18 Marzo

If you can spot the Matterhorn and Interlaken from these pictures I took while flying over the Alps on Tuesday, then you are a Schweitzerkenner or Connoisseur de Suisse - I'll get back to you on the Italian version of that.

On Marianne’s suggestion, I went to the Comune first thing in the morning. It was a bit of a risky move, but I thought it worth taking. It turns out that Vikas and I are registered with the land registry as of 13 March! In a mere 19 months after committing to buying La Perla, it is now legally registered in our names. There is a title/escrow attorney in Bellinzona I can recommend against without reservation.

The official at the Comune (which is sort of like a town hall) reminded me that they wanted a report on what work we have conducted at La Perla. Then they need to come by to see if we did anything that would have required a permit. Of course I had been asking all the workers if any permit was required and they had all said no – even those whom ultimately I didn’t chose to have do work here. Luckily the Comune guy is not as high strung as many European bureaucrats can be. In fact, he didn’t seem to notice that all that work was done while we clearly before the property was officially registered to us.

So now I was set to get my long-coveted white license plate. As you may recall, if one has residence, one can obtain a white license plate. If one if an interloper with a short term visa (permesso de soggiorno or Aufenhaltsbewilligung), one will receive a plate with a suspicion-provoking red stripe. These turn out to be large liabilities when entering Switzerland, especially with a darker-skinned person in the car. The only trouble was that my grey card (pink slip car title or deed) was in Luciano. Now Hannes and I had put the battery back in Luciano on Tuesday. However, I had asked Hannes to close the garage partly because I have heard one can get ticketed for having a car visible without a license plate. The fact that the car is parked in my garage is somehow irrelevant. I don’t ask questions anymore, I do as I am told. The trouble is that Hannes had mostly closed the garage door and when I tried to open it, I wound up accidentally locking the heavy door. It turns out that I didn’t have the key. My father’s notes (he was keymaster) indicate that only two keys exist. And Hannes had one and was across the lake working on another job. I gambled M&W had the other so I headed over there.

I had barely said hi to Wälle and he wanted to know my potential status with the DMV, which, as you may guess, has at least three names here, none of them being DMV. I think he gets a perverse thrill out of helping me navigate Swiss bureaucracy. With glee he looked up the name of my insurance guy and gave him a call. Signor Scesa said I needed to get a permesso B or F. According to him, if I went back to Comune, they could tell me for which permesso I was eligible and then he could send the relevant insurance information to the DMV. If this sounds suspiciously easy, let me remind you that I have done this four times now with many of the same characters, and your suspicions are prescient. We had some coffee (I watched) with Diego and Nicki and M&W’s houseguest (not sure what her name is), and I hoofed it back to the Comune.

They were a little less sure of what to do with me this time. They said I was fine to get a permesso B (the better one) if I filled out the form, which, in typically Ticinese fashion, seemed obsessively curious about my genealogy. They are more interested in when and where my parents were born and what religion I was than in some sort of social security number. But, they also told me, I need to register with the foreigner police in Locarno as they were the only ones who could really offer me the permesso B. I knew, however, from Wälle that they take several weeks to process their applications. I called Signor Scesa when I got home to report this to him and he said that in this case (which would have seemed immanently predictable – at least to Wälle), I might as well get the old plates with the red stripe. I agreed bearing the scarlet letter would be better than waiting weeks to be able to drive.

But I jump too far forward. As I came home I got into an appreciation session with Signor Rocca, the painter. He drags me around the house and points out bits of his work that were especially difficult. He launches into a long and passionate explanation of what he did, about 10% of which I understand as he gets very technical and then he emphatically asks me to agree with what good work he’s done. And, as far as I can tell, he’s done well; the house looks great!

This session, however, was interrupted by my appointment with Signor Berri, the tree-cutter. Berri explained to me that he was only able to cut the top five braches because that was all Peppino would allow. So that’s what they were jabbering about in Italian last October! I wanted about a 75% tree reduction and I got about a 15% reduction. The view from the top story is improved (at the moment, but remember that spring has yet to spring here), but his efforts don’t impact the other two floors at all. Moreover, by August, the tree will be exactly as big as it was last August – by Berri’s own admission. Berri did, however, outline two remedies. He suggested that at the end of this year he could trim it again and maybe aim for some additional branches. Moreover, he recommended approaching Peppino’s nephew, whom I think I recall M&W referring to, in a not-so-cute way, as a “lunetico.”

Fortunately, it turned out that one of the keys that Wälle gave back to me was, indeed, the garage key, so I was able to save the grey card. After lunch with Marianne and house guest, I borrowed Marianne’s car to go visit the DMV. By now the sun had really warmed up and it was about 23 degrees or 73 F. It’s a bit colder here at night, but otherwise much better weather than SF. I haven’t seen any clouds yet, but there is a lot of snow in the mountains. In fact, from where I sit to write this I can watch a couple ski lifts across the lake while the palms here sway in the tropical spring breeze. After a 45 minute wait, which is the longest I have ever had there, I was able to run out of the DMV with new license plates in hand!

Upon returning her car to Marianne, we started talking about the palm tree and she stood up from their card game and announced to me and house guest that we should go to the biological park. House guest (surprisingly) and I agreed emphatically. Despite Marianne saying that they always take guests to the biological park, they had never taken me there in my 19 year history with Gambarogno. It really is worth seeing. So, this guy named Eisenhut bought a ton of land just downhill from Piazzogna and made it into a biological preserve/nursery. There are trails crisscrossing the hillside with plants from all over the world, all meticulously adorned with signs naming the plants. There are vast greenhouses that would make my grandfather envious, and plants of all sizes for sale. Apparently the original Eisenhut used to have the preserve open to the public and only asked for donations for upkeep. This never worked, so now his son, Otto, who runs the show, charges 5 CHF. We met with Otto and reminded him about my palms and he said he’d come by and look at them. We wandered around the preserve a bit. Many of the plants and trees are just about to burst and it was beautiful. Of course the big lake and snowy peaks in the distance didn’t hurt. We looked at all the different magnolia tress and how they were all at slightly different stages of bloom. Marianne and I speculated about how excited my mother would be to visit here next week.

When I got home I called Peppino. Marianne was very clear that I didn’t want to talk to his nephew, regardless of what Berri might think. Peppino is gone next week but we set up a time for him to visit the following week so we can talk about the land and the tree. I set up a few more meetings for next week and tried to make some progress around the house. When I finally collapsed into bed, I was pretty darn tired.

17 Marzo

I just hit play on iTiunes and it’s odd to finish the song I started “yesterday” morning as I was packing in San Francisco. The trip was relatively quick and painless actually. It took 27 hours door to door, which, taking out the time change, is only 18 hours. I even got an hour or two of sleep and they played a Woody Allen flick. The Würste I was able to liberate from the Frankfurt airport into my belly were not as good as the ones my father and I found last year, but it was good to be back in Germany, even for only a couple hours. Unlike my dad, I couldn’t down even a great hefeweizen at 10am even if it felt like 1am.

It’s bizarre to travel so far from my home and trespass through three countries, languages and cultures to wind up back home again. Everything has changed but yet I am home again.

Hannes picked me up at the airport and we had a nice chat driving home. We started discussing progress on La Perla but, by the time we hit the mountains, we had abstracted via the hypocrisies of recycling (he claimed that in his hometown near Hamburg they just threw all the recycling in the same incinerator), to the failings of the US, world economy, Angela Merkel, and Switzerland. On one hand, Swiss protectionism annoys him because they levied €1.40 in duties on him last week for picking up cement near his house in Italy and then taking it across the lake to La Perla. They made him fill out four forms only to give him the money back when he drove home that night! On the other hand, he’s sure the economic crisis will put most of our world into the hands of the Chinese. But he thinks Obama is the next Kennedy. I wasn’t able to solve these problems for him but I was glad I was able to keep up after my lack of sleep and not having spoken German in many months.

We drove up to La Perla and were greeted by Signor Rocca, painting the balconies. He was as jolly as I recalled him. He showed me how he painted each beam under the eaves and how they were difficult to paint as they went under the roof. This was en route to telling me he should get paid 2000 CHF extra for all his extra and high-quality work. I’m not sure how much he was kidding. It’s sort of like negotiating with Santa Claus.

Through this interaction I found my Italian where I left it. I still can’t really speak it, but somehow I am able to carry complete and complex conversations. I really wish I knew how it worked. Generally when I am this unsure in a language, I like to plan out sentences in advance. But here I don’t have time so I don’t even try. I called Signor Berri later in the evening to see if we could meet about the tree and the same thing happened.

Berri cut about five or six branches near the top and maybe took out 15% of the tree. It will be the same size mid-summer as it was last, and, unless you stand on the top balcony, you won’t notice a difference at all. Marianne’s dissatisfaction with the work encouraged me to hassle Berri – a task I’ll be enjoying at about 11am Wednesday (if you’d like to take part in spirit, set your alarm!) Otherwise Marianne is fine and she invited me to lunch. She also offered her car to go get my license plates.

Hannes and I combed every centimeter of the house. He really has done great work. Opening the kitchen to the living room was a move of utter genius, by which I mean it was completely plagiarized from Marianne and Wälle. (That was an inside joke to those who have read Paul’s book). Unfortunately, yet predictably, for every improvement, there are now two to four much smaller problems. My work now will be to take an inventory of these bits and generate a to do list for the next month. I’m already feeling my dad’s absence when I think of all the things I know he would handle if he were here. But I should be able to tie most of it up before Easter.

After a few hours of this micro examination of all the fabulous developments, Hannes drove me down the hill to pick up a few groceries. After he left I spent the evening unpacking all the things my father and I packed in October. They seem to have withstood the winter perfectly well in the wine cellar. It’s really amazing how much stuff I have here and I felt my ridiculously light packing in my suitcases was vindicated. I capped the evening with some sausage, pasta, beer, and a Borussia Dortmund game on TV. It’s good to be home!

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.