I moved to Switzerland in December of 2000 and for a variety of reasons that in retrospect R and I both agree were not good enough reasons, we lived in a small village near Bern even though he was at the time working in Zürich. (The price and availability of housing in Zürich was certainly one of the reasons.) I was taking intensive German lessons four hours a day five days a week; if you throw in my commute and studying time, my German classes consumed a good six and a half hours a day, but R was, that whole first year, gone thirteen hours a day. We were in a small village, I didn’t know anybody, there was not another native English speaker in my German class (for which I am very grateful – it did wonders for my German to be forced to try to make friends and small talk in German – but it certainly limits the speed and ease with which you can form friendships when, for example, you can’t even speak in the past tense), R was gone a lot, and even in the best of circumstances I am shy and reserved and not terribly good at making friends. That whole first year was miserable. Sometimes, even now, R will say to me with a sort of amazement that he can’t believe I didn’t leave him and go back to the U.S. during that first year or eighteen months. Sometimes, even now, I will think with a sort of amazement the same thing. I was miserable that first year.

The thing about learning standard German in Switzerland is that the Swiss don’t speak standard German, they speak Swiss and the two are not the same. If I had it to do all again, if I could have peeked into a magic ball and seen the way my life here has played out, the things I’m involved in, the things that matter most to me now, I would not have enrolled in a standard German course, I would have gone straight into a Schweizerdeutsch course and managed the written German later. Because not being able to speak Swiss is a real stumbling block in trying to build a Swiss life. My standard German, thanks to all those intensive lessons, is very good but it marks me instantly as an outsider no matter how long I have been here. Oh the Swiss understand me and I, at last, understand the Swiss but my German is a constant reminder of my foreignness, a little division between us, a stumbling block to overcome. A small one, perhaps, but it is there, a little hitch, a little hiccup.

The Swiss have a reputation for being reserved, hard to get to know; I myself have called the Swiss “a tough nut to crack” (you can read the comments on this post, especially those from Gretchen, for some more insight into this) and I think there is some truth to this (though I also am in the middle of seeing how very untrue it is) but I also think that half of it is simply the language and I finally understand the Swiss – not just linguistically, but emotionally – on this point. German and Swiss are not interchangeable and speaking German is not an approximation of speaking Swiss. I wish R had insisted on this point (but R is funny, and to this day thinks I did it the right way by mastering standard written German). But I wish I had done it differently; I would, if I could, go back and do it differently but I can’t, of course, so I am trying to make up for lost time and working hard to pick up Swiss. I don’t want to speak German anymore. And I think those first few years would have been so much easier if I had learned Swiss from the start. I get it now, the Swiss love of their dialekt, I really do.

I didn’t have Swiss friends, other than the Swiss spouses or partners of my English-speaking friends, for years. R’s job situation when we first moved here – working in Zurich but living outside Bern – didn’t help, because it made socializing with his work colleagues difficult, although of course now with the benefit of hindsight I can see all the ways we might have made that easier. And because if you talk to expats living in Switzerland you’ll hear the “Swiss are so reserved” line a good ninety percent of the time, it’s easy to fall into believing this and giving up; to not explore if there aren’t just little cultural differences you have to pick up on and adapt to; to not wonder what about your own personality and behavior are contributing to the situation. Yes, the Swiss are reserved but I am shy and self-conscious in German. And if I am honest with myself, I am shy and self-conscious in English. I grew up in a house where my parents did not socialize and learning how to do this – how to invite people over to dinner just for the sake of inviting people over to dinner – has been hard for me. It was, when I remind myself, hard in English. It was hard back home. At some point, it became clear that I was using the old Swiss reserve schtick as an excuse and that I needed to do some heavy lifting.

And so I started lifting. And my life now, ten years on, is so different. “Bloom where you’re planted,” Australian Friend likes to say and yes, yes, yes to this. It has taken ten years, but I am blooming.

There’s a lot of party jockeying and coordination in the weeks leading up to the Bundesratwahlen - party leaders need to corral the troops, to make sure for example all the FDP members are going to vote for the FDP candidate but they also make alliances with one another – if the SP members all stick with the BDP candidate, the BDP will in turn deliver votes for the SP. The actual voting for the council members should be orderly and largely unsurprising, as everything has been worked out in advance and because there is an unwritten rule about which parties should end up with seats in the Executive Council.

Everything is supposed to be run according to two principles: the “magic formula” and Konkordanz. The “magic formula” decrees that each of the four leading parties in Switzerland (Switzerland has a multiparty system and representatives of no fewer than ten parties sit in the Parliament) holds at least one seat in the seven member Executive Council; typically, the three largest parties hold two seats and the fourth party, one. Konkordanz – agreement, collegiality, accordance – is the linch pin of Swiss politics. Everybody agrees, gets along, sticks to their word, works together, achieves compromise. There is nothing more Swiss than a good compromise and there is nothing Swiss politicians like to speak of more than Konkordanz. And there is nothing lower than violating the spirit of Konkordanz. If you want to blast your opponents in Swiss politics, say they violated Konkordanz.

The Swiss People’s Party – the SVP – is the largest party in Switzerland (you can peek at the most recent election results here) but they currently hold only one seat in the Executive Council as a result of an internal party split that saw Bundesratin Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf split from the SVP and help form the BDP. It’s a bit inside baseball, but basically the SVP is becoming increasingly rightist, nationalist, and strident; what used to be a solid conservative party has become increasingly extreme to the point where many of its own members were no longer comfortable with the party’s positions and its Zurich-based leadership. Think Tea Party v. normal conservative Republican. So in 2008 some members split and formed the BDP and one of these members was Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, and when she left the SVP she took her Executive Council seat with her.* It was quite the earthquake in Swiss politics, and the SVP has been under-represented in the Executive Council ever since.

Yesterday, Widmer-Schlumpf was up for reelection to the Executive Council; her candidacy was the second to be voted on and she was reelected with a single round of balloting. The SVP then announced that they would fight vigorously for every remaining seat (even the FDP seat, and the FDP might be the only semi-ally the SVP had left at then point) and oh boy did all heck quietly move about after that. (Hell does not break loose in Swiss politics, by US standards, but by Swiss standards yesterday was quite the political show-down.) At the end of the day the SVP still only had one seat in the Executive Council, they had turned on any potential ally they might have had, their leadership was shown to be ineffective, and this morning most political commentators agree that they were the big losers of the day yesterday.

Them, and Konkordanz. Say what you will about the conservative, nationalistic politics of the SVP, they’ve held the most seats in the Swiss Parliament since 1999 and in the last two elections for the Executive Council they’ve ended up with one seat, the same number as the BDP with only 5% of the vote nationwide. It’s a situation that can’t hold. I’m no fan of the Swiss People’s Party, but if Switzerland is going to have its “magic formula” and its Konkordanz, then the Parliament is going to have to hold its nose and find an SVP member they can vote for. (Admittedly the party leadership does not make this easy – they demanded a second seat in the council while removing possibly the most likable candidate from consideration). And if not, if members of the Parliament can no longer be corralled and parties can no longer come to agreements that will hold – well, maybe it’s time to stop talking about Konkordanz as a guiding principle of Swiss politics.

To add to the bitter blow for the SVP, the Executive Council then elected Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf President. The Swiss presidency is largely ceremonial – because it’s awkward for a visiting head of state to be greeted by a body of seven, you know? – and the president holds no more sway in the Executive Council than the next member of the Council, her vote is not weighted, she holds no special powers. The title is ceremonial and rotates steadily among the members of the Executive Council but nonetheless: a woman representing a party that gained about 5% of the vote nation-wide holds the presidency. The SVP must be loving that.

What does the SVP do now? Go into opposition? Revamp their national leadership? Can they hold on to their voters? How many of the rank and file members of the Parliament, tired of the shenanigans, will jump ship to the BDP? Swiss politics – which basically prides itself on being staid, orderly, and predictable – is getting more interesting all the time.

* I’m shortening the story here: Widmer-Schlumpf, then with the SVP, was elected by the members of the Parliament against the will of the SVP. They had put up as their candidate Christoph Blocher, who in 2008 was unacceptable to many members of the Parliament. In keeping with the magic formula the parliament did go ahead and elect an SVP member to the cabinet, just not the one the SVP leadership wanted. Political infighting, bickering and party-splitting ensued; Widmer-Schlumpf was essentially forced out of the SVP; the BDP was founded; and Swiss politics has been a bit more interesting ever since.

And if you think about it, if you really sit down and think about all the new social skills a Kindergartener has to learn, it’s a lot. It’s hard for a kid to come into a classroom and play nice with all the other kids: first they have to learn what the teacher considers “play nice” to be and then they have to learn how to do it. They have to learn to sit still and listen and share and play games they don’t enjoy and be in the same room with people they might not like and negotiate rules and consequences and who’s friends with whom. I think we forget, or fail to appreciate, how hard that all is for kids, and how much of their brain is engaged by that kind of learning in school. And how important it is. Now imagine adding actual school work on top of it. It’s a lot to ask, and it sound to me like US Kindergarten is asking an awful lot of little kids all at once. And because there is actual academic work to be done, kids have less time to practice and learn the social skills and kids who need time to figure it all out are labeled “discipline problems” because the teachers don’t have the time to let the kids have time to just go on the playground every day and figure it all out.

The first grade in Switzerland gets more serious than Kindergarten, in that there are now actual academics with homework and tests, but the kids still have recess every day and go wild on the playground – again, the green pants – and have gym class three times a week. Although the kids are learning now to sit still and listen to the teacher and there are consequences for too much goofing around – the dreaded thunder clouds – the system acknowledges the fact that six and seven year old kids still need to burn off a lot of kinetic energy. I appreciate that. As the mother of a very kinetic child, I really appreciate that.  As for the hours, which compared to a US school day are limited indeed, I can see some benefits to that as well – the kids have a lot of time in the afternoons to play and screw around and just be kids. And especially in the first grade, I highly doubt the Small Boy is falling behind in any serious way by not being in school longer – there is only so much a small person needs to learn, after all, and I know a fair number of homeschooling parents who report that at every grade level they teach their kids what they need to know to meet state standards in half the time a public school day takes. He’s learning to read and write and count and add and carve a Fischertucan out of wood. I’m not worried about the content of his days.

No set up is going to be perfect, and no set of hours is going to satisfy the needs of all the different families that use a school system, and everybody is going to find something to complain about, but if I look at the Swiss school day purely from the point of view of my first-grader – if there were no demands to satisfy other than those of the first-graders themselves – it looks like a pretty good day.

US Kindergarten sounds a lot like the Swiss first grade. Small Boy did not have what we adults would recognize as “work” in Kindergarten. Fine motor skills and pencil control were trained through art projects rather than writing. Oh, the art projects. Cutting and pasting and drawing and sewing and weaving and carving and once, for this past Mother’s Day gift, etching a design into a rock with a stylus. Language skills and memory were covered in song and rhyme and story time. The rest of the time, they played. The children were largely free to choose what they wanted to do and with whom, although if Small Boy and Best Friend sat at the drawing table four days in a row they were encouraged, on the fifth day, to maybe do something else with somebody else. There was time to play outside every day, unless it was pouring rain (snow was fine), and judging from the knees of the Small Boy’s pants there was a great deal of wrestling and tackling involved. There was structure in the day, in terms of time blocks, but within the structure there was a great deal of freedom.

Towards the end of Small Boy’s second year of Kindergarten the children who would enter school the following year started practicing the type of work they might be presented with in school. The older kids (Kindergarten classes are mixed between the 5 year olds in their first year of Kindergarten and the 6 year olds in their second) gradually started having to sit still more; art projects became less paint whatever you want and more do here what the instructions are telling you. They did start practicing writing letters and yes, every single one of them could write their names. They took home a little bit of homework, and they visited the school building. Fridays, when the first year kids don’t come to Kindergarten, were almost, almost like school.

And now, Small Boy is starting his sixth week of school. He is fully settled in now, but the first week was rough. I could tell from his behavior at home – reacting badly to situations much more quickly than usual, arguing with me, breaking down in tears when I told him no to something (I no longer remember what – probably if he could watch TV). His behavior at school that first week was fine, no reports from the teacher, no notes home, but that is typical Small Boy: he works very hard to hold it together in places like school or hockey training (the trainers are strict, and I’ve seen them give kids 10 minute go sit on the bench penalties for what seem like minor infractions, but never the Small Boy)* and then he comes home and lets go. So I could tell, that first week, that the new routine – sitting still for 90 minutes before recess – was a lot for him.

The work so far is basic: they are learning letters and numbers, starting to read. There is homework three days a week (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays), and it never takes very long; they do most of the work in class. So far the homework has only been in either math or German. The subjects covered in the first grade are German, Math, Nature-Mitwelt-Mench (natural and social sciences – right now the theme is Water), Art (drawing, textiles, and woodworking), and Music. He has a fifteen minute recess every day and Sport (P.E.) three times a week. He’s in school five mornings and one afternoon a week, plus every other Thursday.

Every student has a homework notebook in which the teacher writes down the assignments on the left hand page; there is a column where I am supposed to record how long it took Small Boy to do the assignment. I think this is a great idea – it gives the teacher an idea of how hard or easy the work might be for a child (if a kid got every problem right but took 90 minutes to do it, that’s something the teacher needs to know) and it also trains the parents in the idea that they need to be attentive to their child’s homework practices. This might be second nature for some parents and not for others; this way the parents are slowly learning to be involved and it’s done in what seems to me a non-judgmental way. I’m curious what other people think about this, but I sort of love this idea.

The right hand page is for communications between the teacher and the parents. Here on the page in the picture, the teacher wrote a note to remind us that class pictures would be taken on Monday (Mo: Photograf) and that by Wednesday at the latest Small Boy needed to have a toothbrush (Mi: Zahnbürste) because the dental hygienist was coming that day. Progress is noted on a weekly basis: sunshine, sun with a cloud or two, or clouds. (You’ll notice Small Boy got the sunshine. He’s had all sunshines except for one teeny tiny cloud last week because somehow we forgot to do one problem on a homework set. We just skipped right over it, didn’t even see it somehow. Both of us! The teacher told him if Small Boy keeps doing as he’s been doing, he’ll erase the cloud next week.) Clouds seem to be given for not paying attention, talking in class, and not doing your work. Each week, a parent has to sign that week’s page.

Can I just tell you I LOVE the homework notebook? Seriously. Best idea ever.

What does school look like where you live? If you’re an expat, and your kids are in the local schools, are you happy with them? I have to say, although I’ve been known to complain about the, um, limited hours shall we call them?, I can also see some real upsides to the Swiss schools. More on that in another post.

* I approve of this approach, by the way. Hockey is an extremely physical sport with a great deal of contact, and the kids need to learn early that the apparent aggression in hockey is actually quite controlled – there are rules, after all, about what’s a legal check and what is not. There are rules against fighting. If somebody deals you an honest blow, you can’t turn around and whack them for it and you can’t take it personally. The honest check is part of the game, and if you can’t get checked without losing your temper you won’t be playing hockey for long because no coach is going to want to deal with that. I approve of the trainers nipping temper in the bud, calling out every bad hit, and issuing penalties. A kid simply cannot engage in a contact sport without mastering some self-control.

Then this morning, for the first time, I wrote it (as best as I could figure, since the spelling rules for Swiss are pretty much: eh, write it how it sounds) and it all made perfect sense to me. Ritigumpfi. Of course. Riti must be derived from reiten, to ride. Gump is jump. Ritigumpfi: ride-jump. What a perfect name for a swing.

It takes a good couple of hours to renew the US documents. It’s not possible to make an appointment at the Embassy here in Bern, though I have recently learned from Cosmopolitan Friend that such a thing is possible in US Embassies located in other lands; we just seem to have a crappy system here: first come, first served. It is possible to fill out some forms in advance, but that hardly saves any time – it’s not filling out the forms that takes the time, it’s then waiting to have them looked at. If we could fill out the forms on-line, the way I can for the Swiss documents, then they could also be reviewed prior to my arrival at the Embassy. Imagine that.

Renewing the Boychen’s Swiss documents was lovely. It went so quickly that we had time to pop over to Starbucks for a coffee (me) and heisse Schoggi (him) and still be back before Small Boy finished morning Kindergarten.

Americans living abroad outside of Switzerland, I’m curious: what’s your experience with the US Embassy where you live? If you have minor children, are you allowed to make appointments to get or renew their passports?

The difference between Kindergarten and first grade is stark here. I’ve heard it said that these days, in the US, “Kindergarten is the new first grade” but here in Switzerland Kindergarten is about socialization and integration and getting ready for school but there is very little formal instruction. They play in Kindergarten, and there is a great deal of learning hidden in that play, but it’s essentially play. Kindergarten is about socialization, learning how to be away from home, and gradually adapting to a structured day in which you follow the instructions of your teacher. Small Boy’s Kindergarten class is a mix of five-year-olds who are in their first year of Kindergarten and six-year-olds who will enter school in August; the teachers do have different expectations of the  two groups in some circumstances, but the age groups mix and mingle during most of the day. Here, children learn to read and write in the first grade, and although from what I can tell all the six-year olds in Small Boy’s class know their letters and can write their names, it’s not a requirement for entering the first grade.

The things that do matter in Kindergarten, the things that define a child as Schulreif (ready for school) have less to do with what the child knows in any academic sense than with social competence. Kids here are expected to walk to and from school by themselves; that means they also have to be able to put on and take off all manner of clothes (including snow-suits and winter boots) without assistance. Children need to be able to sit still. They should be able to play with different kids (having one super best friend you always play with to the exclusion of other kids is a cause for mild concern here) and you should be able to engage in different types of activities (if you play in the building blocks corner every single day in Kindergarten, the teachers will encourage other activities). A child entering the first grade should recognize shapes and forms and be able to draw letters and numbers when looking at a model, but reading and writing is a job for the first grade.* Rather than writing in Kindergarten, the focus is on basteln – art projects. They are a useful measure of so many things, if you think about it: the fine motor control that children need to master writing, patience, the ability to follow directions and patterns (in the case of projects where the teacher tells you what to make), imagination and creativity (in the case where the teacher tells you to draw a picture of anything you want), or memory (in which the child might draw a picture showing a scene from the story the teacher read that day). Small Boy does a lot of art projects. The things we talked about at Small Boy’s parent-teacher conference were all along this line of social competence: if he can make friends, get along with people, get to school on time including getting undressed and changing his shoes, follow rules and pay attention to the teachers. In short, is he independent and confident enough for school? (If you can read German, there is an interesting checklist on this site; the chart on page two lays out the most important aspects of Soziale Kompetenzen.)

For all these reasons and more, the transition from Kindergarten and school is a big one. Kindergarten is Kindergarten; first grade is school. And so there are traditions to mark the move from one to the other; the first day of the first grade is a true milestone in a child’s life in the German-speaking world. There is the ceremony of the first day of first grade, the Schultüte, and the school backpack. Because there is no homework in Kindergarten, the kids only need a snack bag. For school, they need a school bag. Not just any old backpack, a special school backpack. Small Boy and I went shopping for his school supplies last week, and he took his time picking out his school backpack, looking over the different designs and ranking them one a scale of 1 to 4. The school backpacks here are big and boxy with a solid form that distributes weight fairly evenly and – I think more to the Swiss point – protect books and papers inside from getting bent and crumpled. They’ve also got a good deal of reflective material on them, what with all that walking to and from school kids do here. They’re really big, though; they can overwhelm a slight child.

Here is Small Boy’s school bag:

Inside the backpack are his school supplies, all neatly contained in an “etui”:

Buying them was a big deal for the Small Boy, and he is very, very proud of them. He’s getting ready to head on down the road wearing his school backpack, his school supplies tucked neatly inside, his snack bag a thing of the past. My Small Boy, getting Big.

* The other day Boychen’s babysitter** was here when Small Boy came home for lunch; it happened that he had gotten a piece of mail that day and when I gave it to him he asked where it was from. I said, “Read the return address.” “In-ter-hock-ey” he sounded out. “Cool, it’s from Interhockey” – the store where we buy all his hockey gear – and the babysitter was so surprised he could read and asked if was still in Kindergarten. There is absolutely no pressure for Kindergarteners here to learn to read and write before the first grade and no shame if they don’t. That’s what first grade is for.

** I think we’ve found a babysitter for Boychen one day a week. At her house. Rays of celestial light!

Let’s take a look at some of the ingredients called for in these wild and crazy cookbooks. Soba noodles. Japanese eggplants. Bok choy. Monterey Jack cheese. Oyster sauce. Thai basil leaves. Lemongrass. Wonton wrappers. Ten years ago this stuff was impossible to find. Ten years ago, I was hard pressed to find, wait for it, whole black beans. (When I found them, sold by the lovely lady who cooks tacos at the market in Bern twice a week, they were five francs a can. Yes, I still bought them. Together with the newly available and somewhat radical sweet potato, they made a lovely Navajo Stew.) Martin Yan’s Asia moldered on the shelf.

Slowly, a few speciality shops opened up, or I expanded my horizons enough to find them but I think it was the former more than the latter. Maybe a bit of both. The Loeb food shop in Bern has an entire section devoted to Asian food. I can get mung beans and chinese broccoli and two types of tofu and oyster sauce and my god I can even get galangal. Globus foods always carried specialty items, at a steep mark-up – for years they were the only place to get fresh cranberries. (Now that I’m thinking about it, I think for a few years they were my only reliable source of sweet potatoes as well.) Then we found an Indian market where we got cardamon pods and turmeric powder and coriander seeds. About five years ago I might have had to go to three shops to get the ingredients for an Indian curry or Singapore noodles, but I could find what I needed. (Actually, had I thought about it and dug around more, I would have realized that the large population of ethnic Sri Lankans and Thai in Switzerland had to be shopping somewhere and I would have tracked down their secret shops.)

Now, in an ordinary grocery store (okay, it has to be one of the larger stores but still, it’s an ordinary chain grocery store) there is this:

and this

I can get ramen noodles – which Small Boy loves eating Thursday nights after hockey practice – and your standard Old El Paso mexican foods plus the real stuff the lady sells at the market. I’ve seen blue corn chips and humous and falafel mix. Ten years ago I used to screw up my courage to ask the butcher for ground lamb and he’d sort of give me a “that’s a waste of perfectly good lamb, lady” look and now ground lamb is so popular it is pre-packaged at the Coop. Pre-packaged, people. Coop sells a little package of all the fresh spices needed for a basic Thai curry. I cannot tell you how much my culinary life has improved over the past five years in particular and I think it will only get better.

Bring on the falafel!

A tiny plastic king is baked into one of the sections of the wreath.

By tradition, the person who finds the king gets to be “king for a day” and wear the paper crown that is sold together with the bread.

This isn’t just for kids. Plenty of people will bring a Dreikönigskuchen in to work to split among their co-workers. People can be downright insistent that the person who finds the king actually wear the crown all day. Needless to say, kids tend to want want want to find the king and adults tend to try to avoid it if they can.

In theory, if you examine the sections of the bread really carefully you can guess where the king is because that section of the wreath bakes a little differently, but I guess wrong as often as I guess right, so maybe it’s something you need years of practice with.

This year, Boychen found the king and got to wear the crown and be king for a day – which is fitting because he’s turned into a bossy little thing. People talk about the terrible twos but I’ve always found three to be the year of pushing, testing, defying, and general trying of my patience. Good thing he’s got that killer smile, I tell you.