here’s something.

So Danny sent some of his people this way to help us with our fundraising, which is beautiful, because I mean, Danny has a lot of people to send. If you’re reading this and didn’t know, Sarah and I are training for a marathon, and we’re raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Want to help? Go here.

Meantime, I offer you a little something in return. It’s a recipe for a cool summer soup, sort of like a gazpacho, but with a melony twist. Mia invented it on a lazy Saturday a couple weeks ago – we’d spent the morning in the pool, and Max was napping, so Sarah made sandwiches and Mia made…

Watermelon Water Bisque

3 cups water
one string cheese
2 slices of watermelon
A handful of toasted soy nuts

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Let it soup sit for 20 minutes to allow the nuts and cheese to begin to soften and decompose. Enjoy!

Or not. Truth be told, it didn’t taste quite as good as it sounds (and I know how good it sounds), but good for Mia for trying – she’s a creator, that one. Still, she really wanted us to love it, so I had a spoonful and made a big deal over it, and a while later, after some very effective badgering, Sarah pretended to take a taste as well. She made an even bigger deal over it, then wolfed down the rest of the batch while Mia was in the other room. She stood over the sink while she ate, lest some of the soup spill. Unfortunately, I think a lot of it spilled. A lot of it.

Sometimes you love your kids so much you lie to them.

 

trois, deux, un…

There are three weeks left in Sarah’s assignment here, which means there are four weeks left before we get back to LA, and about five before I get back to school, and the kids get back to daycare, and Sarah gets back to American Idol. That’s a lot to get back to, and we’re beginning to get excited – Sarah and Mia have been ex-ing out days on the calendar for a month now, and we’re down around 25 days at this point.

That’s not to say that we’re sitting by the door with our plane tickets in hand or anything. Since I last wrote, we’ve been to Paris, we entertained some handsome visitors from the Pacific Northwest, and we even managed to shoehorn in a trip to the slopes (finally). And through it all we kept up with the coffee-drinking and the bread-buying, so we’ve been busy, and we’ll continue to be busy, clear through to the 26th, when we strap the kids back into fancy-class and fly back home. Which is why I need to pause now, and record.

So let’s see. Paris.

It may have been our last big trip from Switzerland, so it was all a little bittersweet. Everything felt like the last to me. And everything was extraordinary. So here’s Paris, beginning and ending with two insanely long paragraphs, specially designed to commemorate the train rides there and back. Speaking of which, they were fine.

The train rides, I mean. Fine there, fine back. I was worried, but on the way there, with just me and the kids and Sarah awaiting us, the kids slept, and they watched movies, and they ate sandwiches, and they were fantastic, the whole five hours. Just wonderful, total troopers, and I could have boxed them up right then and sold them as-is to anyone on the train, and gotten a really good price, I know it. I didn’t, because Sarah would have been irritated, but I could have, and that knowledge alone made me smile, just a little, to myself. The ride home was also easy, but not quite as easy, despite Sarah’s presence – the Sunday train was packed, and we shared our six-seat compartment with a pair of stragglers, neither of whom seemed terribly thrilled to be in the car with the kids. The six-minute transfer in Strassbourg was trying, to put it lightly, because Sarah didn’t realize until we reached Train B that she’d left her purse on Train A, which resulted in me executing a 1,000-meter dash, down and up a flight of stairs and down and up another, with only a minute left before Train B was scheduled to leave for Basel. I made it back in time, because I’m blindingly fast, but I was empty-handed because, as Sarah had by then realized, she had the purse with her after all. Meanwhile, the train was late leaving, which is probably the real reason I made it back in time. Okay, it was the reason. So…hooray for French inefficiency!

Told you that graf was a long one. Here’s the rest of our trip, broken into smaller grafs for your convenience:

We stayed in the Opera section of Paris, just north of the Jardin des Tuileries, just east of Champs Elysees. The location was great – close to everything we wanted it to be close to – and we walked all over town. We stayed at the Opera Richepanse, which is pronounced “Oprah Rich-Pants,” or at least it is when we say it.

The Rich-Pants is lovely and quaint, though it’s built above a metro line, a fact that became clear to us within about ten minutes. Didn’t bother us, but then, we had Max in the room, so it may have bothered the metro passengers. If it did, we didn’t hear anything about it.

I spent Friday morning in a neighborhood park with the kids while Sarah tied up some loose business ends, and I learned two things: Nanny culture is just as big in Paris as it is anywhere else, and all the nannies in Paris are African.

In our family, crepes are now called Paris pancakes. Man, I love Paris pancakes.

I asked every cab driver about the upcoming elections. It wasn’t easy, because only one of our cabbies spoke English, and he wasn’t terribly chatty. Another guy broke it down for me, though, and his take is my take until I do a little more research, which I probably won’t. To wit: Bayrou is good. Royal, the socialist, is crazy (as he indicated by twirling both index fingers next to his ears). And Sarkozy is bad for black people. Or people with forearms, I’m not sure. All I know is that he said “Sarkozy bad for…” – and then he pinched the skin on his forearm.

He also said Sarkozy was going to win. So, you know. Bummer, dude.

The city was blanketed by men in blankets. Actually, men in kilts. Scottish men in kilts. Apparently, the Scots were in town for a big rugby match for the Six Nations Chalice, or whatever it is, and the fans were out in force. The Scots lost, but not by enough to give the French the championship. The Irish won that. In case you were wondering.

No, I didn’t think you were wondering.

We spent Saturday afternoon in the Jardin des Tuileres. Sarah rode the carousel with the kids five or ten times (I didn’t count, but it took a while). And then the kids bounced on the trampolines for about two hours (I didn’t count, but it took awhile). And the sun shone. And we ate sandwiches. And it was lovely.

We lost Max’s Neigh-Neigh. Six weeks earlier, in Amsterdam, we lost Neigh-Neigh’s predecessor, also called Neigh-Neigh. We now have Neigh-Neigh III, and as long as we don’t visit any more world capitals, we should be fine.

Mia had one goal for Paris, to see the Eiffel Tower. She knows it from the Dora DVD she watches every couple of days, including on the train to Paris. I don’t know if she thought she’d see Dora there, or if she just wanted to share Dora’s air, but either way, she was positively giddy when we got there Thursday night. We waited in line for an hour to board the elevator to the top, and while we did, Mia literally hopped up and down, punctuating her landings with cries of “EIFFel! TOWer! EIFFel! TOWer!”

While we waited, the lights on the Tower sparkled, as they do at the top of every hour. Mia’s eyes sparkled right back. She may remember that moment forever. I think I will.

And then there were the Parisians. The unbelievably friendly Parisians.

No, really.

Last time I was in Paris, I walked into a visitor’s welcome center and politely – even timidly – asked the woman there if she spoke English. I asked in French, and I apologized for not knowing French. I may as well have genuflected, but it did nothing for me – she spat out non, and turned back to her paperwork. Mind you, this was in the welcome center! It was far from the only such experience I had. I left town that day.

Things have changed. Maybe the French have realized that they need tourists more than the tourists need them. Maybe we just caught them on a good weekend. Or maybe it just helps to have a little more money, a little less scruff, and a couple of really cute, really well-behaved kids. Whatever the reason, things were different this time out. The guy who made my Paris pancakes handed them to me with a smile and a bow. The woman who sold me two roses for my wife and daughter chatted happily with me – in English. The aforementioned cabbies were, as aforementioned, very gregarious. And the hotel staff was tremendous, loading the kids up with candy every time we passed. The manager even went a step further, stopping us one afternoon on our way to the elevator to give them presents – a yo-yo for Mia, a toy phone for Max. She later brought Mia behind the counter and loaded up her bag of treasures with soaps and lotions from the supply cabinet. None of it felt like business; all of it felt like kindness. What a treat it was. What a treat it all was.

So that was almost certainly our last big trip in Europe, which is too bad. But at least it was a good one. A great one, even.

One more thing. I mentioned the good-looking out-of-towners who came to Switzerland all the way from Portland, Oregon, and that was another treat. Dave and Karmin spent a couple days on an airplane last Sunday, and when they made it to Zug, we gave them some raclette and some Spanish wine, because nothing peps up a weary traveler like bread and cheese and wine. They were asleep within minutes.

The next morning, I made some rösti. Then we got sandwiches on baguettes. Then fondue. Then meusli with yoghurt. And älpermagronen, Switzerland’s answer to mac-and-cheese, with potatoes and onions added. Oh, and a knockwurst. And a lot of coffee and chocolate. They left Wednesday morning, and as I type this they’re in Paris, presumably eating anything but bread and cheese.

Want some more pictures?

 

five things i learned on our trip to barcelona

1. Driving a cab in Barcelona makes you crazy. Our cabbie from the airport shouted at us because we hadn’t told him the name of our hotel. Of course, we had told him the name of our hotel. In fact, the first thing I said to him, in Spanish, was “Do you know the Hotel Sant Joan Despí?” To which he responded, “Sí.” To which I responded, “Good. Take us there.” Later, on our ride, he asked for the address, and while we searched for it, he became more and more impatient, until I finally said, “Wait, you don’t know the Hotel Sant Joan Despí?”

“Oh, the Hotel Sant Joan Despí!” he said. And then he yelled at us. For not telling him the name of the hotel. You figure it out.

Our cabbie from Las Ramblas to Parc Guëll fussed over his upholstery, even swatting at Mia’s foot because her shoe was touching the seat. (She’s four. Her legs, really, are not all that terribly long. Her shoe, inevitably, touches the seat.) Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’ve got a car and I’m super-precious with my back-seat upholstery, you know what I don’t do with that car? I don’t turn it into a cab, that’s what.

But then, that’s just me. Mr. Pragmatic.

Both cabbies were crazy. Neither cabbie got a tip.

2. Barcelona is for walkers. The Metro is, anyway. We might never have noticed this had we not traveled with Max’s stroller, but we did (it came in awful handy around nap-time), and now I’m wondering how handicapped people get around.

It’s not that there aren’t elevators, because there are. It’s just that they’re not always where you want them to be, and they don’t always go where you want them to go. For example, they don’t always go out to the street. You’d want that, right? In a subway? If you couldn’t walk?

Instead, they may get you to a walkway that gets you to the other side of the tracks, but if you want out, you’re going to need to get out of the chair and climb some stairs. Or they may exist only on a sign – the picture of the elevator points to the stairwell, or to an escalator, or even to a dead-end, but not to an actual elevator. Even those elevators that do exist – and in fact lead up to the street – often sit at the top of a short flight of stairs. It’s as though the Barcelona Transit Authority thinks people only ride wheelchairs because they’re sick of walking.

Of course, that’s why Max rides his stroller half the time, but when he’s feeling that way he’s pretty ornery, so it’s best not to haggle with him. As a result, we spent most of the week lifting the stroller up and down stairs, sometimes with Max in it, sometimes without. It got a bit wearying, to tell the truth. At one point, after an entire day of this, we dragged the stroller down a flight of about ten steps only to discover, after about twenty feet, an identical flight up. I got the feeling the entire Metro system was intentionally set up as an obstacle course for rollers like us. All that was missing was a rope wall.

Finally one day, I found myself standing above an empty stroller, pressed into a far-from-empty train car next to a pair of subway cops. Max was ten feet away on the lap of his big sister, who was on the lap of her mother. It was rush hour, and I was cheek-to-cheek with the two cops, one of whom nodded to the stroller and asked, “Can’t you fold that thing up?” I smiled and shrugged. “Not here I can’t,” I said. Then I asked him why there were no elevators in the subways.

He shook his head. “No, that’s not true,” he said. “There are elevators in the subways.” I told him that I always had to carry Max and his stroller, and he nodded. “Oh, yeah. There aren’t really elevators for that.” So there you have it.

3. Spain is for meat lovers. But I already knew that. There are two kinds of food in Spain: food with beef, ham, chicken, and seafood, and food with just ham. I had the patatas bravas.

A lot.

4. Antoni Gaudí is way rad. I knew that too.

5. Barcelona is also way rad too. I’d been there before, but for some reason it hadn’t made as much of an impression on me as the rest of Spain. This time, though, it hit me, despite the fact that we were with the kids and, by definition, unable to see the city the way it really ought to be seen. That means no late nights stumbling from tapas bar to tapas bar, no lazy, sangria-addled afternoons on some beach terrace, and no lingering visits to the Picasso museum, or the Miró, or the Dalí. We did do some of that – Sarah let me visit the inside of Gaudí’s crazy aquatic Casa Batlló while she waited on the street with the kids, for instance, and we did settle everyone down enough for a (very early) round of tapas one evening. But Barcelona with kids – anywhere with kids, really – is just a different experience altogether.

Still, we managed to blanket the city pretty good in about five days. We craned our necks at Sagrada Familia and hopped from street tile to street tile along the Ruta del Modernisme, and we found a nice spot on the long, curvy bench at Parc Güell for some sweet pastries and chocolate milk. We navigated the crowds and the birds and the human statues on Las Ramblas, and we squeezed ourselves into the buzzing market just off to the west, where fruits and vegetables and flowers and so, so many dead fish and squids and cows and pigs form a gorgeous, brilliant walk-through collage.

We also let the kids take a break from all-Barcelona-all-the-time and visited the zoo and the beach and the aquarium, the very sight of which caused Mia to break into a dead run, shouting – I kid you not – “Come on! Let’s go experience the world of fish!”

And on Friday night, after a long, trying day of hauling Max’s stroller up and down the Metro steps, we hiked up to Montjuïc to watch the dance of the Magic Fountain that lies between the National Museum of Art and Plaza España. The sun set, the lights filled the sky, the music settled an otherwise itchy Max, and the spray damped our tired faces, and it was an altogether gorgeous way to end the week.

We caught a cab from there back to our hotel. As we rode off through throngs of locals shopping and drinking and strolling, I asked the driver if the part of town we were in had a name. “Sants,” he said. Then, after thinking for a moment, he laughed and told me, “Every part of Barcelona has a name.” We listened to the radio, and told me about Saddam, and about Mike Tyson, and he brought us straight home without once yelling or swatting or fussing.

That cabbie was not crazy. That cabbie got a tip.

 

everything i need to know about the swiss i learned from canadians

Today marked a bit of a breakthrough in the daycare situation, which is essentially this: I have no daycare for Max. Not that I need him anywhere full-time – I can’t work anyway, so I may as well take care of my boy, and anyway I like my boy. But I also like buying milk without constantly having to play defense, and besides, Max has to be sick of me. Really, a little separation now and then is in everyone’s best interest.

It hasn’t been easy, though. As expected, the English-speaking facilities are full up, and the local centers give priority to locals – if you can find them at all. Once, I stopped by city hall because they supposedly keep a list of daycare providers, but the woman I spoke to didn’t understand English, so I just let her instruct me in German. From her body language, I’m pretty sure she told me to “walk up this street, then left, then look for a woman wearing a brown overcoat, and ask her about the babysitters.”

I may as well have asked Max.

Eventually, I found a place – a little storefront where I can leave him for two hours on Wednesdays to play with other short people – and today was his first visit. I was right, too – he’s totally been waiting for this. When I dropped him off, he didn’t cling or cry, as I’d feared. He ran. Away from me. Laughing.

(But, you know. I’m still his hero and all that.)

Anyway, I bring all this up for a reason, and it has nothing to do with my son. It has to do with this: I met a Swiss person. Her name’s Monika, and she runs the Spiel center over at Feldhof 14. She’s not the first Swiss person I’ve met, but she’s the first one who wasn’t scanning my groceries or serving me a croissant. Or shushing me. Or some combination of these things.

We’re here two months now, and everyone I know is from somewhere else. Not all are from the States – most aren’t, actually. They’re from Germany, or the U.K., or Canada, or Belgium. But they’re not from Switzerland. Maybe it’s because the parents I meet at the park don’t speak English. Maybe it’s because I spend most of my social time with other expats from Mia’s school or Sarah’s office. Or maybe it’s because you just don’t get out much when you’re minding a toddler full-time.

Whatever the reason, it hasn’t stopped me from learning about the Swiss. I know plenty about the Swiss.

Like this: I know that the Swiss are in shape. They run along the lake in groups and they bike up narrow mountain roads, slowing traffic without compunction. And elderly men and women cruise the sidewalks with ski poles in their hands. It’s some kind of cardio exercise – they call it Nordic walking – but it just looks like old people pretending they’re skiing.

I know that the Swiss are way into their hair. Coiffures outnumber gas stations here two to one – maybe three to one. Still, every cut looks the same to me: a Judi Dench crop with a color palette ranging from deep strawberry to light burgundy. (For the men: faux-hawks all around!)

I know they’re also an insular people. Grüzi is their word for hello, and they’ll grüzi you to death, but they won’t invite you over for dinner until you marry into the family. I’m told it takes a personal introduction from a Swiss before another Swiss will trust you in business. It’s like joining the mafia.

Other things: I know they like rules, and they have a lot of rules, and they’re always up for new rules, if you’ve got some. I’ve been told by random strangers not to park here, not to talk there, not to leave my bag on this chair, not to stand where I’m standing. When I start my car in the fog, someone invariably drivdes by to flash his brights at me, because even though I haven’t moved yet, the law says I need my lights on. It’s a nation of hall monitors. There are 7 million people in Switzerland, and 6½ million of them are cops.

I know they’re serious about their cheese. I know they’re not shy about wrapping their personal automobiles in paid ads. I know they eat horse-jerky. (No, really. It’s next to the salami at the Migros.)

I know that they don’t much like kids, but we’ve been over that already.

I know a lot of things. They may all be wrong, we’ll see. Meet Monika, my one-woman demographic sample. She at least seems to like children.

This weekend we visit some serious Alps. Meantime, here’s a picture of Max with orange eyebrows, courtesy of his older sister. (Thanks, Mia!)

 

cheese minus 15 days

In less than two weeks, this family leaves for Chicago. Four days later, it leaves for Zurich, then Zug, then our flat on Weinbergstrasse, then bed, I would imagine. Or not, since we’ll be arriving mid-day.

We will spend five months, maybe six, in Switzerland. Sarah will work, and Mia will go to school, and Max and I will sample as many Swiss cheeses as we can find. Praise cheeses. Especially holey cheeses.

When there’s what to write about, we’ll write about it here.

In the meantime, there’s the getting ready part — clearing the garage to fit two cars and clearing the utilities and clearing the closets and clearing our minds, not that we’ll ever manage that one in the week and two days we have left for it. But we’ll manage something. And on October 5, we’ll go.

Apropos of nothing, the other day Mia revealed to us what’s inside a lobster. Apparently, if you cut it open, there’s ham inside a lobster.