Week 2

Much more time at work during week 2, but during our time out, we managed several milestones.
We went apartment hunting and saw a few places we liked. We subsequently applied for two, to find that one had already been leased. The housing search continues…
We got library cards! Of course, unfortunately for Ken, most of the trashy science fiction is au francais, but we’re both big fans of public libraries, so even if the English language section is small, it’s a huge resource.
We received our bank account paperwork in the mail: ATM cards, user IDs, PINs, and what (at first glance) appear to be 4-function calculators. Apparently the “calculators” are card-readers, and are used somehow to keep our online accounts secure: a 21st century version of Little Orphan Annie decoder-rings. We have no idea why the Swiss banks feel that this level of security is required, but the best guess is it’s driven by all the foreign secret agents (who else has a Swiss bank account?).
Friday night, we went out to dinner at the Café des Halles (downstairs of the Restaurant des Halles) in Neuchatel. Ken had the Neuchatelois prix fixe menu which included sausage with green lentils, fish and rice with citrusy pearl onions and capers, and an absinthe sabayon with a scoop of berry mouse; being that the local specialties included fish or meat, Margaret had a green salad and black truffle risotto with an apfelstrudel to finish. Dinner was accompanied by a good Neuchatelois pinot gris.
On Saturday, we drove uphill, about 5 or 10 minutes from Les Hauts Geneveys to see some of the local ski slopes. The highway signs had had us puzzled, as they appeared to show skiers skiing uphill with a line sticking up at a 45 degree angle from their crotch. Visiting the ski slope, we determined that while we had misinterpreted the sign, the sign perfectly represented the real world. While we were used to chair lifts in the US, even at small resorts, this small resort used a ski-lift. A ski-lift is sort of like a tow-rope, but the end that the skier holds onto has a round disk seat. You grab onto the lift, stick the disk between your legs, sit back, and let the lift pull you up the slope: skiing uphill with a lift-line sticking up from your crotch. Works great for skiers. It’s a little bit challenging for boarders, but the lift pole seems to have a bend in it that can be turned sideways for boarders. We didn’t wind up skiing or boarding, but we did go for a short hike in the snow behind the lifts to get a good view of the area.
On Sunday, we investigated how close the manufacturing plant was to the remaining apartment. According to Google Maps, it was just over one kilometer, and that was following the roads downhill to the apartment. Just downhill of the plant is a wooded area, and we had been told that there were trails through the woods. We figured that by cutting through the woods, we could cut the distance down. It was a muddy walk, and took longer than expected, but was certainly a walkable distance. From the apartment, we decided to test walking down into town (Yes, this does seem like a lot of walking by US standards, but with all the claims that Europeans walk everywhere, we’re just trying to fit in). The walk into town was easy, but town was largely deserted on Sunday. We did find a playground, with some great play structures that would never be allowed in the US (great fun, but also big opportunity to fall and hurt yourself). However, the walk from the plant to the apartment to the town was all downhill, so now we had to walk back uphill. Since M’s heart didn’t quite explode out of her chest on the walk back up, the outing was deemed a success.

This week's lessons:

1) Swiss “efficiency”: We have heard that the Swiss are known for their efficiency. This is supposedly why they make such great watches and why the trains run perfectly according to schedule. We have learned, however, that ensuring that things work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with efficiency. For example, opening one joint Swiss bank account required 10 envelopes: Two envelopes to send a tax disclosure form, two to return the tax disclosure forms, two to send pin numbers, two to send bank cards, two to send the special internet-banking card decoders. Did we get the information we needed? Yes. Could we have gotten some of this information when we opened the account in person? Yes.
2) American marketers are much smoother than European marketers: What Americans call nondairy coffee creamer is known to the rest of the world as coffee whitener with vegetable fat. Mmmm….the best part of wakin’ up is coffee whitener in my cup…
3) When M comments “let’s drive this way to see what’s up there”, it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s probably going to result in Ken backing out of a snowy drive, with a big rock wall on one side and 20 meter drop on the other side.
4) An alternate explanation for how the Swiss can feed themselves when they have such small refrigerators (they're a little larger than the refrigerator you might have in your college dorm), as daily shopping seems to be such a chore: shelf-stable goods. They sell stuff here that we’d never imagine as shelf-stable in the US: orange juice, eggs, milk! With shelf-stable milk, you can buy a week’s supply of milk on one trip to the store, even though that much milk would fill half the fridge – you just put one container in the fridge at a time. Voila.