Living Proof

16 October 2015 Joy Kundig

I’ve just been asked to prove that I am alive. I have until the end of the month.

I thought I had done this at the beginning of the summer by signing a form with my very own signature swearing I was alive, dating the document, putting my return address on the back of the envelope, and mailing it back. Any run-of-the-mill forensics expert could have checked the DNA and fingerprints. Don’t these people watch NCIS? Anyway, spit and handwriting were not good enough; they need official civic proof—a witnessed signature, a passport, and the village/community stamp.

My husband (who is much much older than I) was smugly satisfied with this nasty turn of events. He has NEVER been asked to prove that he was alive. He says it is to prevent dishonest relatives of dead people from collecting their pensions.

Well, I don’t know who would want my tiny little miniscule early-retirement pension (I am nowhere near old enough for the proper state pension), but it has caught someone’s administrative eye, and I feel a bit like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral though I don’t quite know why.

However, upon checking, I see that there are some grizzly shenanigans going on all around us—hundreds of thousands of ghost pensioners have been dug up, so to speak, in southern Europe, Uganda, and Pakistan. I wonder where they put all the bodies? There are only so many closets to be sealed off, walls to be doubled, freezers to be filled, or compost heaps to be plumped up. Don’t doctors miss their elderly patients? I found myself in a medical waiting room yesterday and everyone seemed to be about 120 years old, wearing hand-knit sweaters, fumbling with canes, glasses, and elevator buttons.

So, anyway, wishing to remain in the land of the officially living for a while yet, I went round to the village hall and got an official Life Certificate. I asked the secretary if she wanted to touch my arm to make sure I wasn’t a Whitney Houston-type hologram. She didn’t think I was funny and gave me an elaborate hand-written receipt for my 5 francs.

A small price to pay for living proof.

Going Postal

11 October 2015 Joy Kundig

Well, if it had been April 1st, I would have thought that it was the joke news story (this is a cunning Swiss farce played out annually to keep us on our toes.) But it’s not; I’ve checked. So it seems to be true that the Swiss post office (fondly known as the Yellow Giant) is getting set to deliver parcels to people on Sundays via taxi. The postal spokesperson was interviewed and she said that they had to move with the times.

I have had a close financial and emotional relationship with Swiss Post for the past 38 years. Being from Away, means that birthdays, Christmas, books, and clothes have all been serviced for me by them. There was the famous cracked tin of Canada No 1 maple syrup that had leaked right through the cardboard box and had bits of other peoples’ letters and Christmas cards sticking to it. There was the 5- gram over-the-limit parcel that I opened, ate a chocolate, and repacked right at the wicket. I have argued about the sanity of sudden new rules, and have made militant post office buddies.

The post office in my village closed a few years back. Then the one in the next village closed. The one in village #3 is probably hanging on by a thread of envelope spit. We drive closer and closer towards the city looking for real live people to help us fulfill our postal possibilities.

The stoned postman (who was an extremely cool part of the long-lost village postal team; he used to hide my mail in the garage) has given way to a brisk young man, who seems to be hurried, harried, and always running late. He delivers parcels if we’re at home; throws them over the fence if we are not. I asked him about the Sunday taxi delivery service and he said he knew absolutely nothing about it. I mean, they don’t even deliver parcels on Saturdays, so how can Sunday be a sudden delivery-day imperative? Everything in the canton of Geneva is shut on Sundays–well, except for the cantonal garbage dump, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to my theoretical Sunday parcel deliveries. I wonder where I will have to go to collect my parcels if I’m not at home? I wonder if they will use illegal Uber taxi drivers as they are cheaper?

I wonder what they will think of next.

The Bucolic Haven of Tranquility Myth

7 October 20158 October 2015 Joy Kundig

I live in a village in the Geneva countryside. It is a bucolic haven of tranquility. It has a school, church, gas station, corner grocery shop, a hair dresser, two restaurants, and an ill-defined gathering place down by the river.

From my house I see the Jura out one window and the Salève out another. The Rhone River tinkles merrily at night. The owls hoot. The bats flit.

We don’t need alarm clocks in our village. The barrier at the French border is unlocked every morning just before 6 a.m. If the first volley of cars and motorbikes without exhaust pipes doesn’t get you out of bed, then the first flight into Geneva Airport (today it was the 6:10 from Ankara) will.

A FARMER has spent an estimated £55,000 to import a flock of the worlds cutest sheep to the Scottish Highlands. Valais Blacknose sheep are only found in Switzerland where they are worshipped by locals for their black hole faces, shaggy coats and spiral horns. Raymond Irvine paid around £5,000 a time for 11 sheep - 10 ewes and show-winning ram King kong - making it the first herd north of the border. The sheep are so valuable he has installed CCTV and brought in guard dogs to stop them being stolen from his farm near Tomintoul, Moray. Raymond and girlfriend Jenni (corr) McAllister got a surprise when it turned out one of the ewes was already pregnant, giving birth to Scotlands first baby Valais Blacknose. — DR

You have time for a coffee and shower before the army troop transporters roll in at about 8 a.m. The recruits have days of shooting, days of explosions, and quieter days when they come with rolls of orange tubing used to pump water from the Rhone into a parking lot in the woods. This is probably a top-secret maneuver, and as we all know that loose lips sink ships, this must only be spoken of in hushed whispers.

The army training area is conveniently located inside the bird sanctuary, and some human houses have also recently been built where the more traditional nests once were.

The field over the road with the curly-horned black-faced sheep is being developed into a long grey bunker-building containing 24 apartments. In this way even more people can enjoy village life. Construction work usually begins at about 7 a.m., shortly after the garbage has been collected from the various underground metal containers.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not complaining. Living in our village, one feels connected and alive. A few years back Icelandic volcanic ash grounded many planes. This coincided with bridge repairs so the road was closed. Rip van Winkle-like the village slept solidly for two whole weeks and we awoke refreshed and longing for some action.

Fortunately, the church bells are at the other end of the village; the monster agricultural machines and the techno-raves in the woods are entirely seasonal; and the air-raid sirens are only tested once a year.

And yes. In the little field out back cows with bells occasionally still come to snack on my hedge.

The Voting Kit

2 October 2015 Joy Kundig

It has arrived—big and fat and grey. As a Swiss citizen and a woman, I feel an imperative to vote, no matter how badly. This particular October 18th vote elects our members of parliament and our cantonal representatives.

I carefully peel off the back flap and consider the contents: two voting envelopes, one voting card, one ballot paper, one ballot book (which contains 26 lists of candidates), and two instruction booklets (45 pages total).

Already feeling tired, I do a quick flick through the lists. Geneva’s not too bad as our quota is a skimpy 11 MPs. The poor Zurich people have to choose 35.

This time around, there seems to be no one I know—no neighbours, no former students, no hockey players. Careful consideration reveals a brick-layer, several militants, an astrologer, a feminist, a taxi driver, a naturalist, a TV technician, a dentist, a janitor, a lady-of-the-house, and a couple of wine-makers. The vast majority seem to be existing MPs, or people in more modest, boring, local political positions.

So, on with the vote. I choose my favorite political parties and I limit myself to the lists that give candidates’ ages. I then ask anyone who’s sitting at the kitchen table in my 5-minute voting window whether then have any pertinent information…something they’ve heard or read somewhere, a picture or a tone of voice they didn’t like; a good idea.

This line of enquiry is quickly exhausted and so you must take the plunge. Choose a list, cross out the names or the professions you dislike, double up with someone you feel might be good, write in the name of a wine-maker as you happen to be drinking a glass of wine.

This moves things along quite well, but, finally there are one or two names that you sort of have to guess at.

Finally, with a flourish and a strong sense of citizenry, you carefully sign your voting card, put your ballots into the colour-coded voting envelopes and lick them sealed, repack and stick down your untorn outer envelope making sure that you don’t accidentally send the whole she-bang back to yourself, and place the hefty unused information brochures in the paper recycling basket. Mission accomplished.

This intense political activity takes me back to a local radio interview that quizzed people in the streets of Geneva whether they thought long-term non-Swiss residents should be able to vote. One perky articulate woman said definitely not, as they might vote the wrong way.

I’m sure glad that we real Swiss know how to vote the right way.

A Mouse in the Chuchichäschtli

29 September 2015 Joy Kundig

Well, you can’t go away for five minutes without all hell breaking loose.

Battling the usual post-trip miasma of fragility (brought on by the airplane-induced cough and cold, the suitcase full of dampish clothes smelling vaguely of fish, and the towering heaps of unlovely mail) there is a new and unwanted twist to the tale. A mouse family has moved into the kitchen.

Understandable as this may be in the coolish days of late September, it will not do at all.

There is a definite moral dimension to having a mouse in a Swiss house. It implies bad housekeeping, slatternly ways, possible plague, and total chaos. It is a matter only discussed amongst family and with closest friends. It is a sign of domestic defeat.

There are several stages that lead to mouse awareness and acceptance. The first is denial: that rustling sound is just the onions resettling themselves in their basket. The second is terror: this usually involves the actual sighting of a small rodent scurrying along the edge of the counter. The third is victory through death.

The mice have been living in the kitchen cupboard. This is the most sacrosanct of places. As a matter of fact, in WWII if a suspected German was claiming to be Swiss they made him say “Chuchichäschtli” (gargle it right at the back of your throat). The word means kitchen cupboard in Swiss German dialect and if the accent and inflection were wrong some sort of giant mouse-trap was presumably used on the culprit.

There are different ways of managing a mouse problem. A traumatized French-Swiss friend came across a mouse in her upstairs bedroom. She methodically removed every piece of furniture and clothing from the room; examined, cleaned, washed and ironed every object; then replaced them all carefully. It took weeks, but the mouse had been cleaned out of existence. I like to think of it reduced to a wafer-thin shadow-mouse folded somewhere in her underwear drawer.

A bachelor buddy of my husband’s, living in an old manor house near Zurich, was tolerant of mice if they stayed INSIDE the bread box. Guests who thought they had been eating seeded bread for breakfast quickly changed to yogurt.

And then there is my brother-in-law’s famous mouse tale. Many decades back, Stanley came down to make his breakfast in a Southern Ontario hippie haze. He put eggs on to boil, and toast in the toaster. A mouse, obviously cleaning up the crumbs at the bottom of the toaster ran out, hit the gas flame and jumped into the pan of boiling water. Told with brio (and sometimes with several additional steps) this has become a family mouse mantra passed down through the generations.

With a battery of traps, I have captured three, and Elena (the cat-minder) two. The plastic Swiss traps were craftily named Power Cat. Henry, the real cat of the house, is pathologically frightened of mice, and makes huge, exaggerated, scaredy-cat steps through the kitchen when there are mice in residence. The Canadian traps were called Victor. Peanut butter was the bait of choice.
The kitchen is now a mouse-free zone.

I think.

Out of Station — Sicily

11 September 201511 September 2015 Joy Kundig

I’m off! We perpetual tourists (PTs, as we like to call ourselves) sometimes even leave home. Mozart balls in my pocket (don’t ask) we’re going to Sicily, and I’m completely prepared.

I have read entire books on Palermo and Syracuse; I have toured the island with Laurence Durrell; I have taken short courses on Greek history with Edith Hall and Norman Douglas. I have made notes. I am classically red-hot.

I have learned about sieges and marshes and malaria. I have been captivated by invasions and conquests and tyrants. I know about boat battles in harbors and cavalry attacks and looting and pillage and ruin. I have learned of the double wall of Syracuse built by the attacking Athenians to keep the enemy in.

I know that Constans II was killed with a soap dish in his bathtub by Andrew in 668 and that Cicero means chickpea. I have read of Santa Lucia and Santa Rosa and their miracles and bones and catacombs and caves.

Solidus of the bearded Constans II
I have been told that Palermo is named after a purple dye made from mollusk shells, and that “harena” is the Latin word for sand as it was used to soak up the blood at the public Roman games. “Odeon,” more cheerfully, means song house.

I have found The Book of Roger (1154) with maps of the world-as-it-was-known-then with Sicily right smack in the middle. I know about Frederick and falconry and Goths and Vandals and Punic Wars and Saracens and Marsala.

I know that earthquakes destroyed everything many times and Baroque was built.

In fact, I am factually full up and completely exhausted. My brain is melting into Byzantine butter. I fear that I am losing threads fast, and historical holes are popping up all over the place.

A hospital-sized (2 glasses a day) bottle of Marsala.

Fortunately, my husband has bought an illustrated pop-up guide to the whole island. The “must see” items are clearly listed, illustrated, and explained. We will take that slim volume with us, and all will be well.

Heidi & Hyde

5 September 20158 September 2015 Joy Kundig

I am Swiss: but wasn’t to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. Swiss as a piece of Gruyère cheese. Swiss as a tub of marmot fat (yes, you can buy this at a drug store in Altdorf—the town where William Tell shot the apple off his son’s head.) I am Swiss.

Before we progress it is important to establish this. I have spent my entire adult life in Geneva—the real one. I have a fistful of defunct red passports filled with stamps and visas and now punctured with Swiss-cross holes through them. I speak French (with a slight accent, I like to think) and I can swear like a trooper in Swiss German.
In addition to the shocking vocabulary, I also have a Swiss-German washing machine, salad swinger, iron, alp-horn, and husband. These things last forever.

I, and many of my possessions, have survived three St Bernards and a Great Swiss Mountain Dog. I even like Cenovis. I eat muesli for breakfast soaking in big, fat, Swiss cow bio-milk and take turns shopping at the Migros and the COOP. I make a delicious roesti. How much more Swiss can a girl possibly be? (I don’t often talk about it, but I do draw the line at dried green beans and blood sausages, but I’m thinking of working these in as well.)

blog1canada461988418.0 — Miss Canada in her much-admired hockey dress

However, there are moments when an inner un-Heidi rather Hyde-like creature emerges: a marshmallow-eating, pop-drinking, potato-chip crunching, peanut-butter smearing, chain-sawing, canoeing, gum-chewing, hockey-cheering Canadian throwback to earlier, easier times. Spaghetti in tins and rice in puddings: that’s where a piece of me still belongs.
And so welcome to my world: the world of the perpetual tourist at home and abroad.