Swiss Miss(ry) Loves Company

Okay, yes, by all rights this should be the name of my new blog but a) I'm sure it is copyrighted and b)I am bad enough at updating this blog so I am not going to create a whole new one.

What's with the cocoa reference you ask? I have been living in Geneva, Switzerland, as of April 1st. How did I get here from Egypt? It all happened extremely quickly in late February when the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries emailed me out of the blue to ask if I'd be interested in a six-month consultancy. I was interested and my supervisor at my law firm told me "You'd be stupid not to take it." So I did take it. Then followed a phone interview and written test, after which I had to endure a four-week period in which I'd been selected for the job but needed UN Admin approval to finalize the offer. Confirmation finally came just ten days before I was expected to start work that I finally had been approved for the job.

So I grabbed up very few of my belongings, arranged for hasty dog-care, sublet my apartment, and got the hell out of Cairo. Five hazy hours later, I jogged to my new office in Geneva to meet my new colleagues for a half an hour before the workday ended at six, yes, SIX (I still can't get over how much earlier that is than law firm hours. When we are held over until six fifteen, we can start rolling our eyes in exasperation...so fun!).

I spent my first week in a hotel in a super-shady neighborhood surrounded by strip bars and, thankfully, lebanese restaurants (hello, inexpensive falafel of questionable hygeinic integrity!). From April 6th to May 2nd, I sublet a cute little one bedroom apartment from a delightful colleague who left me all her stuff and all her food to enjoy while she vacations in Syria. Yep, Syria. In April 2011, this woman went to Syria for VACATION. Hardcore.

I am still reeling from the availability of pork and alcohol products. Every meal I made in my first month contained an item from each category.

I went back to Egypt in late April to pick up Whiskey and then had to come back to Geneva via New York (think about that trip for a minute) to get him the right veterinary paperwork to come back to Switzerland with me. It was extremely difficult to find a short term furnished rental option that would allow dogs. All the property management companies turned me down and I didn't want to get an unfurnished place for such a short period.

So I went through Glocals, a Geneva craigslist-like classified ad site and found a Swiss lawyer who was subletting a room and advertized for a "dogs-lover person." She had 3 dogs of her own, including a Doberman, (and there were three other people renting rooms as well so a very full house) but she was confident that after a couple weeks, they'd work out a hierarchy among themselves and accept Whiskey into their pack. Well, that never happened and the Doberman kept jumping on Whiskey and putting him in her mouth like a little Whiskey sandwich, not biting down, but just to scare the hell out of him and show him who was boss.

The living situation there was difficult to start with but I thought we'd be able to survive for my remaining five months in Geneva at least. Alas, the situation went downhill rapidly after one of the other renters, an American professor and her 12 year old son moved out and the landlady's son, a smoker (of cigarettes and other things...) moved in. Then the Doberman got sick and had to go on cortizone which made her pee on the floor every day. So the house smelled like smoke and urine all the time. Hygeine tanked and the stress of living with (and cleaning up after) so many inconsiderate people and dogs made the situation untenable.

The landlady was also a bit of an oppressive bully. She would stand around the kitchen while I was cooking and tell me what sponge to use for which pot, which oil to cook with (and I KNOW how to cook, thank you very much), how to arrange each plate and fork in the dishwasher, how many clothes to put in the washer at a time, etc. So the "free access" to the kitchen and laundry wasn't really free. One of the other guys who lived in the apartment actually had all his own pots, a hot plate, and dishes that he kept in his room and just rinsed off in the bathroom sink next to his room so he never had to deal with the constant nagging.

The story of how I moved out is long and complicated and awful, but basically, I gave my notice but my landlady, who, remember, is a lawyer in Geneva, didn't accept it. She wanted to try to get August AND September's rent out of me, despite the fact that she wasn't even legally allowed to sublet anyway and despite the fact that I was moving in part because of pot smoking in the apartment. I think she is used to using her knowledge of Swiss law to bully non-lawyers. I wasn't going to put up with it. I felt that the living situation was not at all what I had agreed to, especially since her son had moved in, and I gave her plenty of time to find a replacement renter but I think she intentionally tried not to find someone new as a way of trying to force me to pay at least for August. Well, I knew what she was up to (she had tried to similarly cheat the American professor when she moved out in June) and since she didn't have a deposit of mine, I just moved out when I told her I would. With the help of my dog park friends, I had found a new place near work and with the help of my work friends, I moved all my stuff that day.

In what turned out to be a few dramatic hours, my landlady threatened to sue me and actually drove to my office, waited for me to come to work, then tried to follow right behind me into the building to sneak in past UN security. I stopped and told the officers she didn't have a badge and she waited in the security office for TWO HOURS, telling them "I am just going to wait here in case she comes out so I can follow her and see where she lives." I think she realized she didn't really have any legal case against me and was just trying to intimidate me. She also wanted to speak to my supervisor (who knew all about the situation and, in fact, gave me her college pots and pans for my new apartment). I talked to the lawyer friend of one of my colleagues and he also said she doesn't have a case and helped me draft an email to get her to quit stalking me (but since saying that outright is illegal in Switzerland, he helped me tell her off in less inflamatory language). She wrote me back a couple nasty emails but I haven't heard from her in a few weeks now. This could mean that she has found another renter and has given up or it could mean she has somehow managed to file a claim and I will get served a summons one of these days. My heart jerks in my chest whenever I see an older skeletal blond lady outside the security gate in the morning but I am so happy in my new place with just Whiskey and my own space and peace and quiet that it was worth all the terror and stress and awkwardness (with the security officers who don't speak English so I eventually had to have a friend explain what was going on) to move out of that situation, even if it is only for a couple months.

Now I am in a little unfurnished studio near my office, only a couple blocks from Lake Geneva and just minutes from a series of parks where I can walk Whiskey and listen to my audiobooks. A couple days a week, I take the dog on the bus back to the dog park to see his friends and get in some dog on dog playtime. With the help of many generous friends, I sleep on an air mattress on borrowed linens with a borrowed comforter. I got a little fridge and hot plate and I can cook on my boss' pots and pans and eat on the dishes a girl at the dog park who is moving in with her boyfriend doesn't need anymore. There were a few months of pretty crappy weather in late June and July but August has been nicer on the whole and the sky is taking on that late summer/early fall deep deep blue, which the lake is happy to reflect. Although I have heard the rest of the year is rainy and cold, this is a beautiful time to be in Geneva and I am really happy in my new place.

Yet another reason I should change the title of the blog...Despite my continued marginal employment with no benefits and no time off, I am just not very miserable these days.

Now that you're all caught up, I leave you with some of my observations about the Swiss and Swiss things:

At 6:30, all the stores close and, except for a handful of loaners drinking beer outside bars (and I mean a handful, like eight in the whole city), everyone disappears. Even the sailboats disappear from the lake although the sun is still out. So the question I haven't been able to answer yet is where on earth do all the Swiss go at night? Home? Really? Everyone? Why?

It is NOT true that you don't need to speak French to live in Geneva. NOT everyone speaks English, in fact, most of the people I need to talk to (grocery stores, bank tellars, post office clerks, property management companies, vet office secretaries, etc.) speak only French, or maybe understand a little Italian or Spanish, which I often have to use. The only people who claim you don't have to speak French to live here are those who SPEAK FRENCH.

The toilet paper is amazing. Soft, strong, and like 400 yards to a roll (possible exageration). Weirdly, it is not divided into squares, but rather small rectangles that observe the "golden" ratio, most pleasing to the eye. Similar shape to postcards but a little wider.

All drying mechanisms in the bathrooms are those weird rolls of cloth towels where you have to pull on the part of the roll showing to get enough to dry your hands and then the roll rolls forward electronically to the next clean space of towel for the next person. However, since ALL bathrooms have these, they are kept in working order and you don't get yards and yards of dirty cloth towel unspooled all over everywhere like you see sometimes in US movie theater bathrooms.

You can pay all your bills at the post office. I find this amazing. You can open a bank account at the post office with no fees and then you can set up bill pay from your bank account automatically like in the US. But even if you don't set up a bank account (no, alas, I do not have a "Swiss bank account" as with paying my law school loans back in the US, it makes more sense to have my checks deposited there) but no one has to use checks to pay other bills like insurance or rent. You get the bill in the mail and you go into the post office with your cash and pay at the counter. They enter the money into the system and tear off part of the bill and stamp it as your receipt. It goes into the post office bank account of the person or company you're paying.

It is hippie Christmas every day in Geneva. This is what we used to call August 14th in Madison when everyone was moving out of their apartments and leaving their amazing furniture on the street. In Geneva, people are always moving in and moving out and, because most people here are insanely rich, they even REDECORATE if you can believe that. No one has big cars or trucks so it is not practical to donate old furniture unless you can get the organization to come collect it. So people leave fairly new couches and desks and chairs outside all the time. I am slowly furnishing my apartment with stuff I find outside (only stuff that can be washed!) and stuff I find on the Glocals website.

Swiss people kiss each other's cheeks THREE times to say hello. As an American (we are a decidedly non-kissy people), I find this excessive. There is NO ONE who I would be so happy to see I would want to kiss them three times.

Seemingly the opposite of being overly kissy, Swiss people are also extremely indirect if they have a problem with someone or something. A friend joked once that if your neighbor doesn't like your dog, they won't say a word to you about it and you won't have a clue there's an issue until the police or the property rental company shows up with a complaint. This is also adverse to my American nature. I prefer to be up front with people and talk through a problem if one exists but that is perceived as really aggressive here. I need to work on curbing my assertiveness and finding more subtle ways to communicate without losing the ability to speak up for when I eventually (insha'allah) go back to the US.

That's all for now! Since the revolution, everyday events have paled in signficance and hardly seem worth reporting but I will try to do better updating the blog even if Mom is the only one reading this. :) Next time I will also post some Geneva pics.