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Custard in Clockland

May 2000

Two Fridays ago (a bit more than that now) I was a little surprised to find an email stating quite simply that a copy of my work permit has been sent by fax and they look forward to meeting me next week. After four months of waiting everything started to happen all at once and it hasn't stopped yet. The next day I sold my van and packed, then the day after I flew from little old New Zealand to an even littler and older Switzerland, right in the middle of Europe.

A stop-over at Los Angeles airport, almost two years to the day since I first strayed from home, left me feeling like I've become a little seasoned in my travelling. In fact, as I think about it, I recall a few seasonings and some other flavours I have discovered along the way which do compliment Custard particularly well. But I have discovered another flavour particularly worthy of note which, in fact, is an indispensable ingredient for creating the Essence of Custard. She tastes like Vanilla and she picked me up at Zurich airport to take me home to a cosy apartment on a cold dark night. After a brief introduction to the pet rabbit, which is actually bigger than most poodles I've ever met (probably more ferocious too), Claudia and I fell into a blissful reacquaintance. We met in Nepal.

Next morning I got a taste of things to come with an introduction to Swiss cheese and bread. Very much to my liking, I was in for seconds but I couldn't stay sitting for long. The view from the window was enough to get me dressed and outside to explore the cobbled streets, the brightly painted shutters on rows of pastel coloured houses, with flowers growing in all the windows or out on the small balconies. The trams (that are never late), the expensive shopping streets, cathedrals that look older than Jesus himself all featuring very large clocks, and the old part of town where all the buildings join together in a continuous collage of bright, fresh pastel. The buildings look as though they were built without a string-line or a level and as if they were all pushed together into a space slightly too small for them to fit. They lean on one another with some being squeezed in and others being pushed out. The mixture of residential and commercial occupation gives a genial atmosphere to your shopping and dinning experiences.

The rest of the week was a series of similar (and not so similar) delights. On Wednesday I was climbing at the most fantastic indoor rockclimbing hall ever, and on Friday morning I went to visit another country called Liechtenstein. A small country situated between Austria and Switzerland, it is about the size of an average New Zealand farm and has more registered companies than it does citizens. I'm not sure how that works but they have a Prince who makes all the rules and you can bike between all 11 villages in a day. The locals come from either the lowland or the slightly higher up land; quite a significant distinction if you're a local, apparently. By that afternoon I had bought a new mountain bike from Claudia's secretary. Very cool. And on Sunday my mate Rob from NZ turned up for a visit.

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Claudia

I was only an hour late for my first appointment to meet the boss, which by Swiss standards is equivalent to being a week late in any other country. Fortunately he is from the Italian part of Switzerland where they are a little more relaxed so this was probably only like being two days late. After this I got my first taste of fine wine and food from a Swiss restaurant for lunch and, to Claudia's disappointment, the boss informed me I'll be going on an 'all expenses paid' holiday to the Italian part of Switzerland for the next two months. Fortunately I get to come home in the weekends. He topped off our pleasant wee introduction by giving me more than my first months salary to go and buy a one year free pass for every train, bus, boat, tram and everything else that moves in Switzerland.

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The Matterhorn
So on Monday I travelled most of the length of the country (in just 2.5 hours) in a train, which took me to the French speaking part of Switzerland where the companies other office is. Arriving shortly before lunch there was just enough time for an espresso and introductions before we were all taken to a restaurant for some wine and something to eat. Afterwards I was shown the van that is to become my travelling holiday home for the next two months and just as I'd finally recovered from lunch the boss was ordering another bottle of wine at the restaurant where we ate dinner.
The following day was a scenic detour through Italy that took us over a very high and very snowy mountain pass that must be the most dramatic achievement of road engineering I've ever seen. And it is kept open all but just a few days per year! We were on our way to the southern part of Switzerland where I drank some wine with lunch before attending a meeting held in two or maybe three different languages, none of which I understood. I will assume they were talking about roads, as this is the field in which I am working, once again. This time I'm responsible for hurtling around the countryside with 3.5 tonnes of fat Chevy van loaded with every kind of sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, video camera, monitor and computers galore that you could imagine, for measuring every little crack and wobble in every road in the region. I get to see some beautiful scenery and small ancient villages that look like they've been perched in the hills since the Swiss started making clocks. I can tell this because there is inevitably a clock featuring prominently on every church in every little village at the end of every mountain road. The Swiss are apparently quite religious, as is evidenced by the numerous churches and small religious shrines, sometimes just in the middle of the hills not even near a village. So after playing on the roads for a couple of months I'll get to play on a computer for a while longer trying to sort out the screeds of data collected into some form of presentable report, probably in a language I don't understand.

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They have a different view on a few things over here !
I'm not having a lot of success with the languages due mainly to trying to assimilate four different ones at once, not to mention the different dialects. The Swiss-Germans invented a language that they still haven't figured out how to write down so they just write it all in German German, which they call High German. So although the radio DJ's broadcast a monologue of Swiss German, they read the news (and anything else that must be read) in High German! Beats me how they ever got past being a bunch of farmers! But this I just deal with in my weekends, during the week I am trying to learn Italian (and French) from a French 'Rasta' man who speaks just enough English to make any sort of communication possible. But the best part of all this is that the Swiss seem to be very tolerant.
Switzerland is a remarkably beautiful country, as you probably know, but especially now in springtime. Every few days a new burst of colour spreads across the countryside as trees blossom and spring flowers jump up from their winter hiding places.

On Saturday I discovered a forest to mountain bike in just five minutes from home (in Zurich) and on Sunday Claudia took me skiing down endless slopes of soft white stuff that doesn't seem so soft when you go fast. The ski field looks down over a native pine forest to a crystal blue lake resting at the base of immense towering faces of contorted geology that form the opposite side of the valley. The geology alone is quite spectacular. Still plenty of snow in the early spring (although not that good apparently, by Swiss standards) and the slopes are dotted with comforts to make for a civilised days fun. On Sunday night tiredness hit me like a bullet and I was out before I had time to think.

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Buggs - the Rabbit!

Now, Monday morning, I'm heading back down south to start working with the French Rasta man again who drinks wine, not water, if he bothers drinking at all. I'm passing very kayakable looking rivers on a train that will arrive on-the-minute after a three hour trip through the alps, quite a contrast to India. And to achieve this the Swiss have made more holes in their mountains than they make in their cheese. The holes are also made for roads, army shelters, stores and just about any other reason you could possibly want to make a hole for. The nation is prepared for any and every possible disaster which includes a designated space in a nuclear fallout shelter for every Swiss citizen, not to mention the couple of years army training all the blokes get. A very interesting country! The people do seem polite and reserved, which is their stereotype I suppose, but they are friendly and I have been made to feel welcome in many different ways. If it is the country that make a people, well ...for me, it is those people that make the country.

From Custard in Clockland. 

 

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It's a Unique Feeling

June 2001

Loving Switzerland completely. So much to do, so much to explore. Claudia and I went for a big walk the other day. Well it was big for my little legs anyway. Up beside a glacier and over a mountain pass with a little bit too much snow for the likes of all but two other adventurers we crossed right at the very top. Coming down was a scream, especially when I realised my pack was tumbling down the mountain with a full bottle of wine still inside! Forgot to drink it the night before so had to carry it over the pass and, given that I was carrying the pack up the hill, I reckoned it was gaining about 1 franc of value for every 10m of elevation, leaving us with a bottle worth something in excess of Fr159-. Drinking it that evening beside a gorgeous semi-alpine lake in a small Swiss village called Champex, we decided it tasted like it was worth at least that. Throwing the pack down the snow meant we could glissade down ourselves which was much more fun than just walking. Quite serendipitously, we hit this trail at exactly the right time of year and on a weekend with perfect weather. Still too early for the annual 'Tour de Mt Blanc' to be underway which uses this trail and involves about half of France apparently, but late enough for a full display of alpine flowers to be decorating the landscape with colours more vivid than I've seen in any paint tin.

Put-in to the Albula River

Here in Switzerland I have noticed the strengthening of some old addictions and the development of some new ones. My addiction to coffee, if it wasn't already strong enough, has now tripled due to an abundance of very good coffee and an appropriately matching culture of very good coffee drinkers. There is even a machine at work that grinds up fresh beans every time you want a drink. My weekly dose of exceptionally fine cheeses and chocolate has been increasing steadily and I never want to eat a slice of square white New Zealand bread again. My passion for banana (and now pear) pancakes, and plastic boats remains fairly constant although it was nice to receive a little booster over the three day weekend with a big pancake followed by a sojourn to the Engiadin Valley and the Inn river.

To reach the Engiadin valley was another train pilgrimage with kayak and pack full of bits for the weekend to meet up with a bunch of mainly German paddlers. It is interesting how there seems to never be more than two paddlers between myself and any other paddlers I meet. Always a friend of a friend, or a friend of one of their friends. Reassuring in a world so full of rivers. The weather gave everything from hot sunshine to heavy rain which, in both cases, provided an excess of water for the rivers and which ultimately incited my fairly brief, but disconcerting encounter with a small undercut ledge. Cold water was the only other discomfort to suffer but it was combined with the pleasure of great rivers, camp fires, good company and incredible scenery. It is a unique feeling to experience the worlds high places from the bottom, from the crystal blue water that tumbles silently down the cracks between mountains. I love it. The Inn, Albula, Glenner and Vorderrhein, just for the record. All worth a visit.
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Swiss landscape

Now despite how efficient the Swiss claim to be, and in fact demonstrate to be in most cases, I have observed an exception at the doorways to public transport facilities. Here the preferred approach is for the masses to distribute themselves evenly along the platform, which ensures that when the carriage pulls up, the waiting passengers can quickly form barricades of equal resistance at every possible exit. Meanwhile on the approaching carriage, at precisely three minutes before the scheduled stop (I've timed this several times to amuse myself), people have begun their approach to the exit; even the old and frail will run the swaying and tossing gauntlet in order to get their fix of door watching. I find the most hilarious thing to be when they stand for three minutes watching the door on the opposite side from the platform which consequently stays closed on arrival. So these congregations in and outside of the doors mean that when the doors finally open there is a sort of blank faced stand-off until either common sense or habit dictates that the inside people should be allowed to get out first. Unless you happen to be holding something large and cumbersome, like a kayak, in which case a panic ensues and all the waiting passengers just barge in, presumably in the fear that you will somehow get stuck and block the door completely. However, under usual circumstances, a narrow opening ensures that all exiting passengers can be subjected to a thorough inspection before the original barricade once again forms a loose scrum to attempt boarding.

switze41.jpg (37425 bytes) Actually I think the biggest downfall in Swiss efficiency is embodied by the Swiss Post, which so far seems worse than the Indian Post. They take longer lunch breaks at least and the counter staff are possibly less qualified, if not less helpful. Really quite an achievement against the surging flow of inescapable efficiency that washes in repeated cycles over the rest of the country.

And last night God washed Zurich with a big electric washing machine that arced across the sky and trumpeted loud bursts of thunder all through the valley for hours and hours. Was nice to go to sleep to.

My stint working in Tessin (the Italian part in the south) finished about a month ago with an extra few kilo's to show for all the fine restaurant dinning and for being so far away from my bike. Situation now rectified and, in fact, the last two nights bike riding, I think, have been my own subconscious way of trying to make up for lost time. A total four hours of 'balls out' riding with no good excuse other than 'I like it'. Just a pity the trip home from work isn't very interesting to bike 'else I would replace the one hour foot/train journey with a bike ride.

Another weekend has been and gone since I started writing, and this one was spent at a town called Lauterbrunnen. We stayed at a hotel belonging to friends of Dalena, a girl I went to school with when I was 8 years old. Bumped into each other on the plane on the way over here and turns out she married a Swiss boy and lives just a bit down the road. It seems the web of ubiquitous Kiwis has woven itself even into this corner of the World. Maybe the World will begin to fret that Kiwis are secretly planning to take it over, aiming to divide and conquer by enmeshing the globe with a fine but insidious web of infectious idiots J! We rode on gondolas like the one that James Bond fought on top of (in fact that one was just across the valley), checked out the north face of the Eiger, had some snow fights then did our best to run away from all the tourists, back down the hill to the bottom.
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A Swiss tree

To Austria this weekend for a kayak fest followed by a week off work to go play in Chamonix (France).....and the summer continues.

Love From Custard.

 

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 PERFECT EGGS

August 2001

Sitting here alone eating New Zealand mussels (sand included) lightly fried in butter with fresh garlic, drinking beer and listening to Alice in Chains, it's not that I feel like I need to escape the Swiss life, just sometimes it's nice to take a break and remind myself I 'm a Kiwi.

Ah yes the Swiss life; tried a Swiss BBQ the other night, walked up into the forest behind our house and I built a fire (as nominated expert) while Claudia laid the spread. Very similar to a kiwi BBQ really but a little more cheese and chocolate involved and it is legal here, albeit expensive, to buy trout from the supermarket; which we (for better or worse) BBQed. We also pushed bits of dark chocolate into ripe bananas, wrapped them in foil and roasted them. Wonderful, right up there with the ash blackened potatoes.

I'm trying to stir the erogenous zones of my imagination with the scrawling of my own literature. I want to write but I do get a little bored writing just about my weekends or myself. But when I take a different scope I only seem to struggle to inaugurate any creative activity within my imagination. Got a wasp sting on my wrist yesterday while riding the Vespa to rock climbing. Nasty little creatures but I guess they have a reasonable excuse to be in this part of the world (contrary to NZ) and to be fair I was probably going a lot faster than it was when we collided.

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France is incredible. I have never been insulted and abused so much by people I am actually giving money to let alone people I am not. The most unhappy and unhelpful waitresses in the world. The supermarket check-out lady even tried to steal our cheese after we paid for it and then tried to call me a liar whilst I was showing an irrefutable receipt. Fortunately her entire monologue of abuse was blurted out in a rapid torrent of French so I understood very little except that she was fairly stupid. Not wanting to get too cynical too soon though, I should say the stupendous level of France's finely cultured disdain for foreigners is really an exhibition to be awed by. So ignoring then also the bakery people who squash all crosoints sold to foreigners into the bottom of your bag, Chamonix is quite a wonderful place. We had a week of wine, walking around Mont. Blanc, cheese, wine, mountain biking, wine, excellent rock climbing, and super food, ...and ...wine. Full credit to the French for their cheese and bread. The cheese (if not stolen) is as good as the Swiss stuff just not as many holes in it and some of the bread (if not squashed) is even better with big juicy olives and herbs and yummy stuff everywhere. Snails I don't really rate though, I just felt sorry for the poor little buggers; and I didn't even think about eating frogs.

Sam, I met on a river in Nepal, and as an eight year British Army veteran he provided some interesting insights to navigation in the French Alps. Although not perfect, despite (or in spite of) his new precision wrist altimeter, Sam's navigation did supply us with a good bit of adventure. A mere two hundred metres extra altitude and we were treated to a scree run down wet rotten slab rock through drifting cloud white-outs above treacherous bluffs over streams and snow to the best campsite in the world. Not completely out of sight of the small human dots traipsing the main trail like ants, but we felt as remote from civilisation as we could be. On our own little island of beauty nestled high in the head of the valley with a superb view to the White Mountain. Two small cosy tents supplied by Sam's sponsors kept us safe from cold fingers feeling their way down from the high bluffs around us.

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Claudia, who I also met on a river in Nepal, and Beatrice, who Sam met somewhere else, provided a perfect compliment for this adventure and also provided perfect eggs for breakfast at 2300m altitude. Quite a treat and quite a feat considering their stumbling, falling and crashing travels in our packs the day before.

With our short-cut turned long, the second days walking was big which subsequently commanded a brief taxi ride from trails end to campsite, and that concluded two days of super scenery and a brilliant wee adventure. We even saw two snails shagging on a rock, which really was as fascinating as David Attenbourogh's finest television hour. You wouldn't imagine how passionate and perfect the love making of two large snails could be. They must be masters of, and have been the inspiration for, many Tantric practices. We didn't even get a photo but I guess that would have been rude anyway. Made me feel all the worse for eating a few and I can't claim there was any discernible increase in my sexual prowess either, but then it takes miracles to achieve the impossible! There were other wildlife photo opportunities, however, which we did not miss, such as a big mountain goat with horns bigger than a horny thing, and who was surprisingly indifferent to our cameras or our presence.

Only on our last day in Chamonix did we indulge in a day of climbing at a spot just 10 minuets from our campground that could only be described as a rock climbing paradise. Excellent rock, heaps of climbs and clear water springs feeding a series of small lakes among a stand of mature trees. This late discovery was not as big a loss as it at first seemed as we have since begun to discover a number of comparable venues in Schweiz, all a little closer to home. It's a bit of a play ground Switzerland, all conveniently packaged by the superb public transport system that gets us everywhere.

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Actually coming home on the train I noticed a small village called VARNKDORF. Not spelt like that but by way of explanation, the Swiss experience some difficulty in pronouncing their letters like proper English speaking people (and everyone knows we have it right). They have trouble with their V's and W's, so to achieve the correct pronunciation they have to spell it WANKDORF. Now 'dorf' means village so I can only assume the locals are all referred to as Wankers! Most unfortunate. And last night Claudia asked me "Why do they ring the bells?" A frequent and sometimes a seemingly random occurrence here in Switzerland, but it usually has something to do with clocks or Jesus. Still, a magnificent question for a Swiss girl I thought, and one which demonstrates quite superbly, that like all good traditions, this one has lost its origin in time. Enough Swiss bashing, really I quite like the place. Although having a Swiss bank account hasn't cracked up to be so special. Anything less than 6 figures in the account means you get a smile at the counter but not much else that makes you feel good. But then I'd rather count smiles than money anyway J.

A quick sojourn back to the South where I filled in for a missing soldier left me pondering the state of this nation. Travelling through some of the mountain villages I drew possible parallels with various parts of India one or two thousand years ago. Prosperity flourishing, stone sculptures, ornate gardens, artistic decoration on buildings, community life rich with culture and religion. Construction is prolific but rather than the slave labour and exploitation of India, building sites are marked by a plethora of busy machines including the ubiquitous cranes which litter most of the Swiss horizons. Heavy development restrictions have instigated the practice of taking disused stone buildings roofed with a tree branch lattice frame supporting classic Italian style half-pipe tiles, and turning them into luxury villas. Often retaining the original exterior character, even replacing the patchworked roof tiles, the insides will now reflect the pages of a 'wonderful houses' magazine or will make new photo fodder for one.

A four star golf hotel happened to be the most conveniently located for our working week so four Swiss stars it was, including a toilet that sucks away bad smells, tries to squirt water up your bum when you're finished then blow-dries your cheeks with warm air. Incredible!

There are many other stories I would like to write but rather I will part with some profundity derived from my own mental meanderings.

As we possibly all know but may sometimes forget, the most advanced form of sophistication is simplicity. But it would seem this insight can only be derived from knowing both.

And that's enough sententious waffle from me.

Mr Custard

 

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