Midweek Ambassadors

Here's some German for beginners like me: six of the seven days of the week end in -tag in German, equivalent to "-day" in English, e.g., Monntag = Monday, Dienstag = Tuesday, etc. The exception is Wednesday which is Mittwoch, literally "Midweek," which provides my segue into a story about Steph's and my "typical" yet fairly entertaining Midweek last week.

It begins with Hobbes and me waking totally alone and mystified Wednesday morning--Stephanie was nowhere to be found. After a cup of black coffee, we remembered that she had embarked Tuesday on her first European work trip, an overnighter to Milan, five hours by train. She had taken the one and only phone, our temporary cell phone, making any communication impossible until her return Wednesday evening. Luckily my schedule for the day was occupied with two apartment viewings with relocation agent Mr. Mssrli.

To avoid both traffic delays and him spending too much time in the office, Mr. Mssrli always picks me up early in Kloten and we spend 20 minutes driving into Zürich and another 30 minutes finding parking. We enjoy an approximate 50% success rate of procuring parking sufficiently early to stroll through the neighborhood and test the coffee at a local cafe-- such details are vitally important when evaluating potential housing (I'm serious!). This particularly successful morning we found enough time for a guided tour of the new UBS bank neighborhood branch (high tech!) AND for an espresso before our second viewing of the Römerhof apartment (per prior blog entry).

Unimpressed, we determined to discuss the prospects of the afternoon's apartment over a Thai lunch--Mssrli and I talk a lot about food. He's half English and half Swiss, young but well-traveled and an interesting guy. Settling on a nearby Vietnamese (close enough to Thai) restaurant, we started with a traditional Vietnamese appetizer of various greens and herbs rolled together by hand and then dipped into a spicy peanut sauce. He ordered the yellow curry and I tried the duck. After 2+ hours, finishing our second espresso of the day we suddenly realized the time and sped to our next apartment showing at Burgwies, almost mortifyingly late (Swiss promptness to appointments is NOT regarded lightly!). We departed similarly unimpressed.

Nearing home that afternoon, we stopped for about an hour at a local Kloten restaurant/pub to discuss Thursday's possibilities (Mssrli drank tea, I drank Swiss white wine). Before departing--because we're both infatuated by Swiss baked goods--Mssrli graciously gifted me with a jar of quince jelly freshly made from the September harvest of the quince tree in his backyard (quince is a fruit more common in Europe than the U.S., kind of a cross between an apple, peach and pear). Not surprisingly, it's phenomenal.

I was excited entering the apartment because of the activity there in my absence--after three weeks of intermittent and unsuccessful effort to obtain an operational home phone line I had eventually asked our landlady next door to call her electrician to physically evaluate the phone line; she had arranged his visit earlier that afternoon. Immediately after feeding the ravenous and hairy beast inside the front door, I spied the note from the landlady--the phone works!

Momentarily leaving Hobbes amidst celebrating his dinner, I rang her doorbell to thank her and verify that Hobbes had not licked the electrician to death. She's been extraordinarily kind since our arrival, a native of Zürich and Kloten who worked her career at Swiss Air before taking early retirement during their restructuring; she speaks English very well from school and living in London for a year. Answering the door, before I could even thank her, she invited me in and before I knew it, we were drinking gin & tonics (hers without tonic and sipped between cigarettes) and discussing every topic under the sun: from dogs (she owned three) to Swisscom, electricians, recycling, Swiss politics, George Bush, Michael Moore, 9/11, economic theory, hiking & skiing, Swiss-German language, racism, croissants, U.S. movies, on and on. Interestingly, Mr. Mssrli and I have also touched on all these and more during our various excursions. Next thing you know the doorbell rings again--it's 7:45pm, three hours later, and Stephanie (?!?) is miraculously standing there, returned from Milan to find a full but confused dog in our kitchen.

We reluctantly turned down our landlady's offer of additional drinks (but accepted an invitation to a future dinner) because Steph had already made other plans--you guessed it, to go drinking. Several usual Hyatt suspects--English, Scottish, Swiss-French, Australian--were already gathering at a local Kloten sports pub called The Nelson for the critical England v. Croatia soccer matchup; England was dangerously close to not qualifying for Euro 2008 (a huge tournament, like the World Cup but with only European teams, to be co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland (!) next summer); gladly Steph and I are longtime international soccer fans. Regrettably we all departed after only 45 minutes and one drink, due partially to England's dismal first half performance and partially to an entire Swiss army battalion apparently deployed to the bar that evening for chain smoking drills.

As the day's final cultural note, we learned that every Swiss male spends one year in the army upon turning 18. After serving, they take home their gun so that every male citizen is trained and armed in the (unlikely) event of Switzerland being invaded. In Kloten, they take leave in uniform on Wednesday nights to drink and perfect the universally-Swiss habit of smoking like fiends. Although it baffles us, Switzerland ranks something like the third-highest smoking country in the world. I'm certain that Swiss dogs and cats would smoke too, if only they had opposable thumbs.

Overall, a wonderfully diverse day of events to which Steph--who upon returning from Italy briefly embarrassingly started mixing the Italian Grazie! (thank you!) with the Swiss Grüezi! (hello!)--and I thankfully appear to be adapting. By the way, if you don't already know how the England game ended, you probably don't care anyway (they lost).