Joe’s Journal | 2

December 20, 2011December 20, 2011

Korean Diplomacy

While this seems to be quite unrelated to the normally festive holiday season here, news of Kim Jong Il’s death, and the succession of his son to the leader of North Korea has been cause for a lot of news coverage here in Switzerland. Obviously, it’s been a huge news story everywhere, but what you might not know is that Kim Jong Un, the new leader of North Korea, lived and studied here in Bern. Actually, to be specific, he lived on the outskirts of Bern and went to school at the International School just two towns over from where we live.

Kim Jong Un in Gumligen — Kim Jong Un in a class photo in Gumligen

So the new leader of North Korea speaks Schweizer Deutsch. Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il-Sung, who ruled North Korea from 1948 to 1994 was known as the Respected Leader. Kim Jong Il was known as the Dear Leader. I suppose Kim Jong Un will be known, simply, as lederhosen.

December 12, 2011December 14, 2011

Demystifying Swiss Christmas

Sarah recently wrote about our town and the approaching holidays, including an interaction between our children and Switzerland’s beloved Samichlaus. If you are anything like me, though, you may have eyed the darkly-clad mysterious figure next to Samichlaus and thought to yourself, “Who in the name of Yukon Cornelius is this baffling Christmas character?” It turns out that while America has imported and adapted the figure of Santa Claus for our Christmas season, we have largely abandoned the concept of his “Companions” that is so prevalent throughout Europe.

The mysterious dark figure that accompanies Samichlaus is none other than Schmutzli (or Père Fouettard in the French speaking regions), and he is Father Christmas’ answer to Corporal Punishment. Or at least, he used to be. While it was Samichlaus who loved children and brought them gifts of candy, nuts, and mandarins, Schmutzli was known to punish the naughty children by whipping them with a switch from his broom. His relationship to Samichlaus is not really well understood, but now he has become a more benevolent helper, passing out candy, nuts, and mandarins to children who recite poems or sing songs.

While Santa Claus lives in the North Pole, Samichlaus and Schmutzli live together in a hut (with a presumably Platonic relationship) in Germany’s Black Forest. One story I have heard is that Schmutzli was a poor woodcutter who “saved Christmas” one year. Samichlaus’ bag of treats had ripped open, and Schmutzli walked around with his own sack gathering up the fallen treats. Samichlaus was so grateful when Schmutzli brought him back all of the treats that he invited Schmutzli to accompany him on his journey to children’s houses. How, or when, it was decided that Schmutzli would get to beat the bad children (or stuff them in his sack), is less clear.

While the name Schmutzli uniquely belongs to Switzerland, European versions of St. Nick have traveled with other, similar Companions for centuries. He goes by many names and faces: Knecht Ruprecht (Rupert the Farmhand), Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), Krampus, Belsnickel, Bellzebub, and more. They all seem to have the same philosophy in common: they bring fear and retribution along with the kindness of St. Nick. They are the negative reinforcement to Santa’s positive reinforcement. (NPR recently did a story about the Krampus from the European Alpine folklore, if you are interested.)

SBB - Samichlaus and Schmutzli — SBB (The Swiss Rail System) use Samichlaus and Schmutzli to show you how to use paper and e-tickets.

Samichlaus and Schmutzli have their big night on December 6th, when they make the rounds visiting houses and leaving treats. On December 25th, however, presents are left for children by the Christkind or Christ child. Similar to our Santa Claus, the Christkind won’t leave presents while children are still awake (or at least not while they are in the room). Kids are sent to bed, or to hide in the basement while the Christkind leaves presents, and then the children are summoned back to the main room in hopes that they will get a glimpse of the Christkind before he flies out the door. Alas, he is still rarely seen.

David Sedaris summed up his reaction to the Dutch Christmas story, and how it contrasted with our American story, nicely (for full text, read the entire piece in Esquire here, or hear David Sedaris read it here – it is well worth the 15 minutes):

While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our Christmas story remains relatively simple. Santa lives with his wife in a remote polar village and spends one night a year traveling around the world. If you’re bad, he leaves you coal. If you’re good and live in America, he’ll give you just about anything you want. We tell our children to be good and send them off to bed, where they lie awake, anticipating their great bounty. A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before you go to bed. The former bishop from Turkey will be coming along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you in a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

November 13, 2011April 8, 2013

The Simple Life

When we finally realized we were moving to Switzerland, one of the things I was looking forward to was the fresh food. We’ve talked about what the Swiss eat, but I’m not really talking about that. When you go to a Swiss grocery store, most of the items that you see in the dairy and produce section were probably produced within a few kilometers of where you are buying them. Preservatives are uncommon here. Yogurt and milk usually come from local dairies. Potatoes and apples are also usually local.

Well when it comes to getting it fresh, we got more than we bargained for. Starting in late Summer, we had started taking the kids on bike rides throughout the town to get to know it better, and to enjoy the scenery. Fairly quickly we stumbled across a farm a few blocks down from us. We knew one must be close, by the smell if nothing else, but when we finally found it, we noticed a sign out front that indicated it sold some simple farm items: milk, eggs, potatoes, apples, etc.

When we finally looked into it seriously, we found a small stand behind the barn, off the road, that housed their “for-sale” goods. There were baskets of apples, potatoes, various fresh vegetables. There was also a refrigerator filled with eggs. There were also some jarred items like honey, and grape jelly. And in the corner is a scale to weigh your produce, and a small money box that you leave your payment in. There’s no person guarding the stand. No one checks your math. No one even knows if you really even paid.

We went and bought some items one day: potatoes and eggs. The potatoes were labeled by their type (a classification of which I was wholly unaware… they all looked the same to me). Eggs were mixed brown and white, and I believe we met some of the generous chickens while we were there. We wanted to buy milk, and it seemed they had it for sale, but we couldn’t find where it was.

As we were leaving the farm one day, the farmer’s wife was around, so we asked her about milk. She asked us, in German, how many bottles we had. We looked at each other and thought, “bottles?” She smiled, went into the house and brought out a 1.5L bottle, freshly washed. She took us into the milk room which contained a huge stainless steel vat of milk, and explained that we can fill bottles ourselves anytime we want. Just leave payment in the stand for each liter.

So now, about two or three times a week, we head back to the farm, wave to the cows, chat with the farmer, his wife, and mother, get our basics (milk, eggs, apples, potatoes), check on anything new they have that day, pay for our groceries and leave. The milk has never tasted so good. If we want cream for our coffee, we just pour it off the top of the milk in the morning. And better than that, I can check on the cows anytime I want, just to make sure they’re doing fine.

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October 24, 2011April 8, 2013

Team Alps

Sarah had a nice post about our recent trip to the Jungfraujoch, but she has left the bulk of the weekend’s activities to me. You see, we took the train back from the Jungfraujoch to Kleine Scheidegg where we had lunch. There is a 10km hike from Kleine Scheidegg to Lauterbrunnen (at the base of the valley) that was supposed to be very scenic. I had wanted to take one or two of the older kids on the walk, but Sarah felt that she would be a sure lock for the “Best Wife Ever” award if she let me enjoy the hike back in the peace and serenity of being by myself. So she offered me the “once-in-a-lifetime” deal of taking the kids back to our village while I walked back down the mountain. How could I say no?

The vertical distance from Kleine Scheidegg (2061m) to Lauterbrunnen (795m) is around 1.3km covered over a 10km walk. This is about a 13% grade averaged over the length of the walk, but for those of us who are not used to walking down that grade, your quads can begin to burn pretty quick (and that fire usually smolders for a few days).

Regardless, it was a beautiful walk through grassy fields, snow, forest, and meandering streets in mountain villages. The sky was perfectly blue and cloudless all day. It took about 2 hours to get back to Lauterbrunnen, and a short bus ride and cable car later I was back in Gimmelwald.

The next morning we awoke to another beautiful morning with plans to take the kids on another hike. Emily and James told me that they had decided yesterday that they were such good mountain kids, that they had started “Team Alps.” This team currently consisted of them, Mom, and Henry. They were interested in seeing if I wanted to join, but they needed to make sure I was ready to carry on the spirit of the team (whatever that was). I felt ready.

Around 11am we took the kids by cable car up to Mürren, and set out along the Northface Trail. This trail starts with a reasonable climb up paved village roads, but quickly turns to grassy passes, wooded trails, and muddy paths dotted with cow manure. Suffice it to say, the kids loved it. We followed the trail about 2.5km in (and 300m up) where we came upon a small farmhouse on the edge of a cliff that led down to a rushing creek.

Our host, Olle, told us that campfires can be set along the trail anywhere if you want to stop and cook sausages. He further demonstrated this point to us by giving us frozen sausages, matches, and paraffin paper to start a fire. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Look. Your children will not be impressed that you are a doctor, but what will impress them,” he holds up the matches, “is if you can start a fire.” The smile afterwards sold it.

So here we sat, in a field spotted with cow manure, overlooking a rushing mountain stream, in front of a small Swiss farmhouse, roasting sausages over an open fire. The sky was clear, the sun was warm and inviting, the air was crisp, and the sausages were delicious. Team Alps enjoyed a “moment of Zen,” and then headed back home.

If only my damned quads weren’t still burning from the day before, the walk back (and down) would have been that much better. But hey, I can’t let my team members down.

Not when I’m the newest member of the group.

October 12, 2011October 12, 2011

Swiss Banknote Series: 1000 Franc Note

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897)

From the SNB website:

Jacob Burckhardt decisively shaped our understanding of the development of our modern culture. He is best known for his scientifically sound and aesthetically appreciative studies of the Italian Renaissance. But Burckhardt was also a persistent and far-sighted critic of the state’s aspiration for power. Today Burckhardt is admired as a brilliant historian, seminal art historian and prophetic critic of his age. His writings in historiography are literary accomplishments as well as pioneering works that helped to establish art history as a modern academic discipline.

Today the banknote bearing his likeness will get you a trip up and down from Grindelwald to the Jungfraujoch for two adults, three times.

October 5, 2011October 5, 2011

Swiss Banknote Series: 200 Franc Note

Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947)

Information from Wikipedia:

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (September 24, 1878 – May 23, 1947) was a French-speaking Swiss writer.

He was born in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud and educated at the University of Lausanne. He taught briefly in nearby Aubonne, and then in Weimar, Germany. In 1903, he left for Paris and remained there until World War I, with frequent trips home to Switzerland. In 1903, he published Le petit village, a collection of poems.

In 1914, he returned to Switzerland, where he lived a retired life devoted to his writing.

He wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat.

He died in Pully, near Lausanne in the year 1947.

Today the note bearing his likeness will get a family of 5 (including three kids under the age of 8 and two adults with Half-Fare cards) from Füssen, Germany to Bern Switzerland on the excellent SBB rail system (with a little left over for snacks on the train).

October 2, 2011March 31, 2013

Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest.

Just the word conjures up visions of giant soft, chewy pretzels, liter steins of beer, and throngs of Germans clad in lederhosen and dirndls.

Well, it’s all true.

Sarah and I took the kids to Munich to experience Oktoberfest, since we had held an Oktoberfest celebration at our house every year for the past three years. Sarah wrote about how we took the kids for a day of carnival rides and cookies, but the next night, Sarah and I got a babysitter (a saint from Canada named Chantal who had just moved to Munich), dressed up in our best trachten and grabbed the U-Bahn to the Theresienwiese to experience Oktoberfest first hand. And let me tell you, the U-Bahn stop at Theresienwiese during Oktoberfest is wall-to-wall Kraut. You must lose all sense of personal space to brave this crowd.

Like most things, Oktoberfest is now a mutated, bloated, exorbitant continuation of what once was intended as a commemorative celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig (soon King Ludwig I) to his bride, Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen. The marriage took place on October 12, 1810 and the people of Munich were invited to participate in the festivities including horse races. As the horse race was repeated annually, the tradition of Oktoberfest was born.

Oktoberfest features only beer brewed by the six major brewers to brew within the city of Munich (known as the Big Six by me, if no one else): Hofbrau, Spaten, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr, Löwenbräu, and Augustiner. You can usually get Weizenbeir, Helles, and of course, the special Oktoberfest beers at the festival. Liter mugs (ein Maß in German) are mandatory and rarely is anything else sold (or tolerated).

Sarah and I found our way to several tents that all claimed to have reserved seating (though I argued that present paying customers were much better than customers yet to come). You see, at Oktoberfest they will not serve you unless you are seated. So it is not uncommon, if you have a table, for a waiter to escort a pretty young fräulein to your table, sit her down momentarily, exchange beer for money, and then she will get up and walk away. This works with one or two people, but larger groups must find a table to sit at.

Eventually we found our seats in the outdoor biergarten of the Schottenhamel tent, a Spaten establishment (one of Sarah and my favorites, and widely available in the U.S. in case you would like to try). We were seated with a group of biology researchers from Munich, across from some Italians from Rome, and a table from some highly inebriated Scots.

We ate, drank, and sang to our hearts delight. Eventually, two nice older couples from Rome were seated next to us. They spoke no German, but understood some of my Spanish. I almost had a seizure trying to translate their Italian into English, and back into German in order to help them order food for the night. They were very appreciative of our efforts, anyway.

After we drank a few liters we went on to the notorious Hofbrauhaus tent. It is known as the place where loud, obnoxious foreigners (i.e. Australians) go to party. I don’t know where these people were from, but as soon as Sarah and I hit the dance floor everyone seemed to want to take pictures with us. We felt like celebrities (but knew we weren’t).

We finally made it back to the U-Bahn and headed back home. We knew we had gotten the full Oktoberfest experience. If only King Ludwig himself could see the party he’s started.

October 1, 2011March 31, 2013

Lunch on the Alpsee

Sarah is going to kill me for posting this; I’m supposed to be writing about our time at Oktoberfest, but when something occurs like this, you have got to get it down before the moment passes.

We have moved on to very southern Bavaria where we planned to take the kids to see Schloss Neuschwanstein. The morning was decorated with horse-drawn carriage rides, a castle tour, and a lovely wooded hike, and will be covered in another post. We had decided to go to lunch on the Alpsee, and found the perfect little café with outdoor seating. We ordered delicious food, ate and drank in the shadow of King Ludwig II, and decided to let Emily and James go play on the shores of the lake.

Then we noticed Henry had a look on his face. This kind of look, when given by a two-year-old, is often accompanied by a smell. And this was no exception. Only parents will understand what I mean when I say that, what we noticed next indicated that the situation had gone from an unpleasant inconvenience, to an all out emergency. Henry had boiled over.

I raced him upstairs to the woefully unequipped bathroom by the idyllic shores of the Alpsee, stripped him naked and proceeded to bathe him in one sink while washing his clothes in the other. After a heroic effort of cleaning and drying him, he found his mother outside the bathroom with a warm jacket and lots of hugs. I proceeded to clean the walls, floors, and counters and we took him downstairs (strategically washing stairs along the way).

Back on the terrace we found, to our surprise, that we had forgotten about Emily and James. And now, they were nowhere to be found. Sarah scoured the shoreline while I raced Henry back to the hotel. Fortunately the cleaning lady found me in the hallway and told me that my two kids had come home early and she let them in.

I found Emily and James in their room playing with their new Lego sets, and they told me what happened to them. Emily said they thought we were coming down to the water to throw stones with them, but when they looked up, we were both gone. They talked about it, and decided to walk back to the hotel to find us (a very smart move on their part), but were stopped, “by a group of black-haired people who just wanted to take pictures with Emily.”

Asian tourists. They can’t get enough of blond children.

September 28, 2011September 28, 2011

Swiss Banknote Series: 100 Franc Note

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

Alberto Giacometti is a Swiss sculpter, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker born in the Graubünden region of Switzerland, near the Italian border in 1901. His father was an impressionist painter.

He began his arts studies in the School of Fine Arts in Geneva, but subsequently moved to France to study under Antoine Bourdelle.

He produced a number sculptures of the human form, and states he purposefully tried to sculpt the human figure not in its natural form but rather as the shadow that it casts. An example of this can be seen in the sculpture Woman of Venice (II), seen on the left.

He died in 1966 in Chur, Switzerland, of pericarditis and is buried in his home in Graubünden.

Today, the bill bearing his name will buy a mid-level mobile phone (not a smartphone) at Swisscom.

September 21, 2011September 20, 2011

Swiss Banknote Series: 50 Franc Note

Sophie Täuber-Arp (1889-1943)

The first woman in our series, Sophie Täuber-Arp is a female artist born in Davos, Switzerland in 1889. She married the Dada artist Jean Arp in 1922. She studied art in Munich and France, as well as in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Her art is highly geometric in nature with influences of Cubism. She was skilled in textile techniques, sculpture, paint, and dance. Samples of her artwork can be viewed online through the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

She died in Zurich in 1943 when a gas stove in her home malfunctioned while she was sleeping.

Today, the Swiss bill carrying her image will buy you a Skross World Adapter PRO+ at melectronics. It is, quite honestly, the best travel adapter Swiss Francs can buy. I own two of them (and it only cost me “a pair of Sophie’s” as they say in Switzerland).