The Other Melting Pot

While the United States undoubtedly reigns supreme as the world’s melting pot, employment with a European-based international corporation provides another funny slant on mixed cultural experiences. I survived my first workweek in the Swiss-French canton of Vaud near the shores of Lake Geneva despite bombardment by spoken and written French, of which I know nearly nothing. Of course, virtually everyone in the office speaks excellent English as a backup but--in a decidedly different twist vs. Zürich--the region overall is significantly less English-friendly.

For example, I found the wait staff in restaurants speak hardly a word of English (or German), a poor combo with my reciprocally weak French. Thank goodness for our year of adjustment in Zurich’s easier environs; I’m long-since inured to taking the brush-offs personally. For now, oui, I’m content as long as I receive my glass(es) of wine.

Last week, my ears were habitually attuned instead to the occasional German utterance in the office. Luckily some visitors from Austria provided a needed fix. And I actually spoke a bit of German as well, during lunch with another friendly visiting customer from (where else?) Cairo, Egypt. Do all Egyptians speak German? The office hosts a training center, so customers and prospects routinely visit from all over the globe; I rode to the hotel each day with a Greek contingent and Thai guy. The trend continued this week as I enjoyed for yesterday's lunch an excellent preparation of lapin (rabbit, from the cafeteria’s cooks French influence) with a delegation of Russian professors from Moscow and Siberia (on a separate culinary note, I'm already best friends with the office espresso machine as captured above via my new work camera-phone).

Keeping with this theme, I left work last Friday directly for destination Basel (not Zürich) to accompany Steph at Hyatt’s Christmas company outing, where we dined at a table with several Germans, a Scot and Ukrainian, and later attended Saturday brunch with her coworkers from Germany, Norway, Ireland and Australia (strangely enough, Friday night’s corporate event was the Blue Man Group, a show Steph and I had never witnessed despite it being performed less than a mile from home in Chicago for the past 11 years--we needed to come to Basel, Switzerland to see it).

To complete the international flow thus far and cap my seventh day of work yesterday evening, an extremely nice Libyan coworker dropped me at the hotel so that my Indian boss or Dutch HR manager didn’t have to. And as need has dictated, I’m now preparing to start studying French (without giving up German just yet), so that I can someday soon be equally terrible at three foreign languages (don’t forget I brushed the border of functionality with Spanish two years ago, but stopped tantalizingly short of adequacy). Did I mention I'm learning German via Skype from a Russian national currently living in North Carolina? On that note, à demain / bis morgen / hasta mañana… until tomorrow.