fasnacht forever

Okay, so Fasnacht is almost over, and after two parades and a whole lot of shredded paper, I’ve learned a little more about it. Such as:

I. Fasnacht has a special purpose. I’d assumed as much, but I couldn’t have told you what that reason was before the past few days. Now, after a little more research and a hot tip from Mathias, I know that Fasnacht is a pagan tradition designed to scare off the bitter winter – think of it as a kind of Swiss Groundhog’s Day, only more proactive. That, then, explains the all the costumes, though I’m not sure why the iconic Fasnacht clown would frighten anyone, much less the great and powerful Mr. Snow Miser.

Vikings, on the other hand, are very scary, and an entire brass band of Vikings, such as the one that performed, loud and drunk, on the risers at the Metalli mall Thursday morning, were positively fearsome (especially the 300-pound tuba player in the horned helmet). So were the pirates, and the witches, and the trolls, and the other pirates, and the tigers, and the communist aliens, or alien communists, or whatever the green men in the Soviet costumes were supposed to be. The drunken ski team was not very scary (the drum major’s fu manchu notwithstanding), nor was the momma chicken with all the little baby eggs following her down the street, tossing feathers on parade-goers.

The band of smelly hippies was terrifying.

All of these, mind you, were the band members, the people walking in time and playing an assortment of mediocre pop hits from the ‘70s and ‘80s (“We Built This City,” “You’re the Best Around,” “Danger Zone”). The crowds of people watching, both at the Metalli and along the parade routes, were even more impressively, if less uniformly, decked out. There were more witches and more trolls, and there were giant, puffy clowns and Oompa Loompas and blue-haired cigarette girls, and virtually nobody tried to get away with a lame cop-out like “oh, I’m just a dude with a bobbly valentine headband and no other costume to speak of.”

As for us, Mia was Cinderella on Thursday, then shifted gears to Fairy Princess for Saturday’s parade. Sarah was a pirate, complete with a headband and a mask and a scary hook fashioned from tin foil. And Max was Clifford the small red dog on Thursday, then donned a princess dress for Saturday’s festivities.

(Got a problem with that, Tim Hardaway?)

II. Fasnacht works. How else to explain the 60-degree weather on Greasy Thursday, the first day of Fasnacht? True, it was back down to the low 30s today, but clearly, winter is on the run. Not that that’s all that impressive, given what a pussycat of a winter we’ve had so far, but still. Score one for paganism.

III. Fasnacht is funded entirely by an all-powerful cabal of Swiss dentists. Think I’m crazy? Look at the facts. The only people that weren’t throwing confetti at us were throwing candy at us, most of it hard candy of the sort that I always seem to pop into my mouth, then get sick of after about 15 or 20 minutes, then bite on, leaving a sticky pebble of sugar lodged alongside one of my many fillings. I hate that stuff, but Mia doesn’t, and she was in heaven, filling her puppy-dog purse with it, along with all the chocolates and brownies and cookies and oranges and gum she could get her hands on. For some reason we can’t quite fathom, some of the floats were also tossing out travel Kleenex and Pampers-brand hand soap for kids, but nobody – not one of the hundreds of people that passed us and handed out free stuff – was giving out floss.

Seriously. Who benefits? Follow the money, people. Follow the money.

IV. You cannot just brush confetti away like dandruff. Especially when you’re a professional, adultish woman and you make a habit of engaging 13-year-old Swiss girls in confetti fights all afternoon. That’s right, my wife, she of the fancy job and the smooth, even temperament, spent Saturday afternoon out by the hockey stadium chucking fistfuls of yellow and red and purple detritus at gangs of high school kids as they passed on parade floats.

She learned this behavior from her daughter – her four-year-old daughter, mind you – who overcame her early timidity and began heaving confetti at band members near the end of Thursday’s parade. Then she started throwing it at the non-playing mascots that trailed the bands, and then at other parade-goers, and finally point-blank at an infant in a stroller – that’s when I stepped in.

Nothing I could do to halt Sarah’s confettish, though, nor did I want to stop it – the look of glee on her face was just too hilarious. To their credit, her victims responded in kind, pelting Sarah about the face and neck and shoulders with their own supply of paper, leaving her with confetti in her hair, down her back, in her pockets. They weren’t laughing either, not like Sarah. They, one suspects, had spent the entire parade being confetti’d, and they weren’t about to take any more of it, especially from some no-account auslander.

And it didn’t end there. There was a pirate ship float shooting cannons full of confetti into the crowd. There was a medieval castle blasting the stuff from some kind of machine gun mounted in a turret. There was an “Ice Age” float (yes, “Ice Age” again – who knew that movie had such a huge Swiss following?) with squirrels showering us from the top of an iceberg, and there were toothless hags dancing along the street tossing it at us, and there were men on a flat-bed truck shoveling it – literally, shoveling it – out of a giant trough and onto our heads.

It was, as Mia so lyrically termed it, a “confetti-quake.” And for what it’s worth, it’s a pain in the neck to get out of the carpet.

V. No, I’m serious about the confetti. I’ve vacuumed four times, and the cleaning ladies were here Friday. I’m still finding the stuff all over the house.

I’m not complaining. I’m just saying.

VI. Fasnacht is rad. I love this holiday. We need to take it for America. I mean really, it’s 20 degrees in Chicago. Are you telling me that a holiday centered around drinking, fried food, and candy – one that, oh yeah, gets rid of the harsh winter as a bonus – you’re saying that wouldn’t go over big?

Let’s steal it. Let’s make it our own. Come on, who’s in?

 

lowland love

We spent the weekend in Amsterdam, which is a lovely, lovely city, entirely apart from its reputation for total debauchery. Yes, there’s the drugs and the gambling and the dancing prostitutes in the red-light district, but there’s also the canals, and the museums, and the tall, beautiful, friendly, and utterly resistant Amsterdammers. I told Sarah I could drop my bags in Amsterdam, and I really could, though I won’t. Not now, anyway.

And the kids did great, for the most part, other than the fact that Mia’s legs stopped working Friday afternoon and she insisted on being carried everywhere we went, all 39.6 gangly pounds of her. The two little travelers even held up well through a couple of extremely long travel days, with more than nine hours of airport time courtesy the very cheap but very tardy (sl)easyJet, for which we were compensated with four airport vouchers worth five euros a pop. (Yup – five euros for dinner in an airport. Go crazy, folks!)

As for what we did, it’s nothing you won’t find in any guidebook. At one point or another over the course of two days, some or all of us went to Anne Frank’s house and the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh, the flower market, the book market, to Dam Square, and to the Jewish History Museum, which has an incredibly good kids’ museum, for what it’s worth. And on Thursday night, after the kids were in bed, I took Susan on a stroll through the alleys and bridges of the red-light district because, well, she needed to see it. We gawked at the dancing ladies, and we politely declined the drugs, and we laughed at the sex show barkers. (They’re a creative lot, those guys.) And then I took my sweet sister-in-law, she of the wholesome Iowa pedigree, to dinner at a middle-eastern dive with straight-shot view of a storefront promising a “Live Flipping Sex Show” in five languages.

Except, um, not “flipping.” Obviously.

I had a falafel in a pita, and she had some Haagen Dasz, which the kind fellow behind the counter warmed up on the grill because it was rock-hard. We both had bottled water, and I paid, and after all these years Susan finally figured out why her sister married me.

Because I’m classy, that’s why.

 

happy hannuka, part III

Third night’s always a bit of a let-down. First night’s the big guns, and second night is some decent-sized guns, but by the time the third night rolls around, you’re generally down to your bayonet.

This year, the third night is Otto’s, which is no kind of gun at all – more like a sharp stick, really. Or just a dull stick. But still. I like the place.

Maybe it’s because it’s cheap. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally mastered the complicated parking situation there. Or maybe it’s because Otto’s makes me feel at home. It’s sort of like a Target, only without all that attention to “design,” and “presentation,” and “putting similar items in the same place in the store.” Actually, it’s what it might look like if Target had a giant garage sale to get rid of all its old crap.

You don’t shop Otto’s the way you shop other stores. You can’t just go to the aisle that has what you’re looking for, because there aren’t any aisles, save for a few rows of shelves in the far back corner. What there are is vicinities – as in, the men’s sweaters are kind of over there, next to the pasta sauces and the soap. And the candy is right here, between the cologne and the dishware. Toys are on that side, and furniture is upstairs.

All these regions are populated by little islands of merchandise crammed close together, leaving almost no space to pass between. What space there is is limited further by the shopping carts filled with even more merchandise. You can’t stride at Otto’s, you can only zig-zag, and every now and then you get blocked by a shopping cart and have to back up to find a clear path out. It’s like driving a bus through a corn maze, is what it is.

The result of all this haphazardness is that every trip to Otto’s is an unfocused amble down Serendipity Lane. Liquor bumps up against Bath Fixtures, which ends at a bin filled with dented 15-oz. cans of beans.

Today I stopped in to buy band-aids. By the time I found them, I had already picked up five sleeves of instant soup, including one that claims to re-hydrate into full-fledged matzo-ball soup (we’ll see about that); two reams of printing paper; one daily diary upholstered with velour and embroidered with a cartoon elephant and a mouse; one roll of scotch tape for Mia so that she’ll stop taking mine; and one bag of kässewaffeln knoblauch – cheese-and-garlic waffle-chips so good I almost made them the third night’s gift, all by themselves.

It was a balancing act to get it all back to the one tiny checkout counter with the cigarette cubbies above the cashier, but I did it. The whole haul was less than 30 bucks, which is insanely cheap. You’re just gonna have to take my word for that.

Happy third night of Hanukkah!

 

beet down in richterstown

The rain finally showed up last week after nearly a month of dire promises from everyone we’ve met, and with it came heavy fog and colder, shorter days. Which of course can only mean only one thing: It’s time to carve the turnips.

Not being all that terribly Swiss, I didn’t know about the turnip-carving, but apparently it’s a thing here. Story goes like this: Sometime in the mid- to late-1800s, a gaggle of churchgoing women started making lanterns out of hollowed-out sugar beets in order to deal with the encroaching winter pall, which would otherwise make their late-night churchgoing much more difficult. Naturally, this turnip-carving became a habit, then a trend, then a local custom, and eventually, inevitably, it solidified into Räbechilbi, a full-blown regional event tailored to attract tourists from kilometers around to watch the churchgoing women and their progeny carry these lanterns to this very day.

And so we found ourselves helping to line the rainy cobblestone streets of Richterswil last Saturday night for the annual turnip parade, for which the townies hollow out something like a trillion turnips and make lantern-lined floats and re-enact that solemn march to God’s house, or to a local pub anyway, judging from the amount of mulled wine being consumed (which was, like, a lot).

Think: Mardi Gras, only if Mardi Gras happened in rural Iowa instead of New Orleans, and topless heathens and alcohol were replaced by sugar beets and, well, other alcohol. Sort of like that. Oh, and there was an Ice Age theme.

No, really. Like, the CGI movie with Ray Romano and that squirrel.

Anyway, on the train to Richterswil, which sits on Lake Zurich, Mia turned to me with unicorn sparkles in her eyes and said “Daddy, I think it’s going to be so beautiful, I’m going to sing ‘Small World’!” Which, you’ll have to admit, establishes a pretty high beauty threshold.

In fact, the parade was quite lovely, though if Mia sang, I didn’t hear it. There was a menacing tiger float, and a wooly mammoth float (Ice Age, people, Ice Age), and one float that looked a lot like Anthony Hopkins, though judging from the Swiss cross on the lapel and the reverent crowd reaction (delayed recognition followed by knowing applause), I think it had to be someone else, maybe Ray Romano.

see? squirrel from Ice Age.

All of which brings me to Monday afternoon, in the lunchroom of Mia’s school, with both kids staring at me from across a table designed with 7-year-olds in mind. The school sponsored a parade of its own, scheduled for Tuesday evening, and so “we” had come to carve the turnips. Of course, I’ve learned that it’s generally a bad idea to give a 4-year-old a paring knife, much less a 2-year-old, so “we” ended up being “Daddy,” carving furiously in an attempt to finish before the short one started grabbing at pointy things and someone lost a finger. I broke two melon-ballers in the process (yeah, it’s like that!), and I lost about half a pound in brow sweat, but I managed to finish before Max lost it, and the aggravation was almost worth it just to see the look of wonder on Mia’s face Tuesday night as we jogged to catch up with the turnip parade we were 15 minutes late for.

We tried, and failed, to light the votive candles as we snaked our way up and around the one-lane farm road that runs just past Mia’s school, so Mia held a flashlight instead, and Sarah held the darkened lanterns, and I held Max.

If I wasn’t so out of breath, I’d have sung “Small World.”

turnip lantern by me. carved so fast it’s blurry.

 

make of it what you will.

We spent the weekend in the exurbs of Chicago with Sarah’s family. Friday we went for a jog around Sarah’s mom’s new neighborhood in Chesterton, Indiana. Nice place, with woods and creeks and pretty big lots, and apparently a sponsorship deal.

Running off my in-laws’ street, in short order, are Abercrombie, Aeropostale, Hilfiger, and Timberland.