You think the school days are weird, check out the shopping hours

We got into a bit of a grocery bind over New Year’s weekend; I hadn’t planned well for the long weekend and we were running low on a lot of things. Dashing out to pick up a few things on a holiday isn’t so easy in Switzerland: the opening hours of stores are strictly regulated. Typically stores are open from 8 am to 6:30 pm Monday through Thursday (to 7 pm on Fridays) and from 8 am to 5 pm on Saturday. In small towns many shops will close over the lunch hour – in my village the bakery and the grocery store are closed from noon until 2 pm – though in the cities this is less common. In Bern the groceries and bakeries remain open over lunch as do the department stores and most of the larger shops, but there are still small specialty stores – maybe an art gallery, a high-end jewelry store, an antique shop – that close for an hour and a half or two hours over lunch. Most businesses – and my most I mean pretty much everything – are closed on Sundays. The exception to the Sunday shopping restrictions are stores in the train stations, on the Autobahn, or attached to gas stations.

(This is an improvement over the shopping hours when I first arrived in Switzerland ten years ago. Then is was 8 am to 6 pm Monday through Friday and 8 am to 4 pm on Saturdays.)

In Switzerland, holidays are referred to as Sundays. This is important, because the Sunday shopping laws go into effect on holidays. And because by making the holiday a Sunday, it transforms the day before a holiday into a Saturday with Saturday shopping hours. For example: New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday. But because it was a holiday, it became a Sunday: all the stores were closed. Further, the day before New Year’s – Friday, when one typically can shop until 7 pm – became, legally, a Saturday, when the shops close at 5 pm. So over the New Year’s weekend, the shops closed at 5 pm Friday and did not reopen until 8 am Monday. (Which explains why R had to run to the grocery store in the train station in the city over the weekend.)

Banks, for reasons I have yet to discover, are closed all weekend. And often over lunch, even in the city. When, exactly, are people supposed to do their banking?

Museums are typically open on Sundays but then make up for it by closing Mondays.

When I used the library in the city it was open Saturday but closed Monday.

I’m a stay-at-home mom so I can work around all this, but you can imagine the burdens this places on a family where both adults work full time outside the home. And I can tell you: the last place on earth you want to be is in a Swiss grocery store in the hour before it closes for a long holiday weekend.

The long-delayed post about Swiss school schedules or: Are you people *trying* to make it hard for stay-at-home moms?

So I had another Twitter exchange with Jacquie that made me realize I still haven’t described what a typical Swiss school day looks like (more or less: in Switzerland, as in the US, education is extremely local) and rather than let this slide any longer I’m going to take a cue from Alexa (see number three, re: perfectionism, which is the number one reason I put off writing the 20 or so blog posts I have in my head; number two is a dearth of time to actually write them, reasons for which should become abundantly clear by the end of this post) and just describe a school day and not worry about making it perfect, or witty, or just the right flavor of sarcastic. It will be, simply, informative.

Oh, Swiss school system, where should I even start? The typical school day? The numerous vacations (some of which, like Sport Week, I can really get on board with)? The tracking system that determines at about the fifth grade whether or not a child is university-bound? The fact that I’ve been here for ten years and I still can’t quite get my head around how it all works?

Small Boy is in his second year of Kindergarten; the first year is optional though it seems to me that at least in this town most of the kids go both years. Kids are eligible to start Kindergaren in August if they are four years old by May 30 of that year. Small Boy turned four in January 2009, so he started his first year of Kindergarten in August 2009 when he was four and a big half. This is his second year of Kindergarten; he’ll turn six in January and be six and a half in August of 2011 when he enters the first grade. (How does this age of entering first grade jive with where you live?)

The first year kids go to Kindergarten Monday – Thursday 8:20 a.m to 11:50 a.m plus one afternoon a week. Second year Kindergarteners like Small Boy go five mornings a week, 8:20 to 11:50, and one afternoon. The afternoons run from 1:20 p.m to 3:40 p.m and the kids come home for lunch between the morning and afternoon sessions. Let me repeat that, because it’s the bane of my existence and will continue to be the bane of my existence for the next ten years: the kids come home over lunch. There is no lunch room. Some schools are slowly moving to a “Tagesschule” schedule (all day school) but it’s slow and hit-or-miss and locally controlled and socially controversial and frowned upon. You are kind of a horrible mother if you let somebody not related to you feed your child over lunch time. The school Small Boy would have gone to in the city had, if I recall correctly, a lunchtime option for which parents were charged on a sliding scale. Swiss scales slide fast and the irony is that R’s income is high enough that we often can’t afford – or I cannot stomach paying – the rate we generally slot into for these sorts of things (lunch programs, day care, play groups). So had we stayed in the city there might have been a lunch option in that school but there is not one here. And I’m not just talking about the Kindergarteners. They all come home over lunch. For, seemingly, ever. (The daycare center that opened in town this past August seems to have a lunch program where school kids can go there for lunch. I shudder to think what it might cost.)

There is also no school bus. Oh if you live out in the back-of-beyond on a farm somewhere in the Emmental there might be some sort of bus but mostly the kids here, as I wrote about before, hoof it. Bless those sturdy Swiss school children humping it rain, sleet and snow. There’s a reason the Swiss Post is so reliable, they were all trained as children to brave all sorts of weather. However, think about what that means if you are the parent of a Kindergartener, especially a young first-year kid: you walk to school with your kid in the morning, walk back home, then turn around and return at lunchtime to meet your kid at the school and walk home. Then heavens, if it’s your afternoon day you have to turn around and walk back with them. This is why the kids are start walking by themselves at such an early age: the parents just can’t take it anymore. We live 1.8 kilometers from the school – it’s a forty-five minute round trip on foot for me to walk to school with a child walking at the rate of a small child and then turn around and come back home. And I’ve got to schlepp Boychen with me. (Don’t Swiss people have cars, you wonder? Yes, yes we do but using them to drive our children to and from school is frowned upon. Have you ever been frowned upon by a Swiss grandmother? I’ve become exceedingly fond of the Swiss but my god, they can frown upon you like nobody you’ve ever met.) In the interest of full disclosure we use the car on double-kindy day because we live 1.8 kilometers from the school house and I’d have to mess with the time-space continuum to walk to kindy, get the boy, walk him home, cook and feed him lunch, and walk him back to kindy in the 90 minutes we have at lunchtime.

Have I mentioned that school lunchtime is the bane of my existence?

On the upside, because there’s got to be an upside here somewhere, there’s a one-week school vacation in February called “Sportwoche.” Sport week. Yep, it’s a vacation to go skiing, because February is when the snow is really good and there aren’t as many pesky tourists clogging up the slopes. Sportwoche, people, is something I can get behind. (We’re going here, which should come as no surprise to any long-time readers.) As long as I’m talking vacation, and making this post all about the information and not so much about the stellar prose and eloquent transitions, here’s the 2010-2011 Kindergarten school year at a glance:

• August 9 beginning of the school year
• September 24 – October 17, 3 week fall break
• December 24 – January 9, 2 week winter break
• February 12 – February 20, 1 week Sportwoche
• April 9 – May 1, 3 week Spring Break (oh. my. god.) (it’s only 2 weeks for the upper grades)*
• June 2 – June 5 long weekend for Auffahrt (Ascension)
• July 8 end of school year

Whew.

So. I dread even asking, because the answers coming from the US are probably going to make me cry, but what does your typical school day look like? Don’t worry, I can take it. I’ve got plenty of chocolate lying about. It’s Switzerland after all.

* Which is charming if you’ve got, say a Kindergartener and a second grader. No three week long family holiday for you! Nope, your older kid goes back to school but your Kindergartener is still at home.

Zibelemärit

It’s a very Bernese tradition, the Zibelemärit: the annual onion market held on the fourth Monday in November. There are conflicting stories about how this market got started – Bernese legend has it that in appreciation for helping to fight a devestating fire in Bern in 1405, the people of Freiburg were given the right to sell their produce (and their produce, apparantly, was onions) at the market in Bern. That’s probably apocrophal, but it’s the story I like best and it’s the one my father-in-law would tell if you asked him about the Zibelmärit. Other more likely but less resonant stories point to a connection to festivals surrounding St. Martin’s Day. Whatever the origins, Zibelmärit has turned into one of the biggest festival days in Bern, probably second only to Fasnacht (carnival).

It’s actually a pretty big deal for the farmers of the region, who have their stalls up and running by 5am. Up to 50 tons of onions will be sold at the market, largely in the form of decorative Zöpfen

or garlands

You also all manner of onion figurines – these ones are dressed in the different uniforms of the teams in the Swiss National Hockey League:

(The predominantly yellow jersey is our local team – that’s an old jersey design – and the red one to the left is our local rival.)

Farmers also sell plain onions in bulk. Those are gone early and I’m assuming they’re snapped up by restaurants. There is Zibelechueche (an onion quiche which I’ve never liked) and Chäschueche (cheese quiche for the people who don’t like onion quiche and I’ve never really like that, either) and onion soup and to drink, plenty of Glühwein, which I do like.

And there is confetti. I don’t know how old the throwing confetti at people and wacking them on the head with plastic hammers tradtion has been around, but my husband did it when he was a boy so it’s been around a while. We got the boys spring-loaded confetti launchers and a few bags of confetti and they had a great time shooting people. And us.

And each other.

Because if you can’t shoot your brother in the face with a little confetti, what’s the point of Zibelemärit anyway?

And a personal take on the language divide

Robyn asked if I would move to a different language region. Five years ago the answer would have been, “sure.” In fact, five years ago R was looking for a new job and he was considering something in Geneva that wasn’t the greatest move for him professionally (it was a lateral move at best) but he felt that for me, as an English-speaking expat, Geneva would have offered a lot of opportunities, both professional and social. In spite of all the effort I had, at that point, put into learning German I would have made the move. Today the answer would probably be “no.” The difference now, of course, is the Small Boy starts first grade next year: to move now to French-speaking Switzerland would mean to  throw him into first grade in a French-speaking public school having exactly no French. It seems unfair to make him essentially illiterate without even leaving the country. I could understand the unfortunate necessity of setting him back if we were moving to Norway or Spain, but to become a language outsider in his own country, well, it seems a little ridiculous. (R might think differently about that, having studied for a year in French-speaking Switzerland in order to master his school-room French.) So we’re staying put for now.

“Röstigraben”

I want to write some posts about our vacation, a la Bethany’s series on her “highland fling,” but since I already committed myself to answering your questions about life in Switzerland and then promptly left on vacation, it’s probably unwise to suggest that I’m going to take on a series of vacation posts before I at least begin to write to some of the Switzerland posts I put on hold a month ago.

Both Robyn and Claudia asked about the language divide, so I’ll start there.

Switzerland has four official languages: German (spoken by about 63% of the population and dominant in 19 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons), French (20%, 4 cantons), Italian (almost 7%, 1 canton and part of another), and Rumantsch (0.5%, spoken only in parts of the canton of Graubünden). The cantons of Bern, Valais, and Fribourg are bi-lingual German-French; Graubünden is tri-lingual German-Italian-Rumantsch. (You can find a handy little map showing the language distribution here.) Rumantsch, by the way, is a lovely and musical indecipherable little language I dream of learning one day simply for the sake of it. (I love this commercial, which will give you a taste of Rumantsch and is worth listening to even if you don’t understand a word of it. The older Steinbock is speaking Rumantsch and the younger translates it into Swiss-German. And if you’ve never been to the Graubünden, you’re missing out. It’s my favorite canton.)

The percentages I listed above don’t quite add up there, do they? Those numbers measure “mother tongues” and Switzerland has a very large immigrant population – about twenty percent of Swiss residents are not Swiss citizens* and a large portion of those people speak a native tongue that is not an official Swiss language. When measured in terms of “public use” it looks like this: German, 74%; French 21%; Italian 4%; Rumantsch 1%. Take my case for example: if asked for my mother tongue I would say English but if asked for the language I use in public life (the box I check on forms when asked what language I should receive correspondence in, for example) I would say German. 

I’m coming from an outsider’s perspective on this, of course, and to make it worse I’m an outsider with a bias: I can consume the German-language media but not the French, so I get German-speaking Switzerland’s side of the story and the French story filtered through the German lens (am I giving you a headache yet, because I’m giving myself one). My take on the language divide in the country – the German-French divide seems to me the only one that matters because everybody generally ignores the Italian-speakers: for example kids in German-speaking Switzerland are required to learn French in school and kids in French-speaking Switzerland are required to learn German in school and nobody, as far as I can tell, is required to learn Italian – is that French Switzerland (or the Romandie) is ever on guard against being dominated by German-speaking Switzerland. Several years ago when Micheline Calmy-Rey was up for a seat in the Bundesrat – the seven-member executive governing body in Parliament – one of her major selling points was that she was from the Romandie; there is an unwritten rule (at least I think it’s unwritten, though it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find it’s an actual rule) about ensuring representation for French-speaking Switzerland. Which is a fair point but begs the question: what, beside the language, makes French-Swiss and German-Swiss view each other as so different? Why are they worried about being “dominated” by each other if they’re all Swiss.

The differences between the regions are real. It’s not just the language that changes when you travel from Bern to Geneva. The menus aren’t just printed in French, they feature French food. I would go so far as to suggest that Swiss living in Geneva are more aware of what’s going on in Paris than Bern, but maybe that’s just my standing-outside-peering-through-the-window take on it. (And I supposed it’s just as likely that Swiss in Zürich are more up to speed with Berlin than Geneva.) Or consider the Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton: Everything about the Ticino  is like a little piece of Italy. The architecture changes. The food. Cultural norms, wardrobes, street life.  There are also some clear political differences between the regions: French-Swiss tend to approve of closer ties with the EU, for example, at much higher rates than German-Swiss and are less likely to approve of harsh anti-immigrant/foreigner measures than German-Swiss.

The Swiss know this about themselves, they’ve even got a word for it: it’s the famous “Röstigraben,” the divide (literally trench, Graben) between the French- and the German-speaking regions (if you can read German, there’s even a wikipedia page for Röstigraben.  Rösti, a hash-brown like potato dish, is a staple of the German-Swiss diet and is far less popular in the Romandie - the idea of a Röstigraben taps into all the linguistic and cultural and, yes, political, differences between French-speaking and German-speaking Swiss. (It also reinforces my feeling that the Italian-Swiss often don’t figure into the thinking of French- and German-speaking Swiss.)

I think it’s easy to make too much of the language divisions though. My father-in-law is as German-Swiss as they get but sets great store on his French; the whole family (but for me) speaks perfectly lovely French. And when Swiss with different mother tongues of R’s generation come together for a business meeting or Army duty, rather than battle it out over who will switch to their second language, they’re likely to just all speak English together instead. (Which horrifies my father-in-law.) And the Swiss claim any Swiss as their own. It’s a small country – a population of just under 8 million people, not all of whom are citizens – and successes on a world stage for a country that small are rare. No French-speaking Swiss cares that Roger Federer hails from German-speaking Basel and nobody in a German-speaking canton is going to turn up his nose at the Neuenburger Didier Cuche. I’m seeing all of this from the outside, of course, though as an outsider who’s becoming ever more of an insider.

Two years ago I went to a reading by the German poet Jaochim Sartorius at the Leukerbad Literaturfestival. He was reading from his collection Hôtel des Étrangers and before he began he told a story about how he had to convince his publisher to publish his collection, which is written in German, under the French title. Of course in Switzerland, he said, nobody thinks twice about a German-speaking author using a French title for his book, but in Germany it’s a bit strange. And he is right. It hadn’t exactly occurred to me that the title of his book was in French, or it hadn’t occurred to me to think about it one way or the other, because after ten years in Switzerland I’m used to that sort of language mash-up.

I think the Röstigraben doesn’t always have to be a trench; when seen from a bit of a distance it can look like one of Switzerland’s greatnesses, actually.

* Some of this is due to restrictive Swiss citizenship requirements which result in plenty of people being born in Switzerland, attending the public schools, getting a job and living here their whole lives and never acquiring citizenship because their parents are immigrants. It’s a rant topic for another post for sure.

And now for something completely different: actual information

I was tweeting with After Words yesterday about our kindergarten situations (nutshell: hers, awesome; mine, suboptimal) and the discussion of kindergarten and school schedules led to a little back-and-forth about daycare options here in Switzerland (nutshell: suboptimal) and the dearth of any organized anything to help out families with two working adults led her to say: “Somehow I thought the Swiss would be more progressive?” which made me chuckle, because, really, Switzerland?, until it made me realize that clearly I’m not a very informative blogger. Because, really, Switzerland? Switzerland, I think you know I am deeply fond of you, heck I might even love you, but progressive you are not.

So, since I’ve been telling myself for months that I need to recommit to this blog, and since I live in Switzerland, and since a fair number of my readers do not live in Switzerland, I came up with this brilliant idea. I should tell my readers a little bit about Switzerland and invite questions about life in Switzerland, life as an expat, raising bilingual children – and I’ve got an interview about that to finish for Bringing up Baby Bilingual, actually – or whatever question you have about life in the land of cheese and chocolate.

What do you want to know about the mountain fortress that is my home? Fire away. In the meantime, I’ll be putting together a post about the Swiss school system in the next couple of days. I bet you can’t wait.

Still crazy after all these years

Sitting at the Grosse Schanze, this view that I never tire of. To the right the green wooded hill of the Gurten, in front of me in the foreground the spire of the Heiliggeistkirche and to the left the dome of the Bundeshaus, the tiled rooftops of the city below me, the window boxes of geraniums that are the hallmark of Bern and the backdrop to it all the snowcapped wall of the Alps, the Jungfrau, Mönch, the black diamond of the Eiger Nordwand. Even the Bernese come up here on a blue sky day, lean against the railing and stare out at that view. The hippest trying-to-be-jaded twenty-something will stop in spite of himself, watch a cloud forming around the peaks. I love this view, I’m crazy for this view, I can’t get over this view. This view makes up for Swiss-German, for my outsider status, for being a foreigner, for Swiss reserve, for being away from home and living my life between two languages, two countries, two cultures, two homes. This view helps my heart decide.

Random expat thoughts

A grocery store I frequent has a big display at the end of one of the aisles, all “Neu!” and “Jetzt!” and big attention-grabbing signs and a tower of boxes of … Fruit Loops. As soon as I saw them I said “OH! Fruit Loops!” My heart might possibly have fluttered. Here’s the weird part, though: I don’t eat Fruit Loops. I never ate Fruit Loops (we were more of a Frosted Flakes family), except for possibly a few Sunday mornings in the college dorm when I was hung over, and I have no desire for the boys to ever discover the existence of Fruit Loops. I could easily go the rest of my life without eating a single Loop of Fruit. But seeing them in my Swiss grocery store made me so excited I almost actually grabbed a box just because I could. I’ve been here for ten years, but I still get excited when I see American food in the store, even if it’s nothing I have any interest in.

*  *  *

I’ve been in Switzerland for ten years, and I’ve been toying with writing for much of that time. I never took it as seriously as I have for the past eighteen months, but I always had bursts of energy and Big Plans. And postage stamps for those pesky SASEs. (And 8 1/2 x 11 paper, too.) More and more journals now accept on-line submissions (at least for poetry; I’ve put prose on the back burner these past two years so I don’t know what the status is there), and I’ve found that many of those that say they don’t will make an exception for overseas submissions if you send a polite e-mail asking about it. But there are still those journals that only accept postal submissions, so I’ve always got some US international airmail stamps around. I’ve got 75 cent stamps. I’ve got some 80 cent stamps. I’ve got 90 cent stamps, and 4 cent add-ons, and now I’ve got 98 cent stamps. I’ve even got some regular old 32 cent stamps, and if US postal rates keep going one like this I’ll soon be able to combine them with the 75 cent stamps and get both of those denominations out of my hair. I have seventy-five cent postage stamps. I have been in Switzerland for twenty-three cents worth of rate increases. 

*  *  *

When Small Boy started talking, he preferred Swiss; he still does, I think. It felt strange, this son of mine chattering at me in Swiss. I guess I’ve gotten used to it, because I kind of think that when The Boychen (who I think is more linguistically balanced than his older brother) says, “Ja, das chöi mir, Mama” * it’s the cutest thing ever.

*  *  *

When I read the first line of this Tony Judt article, “One is not supposed to love Switzerland.”, I took umbrage. My pride was hurt, and I felt defensive and protective. Damn, I’ve been here a long time, because the truth is this: I love Switzerland. Unabashedly. 

* Yeah, we could do that, Mama.

Breathe

I can always breathe in Arosa. After the car ride during which The Boychen refused to sleep even though we purposely left at his nap-time, after the last 40 minutes when Small Boy’s admirable patience finally deserted him and he began asking “How much longer?” every five minutes and then arguing with us over the reply, after the mad dash to the sport store for helmets and sleds five minutes before closing, after the unpacking, I can breathe. A person can breathe up there, can breathe in big lungfuls of snow and sky, can breathe in this:

Yes, a person can breathe up there.

This, again

Every year I forget what autumn in this part of Switzerland is like. This part of Switzerland, where we can see the mountains but are not in them. This part of Switzerland lying at 500 meters above sea-level, this moist and temperate section of Switzerland. Every year I forget this, forget about the low-lying fog, the weak sunlight failing to break through, the damp air. The rain and the grey. The way the chill sinks into everything but temperatures do not fall enough for snow. Bare trees, sodden limp brown grass. Now that we’re on the farm our driveway is a ribbon of mud: there is not enough sun to dry it, not enough chill to at least freeze it hard. Every year I forget this, forget that from now until spring, sunshine will not come to us. 

From now until spring we will be chasing the sun, gaining elevation, getting above the clouds. When we can. Work, Kindergarten – these things keep up in the flatlands. Hockey practice bang at noon steals our Saturdays. I look out the window of my studio – the studio with walls the color of Idaho skies, and now I remember why my heart chose this color – and cannot see our nearest neighbors half a kilometer away. Every year I forget this, this grey blanket. I can remember the exact color of light shimmering across Swiftcurrent Lake the summer I was nine, but from one year to the next I forget the color of this fog.

* * *

Honestly compels me to confess that the mornings are worse than the afternoons, that often, by mid-day, even the Bernese Mittleland shrugs its shoulders and shakes off the mantle of fog.