5 posts tagged “switzerland”
Show us something puzzling.
I couldn't figure this thing, spotted on a street in Zürich. It's a cement dog, with a chain. The chain is attached to a hook on the wall.
Then it was explained to me, that this is a sign for a dog parking lot of sorts - where owners are encouraged to tie up their dogs before entering a store.
Ah so.
You will notice that the 'parking lot' is empty though.
Lately my energy level has been very, very low. I have little appetite. (On the plus side this has lead to a weight loss of 5 kilos, yay). I don't feel like doing much of anything except for uncomplicated tasks, reading, watching TV etc.
Even selecting a movie to see from our vast DVD selection is a bother. We get stuck around the discussion of "what genre to watch". I like to diversify my genres, but the House Mate always seems to stick to the light comedy/sometimes romantic comedy area. Baah.
So lately we have been working our way through the Complete Poirot boxed collection. It's not really complete, because it only has the David Suchet Poirots up to around 1990, and he's made several more since then. Still, it's 30 DVDs of classy British mystery goodness.
No violence, gorgeous Art Deco sets, just enough of a mystery each episode to keep the brain from totally atrophying. Perfect for summer evening viewing.
It seems that my aunt and uncle purchased this set in Japan - my uncle retired recently, and he seems to be at a loose ends as to what to do with his days. They have been watching the Poirots over and over, my mother says. They are obsessed with the sets, the English landscape, etc.
Oddly enough none of my relatives on my mother's side have ever really travelled outside of Japan. They never visited us when we lived in the U.S. or England, and they have never even expressed an interest in coming to Switzerland. It's like my mother took all of the family's travelling genes into her own little body. She's coming to visit again in late November, to visit the Christmas markets.
Summers in Switzerland are beautiful because of the cool mornings and summers, and relatively low humidity. We live in a quiet village (though it's only 20 minutes from the center of Zürich) so it's even nicer. However, one big icky factor is that one of the local farmers likes to spread the fertilizer on his fields early in the morning, just when that nice morning breeze is up. So with that cool air is tinged with the aroma of eau de moo poo. Like, right now!
One of the possible contributors:
What's the most extreme weather you've been in? A memorable storm? Heat wave? Or something else?
The scariest weather I've encountered has been one of those summer hailstorms that one gets here in this Alpine country.
The first full summer I was in Switzerland, there was a real doozy of a hailstorm. (Wow, doozy, never used that word before.) The sky turned a dark, oppressive grey, the wind started blowing, then came the huge chunks of ice pelting down. There was a patch of zucchini in the garden, and all the large leaves got torn up by the hail (though the plants survived). Several cars that were parked outside got dented all over. When the storm was over, and I tiptoed outside, there was a pile of ice cubes piled up outside the front door, enough for a big cocktail party. Then like ten minutes after the heavens stopped hurling ice, it cleared up and there was a beautiful, blue, sunny sky and soft, cooling breeze. Really awesome.
I am sooo glad to be home after a week and a half in NY.
I love NY. But NOT in July, in the middle of a heatwave.
Air conditioning is not the solution to heat! Air conditioning feels so unhealthy, once you get used to life without it. I got a bad snivvely kind of cold due to overexposure to air conditioning in NY.
Here we only have a fan, which cool things enough during the day to make things tolerable. When it gets too hot in midday, I just take a nap. Mornings and evenings here are so delciously, naturally, cool. And we don't even live in the mountains, just a normal 'burb of Zurich.
Right now there is cool, flower-scented breeze coming through the open windows. Ahhhh. I love Switzerland in the summer. If it weren't for the flies I might even think it was heaven. (That, and the lack of good sushi restaurants.)
