and we came upon a sign that would make Uncle Sam proud. Next to a collection of sofas, in bold print on the wall, it simply stated: “Sit For You.” I think perhaps there may be no more elegant way of saying USA #1.