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.