June 13 – Planning my life away

Ok, so I’ve spent most of the last few weeks planning my backpacking trip. It took me a looong while to get the itinerary down pat and I’m still making adjustments to it. It then took me most of an entire day to organize the most unpleasant thing with trip planning: transportation. This was made more frustrating by trying to figure out which combination of unlimited rail pass days and one-way tickets I needed for my budget and preferences.

I also spend entire days looking for perfect accommodation. In the main cities where I’m only staying a few days, any semi-decent hostel is fine, but there are some locations where I’m staying almost a whole week (i.e. Paris, Provence, Tuscany, & Rome). For those, I pass many days in front of my laptop looking for cheap-and-chic accommodation that I can rent for a whole week. It’s a race between Amy and Time as things are getting booked up, and Time has a hell of a lot more freaking endurance.

This is why I’m writing a blog entry – something I haven’t done in some time. I just need to stop planning for a little while. I have a bunch of little things to tell, so here’s my Collection of Short-to-Medium Stories, Part II.

A short essay on Swiss anal-ism

Maybe it’s Brendan Schulz’s theory that culture shock is actually at its worst after 4 months in another country (it’ll be exactly 4 months for me in 9 days), but I’ve realized that one of the negative side effects – or requirements, depending on how you see it – of an incredibly efficient nation is an incredibly anal population.

Firstly, I love how efficient the public transportation system is. For example, just last night, I was able to put in an address of a hotel in suburban Zurich, find out the 3 closest bus stops to that address, including how far of a walk each one was from my exact address, choose which I wanted to leave from, input my destination and time of departure (which happened to be months away from now), and get the EXACT routes and times that I could wait at the bus stop, as well as the times of all of my connections until my final destination. Even though I’m now used to a great train system, I was still surprised that I could plan a bus trip down to the every single stop and minute. Another positive note before I start bashing: if you put a letter in the mailbox here before the daily pick-up, it’ll reach it’s destination the next day if it’s within Switzerland, even on the weekends.

Now, on to the anal-ness. This was illustrated in an earlier blog entry with all of the Schengen Nein propaganda pages. Although, in my opinion, the vote on June 5 had a somewhat positive outcome – which I’ll address in another blog entry, two other events have sufficed as evidence of the anal-ism that permeates at least the eastern, German part of this country.

Case 1:

My Peruvian roomie, Liseth, and I were walking up the stairs on our way home, which is Hoehenweg 12. There’s a small, gated shortcut close to our house. It’s a short set of stairs which then connects to a road, which connects to our street. In total, it’s maybe 30 seconds of walking. On the gate, it says “Private Pathway: Only for residents of Hoehenweg or police will be called,” or something like that. Sign on the gate notwithstanding, it doesn’t look like much of a private path. I’ve used this shortcut on 2 occasions: once, when my ankle was bleeding from a new pair of shoes, and twice, when I was walking with one of the American girls who live next door at 3am or 4am.

Liseth always takes the shortcut and this time was no different. 10 seconds from freedom, there was an old lady in the passenger seat of a car that was backing up on the road. She told the person who was driving to stop moving, opened her door (because rolling down the window wouldn’t have been enough), and said to us in a tone even snobbier than the snobbiest, nose-in-the-air, SLK-driving, self-righteous, Yorkville-residing, Rolex-watch-wearing, look-how-much-money-I’m-made-of-and-how-much-better-than-you-I-am person could say (in German), “This is a private path! Don’t use it or I’ll call the police! Good evening.” Cue jaw-drop here.

Liseth tried to protest by explaining that we live on Hoehenweg, and the sign says it’s for people who live on Hoehenweg. We know that the intended meaning is that it’s only for the people who live in that apartment complex, but c’mon, what’s the harm in sharing? Old lady with the stick up her ass replied frantically, “No! No!” This was followed by, “Don’t use it or I’ll call the police! Good evening.”

At this moment, I prayed that I could click the heels of my red sequin Mary Jane’s together three times and be in Toronto, so that I could tell her off. Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes, I was still in Switzerland and still bewildered. Since then, I’ve stopped using the path, because I know almost as well as a fact that if I were to test it, one of the residents of the apartment building would indeed call the police because the sign says that it’s only for them and everyone should follow all of the rules, even if they seem pointless.

Case 2:

I met two guys here, Alex and Jordan, both from Western and both a bit of a drag (haha j/k Jordan, just wrote that cuz I was pretty sure you were gonna read it). We’re going to make poutine as the dish of Canada for the International Dinner on Wednesday, ha! Ok, back to the task at hand, which is to convince you readers that Swiss people are generally and comparatively more anal than others. I think only one sentence is really needed for this one, although I’ll give you more than that.

5 out of the 8 other residents who lived in their apartment building conspired against them to get them kicked out of their flat. Their reasons? They said that Jordan and Alex made noise, and put cigarette butts out on the stairs as well as throwing them off of the balcony. The unbelievable part is that these reasons were enough to get them kicked out. They’ve been moved as a “precautionary measure to avoid further conflict.”

According to the guys, none of it was true. Well, I guess the existence of “noise” depends on your definition of “noise,” but there weren’t any cigarette butts on stairs or thrown off of balconies. What did happen, though, is that one of the other tenants stole all of Jordan’s socks while they were drying in the laundry room.

I’m not even going to bother to conclude here, which, incidentally, also makes this entire sentence redundant.