A Viola and a Library Card

I have discovered a couple of things that I always look forward to doing: going to orchestra rehearsal and visiting the library. These were things I liked while back home as well, but here they are even better. I'm not exactly sure why, but it might have to do with the fact that I can find some really awesome things at the library, and some of my favorite people I have met here so far are in the orchestra.

Just to give you an idea, this is what I have checked out from the library right now:

Tintin in America (French and German editions), a book about digital photography (German), Calvin and Hobbes (French), a book about design (German), a translation of a John Updike novel (German), the piano works of Erik Satie, Dvorak's American Quartet and a quintet, and a French audio version of Roald Dahl's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Let's just say it's enough to keep me entertained for a while. I always leave the library with something I'm really excited about, and the only downside is that I have to carry the heavy books around until I get to a bus stop. But it's definitely worthwhile.

About orchestra. In a previous post, I told you about how I finally found an orchestra I am happy with and that I might have the chance to play viola in it. Well, I now have the viola and it is functioning well. It was sort of like a scavenger hunt to find all the parts I needed and to get it to work properly. I had to get the music from one person, the actual viola and case from somebody else, a bow from yet another person in the orchestra who happened to have one she was willing to lend me. And the strings were very old and needed to be replaced; the concertmaster is a luthier and took the viola with him to work on it. I met him at the Conservatory the next week and he said that he had had to adjust the bridge and the sound post as well as replacing the strings. Fortunately the orchestra fund was willing to pick up the tab. And my violin shoulder rest, when adjusted to its largest size, was miraculously able to fit on the viola, saving me around 50 CHF. At the beginning I had some trouble with peg slippage, but it seems to be getting better now that the strings are stretched out. This paragraph is dedicated to my stringed-instrument-playing readers, who would have understood all the terms used, and to my non-muscially-inclined readers, who toughed it out and read all the way through even when encountering strange words like "luthier" and "sound post."

So that's the viola. And actually playing it has been a success so far. I only started viola last year, also because I was in an orchestra that needed another one and because there was somebody that was willing to lend me one, so it can still be difficult for me to read the clef. I'm getting better, though. And the section sounds better with another player. The director is pretty happy that I switched and throws me compliments on my playing here and there. Some of them are in the form of viola jokes yet still manage to be nice. Yesterday was my second rehearsal in the viola section and the section unanimously promoted me to the first stand.

Orchestra people are awesome. It's always nice to be part of a group, but there is something about playing music together that creates an instant bond. Even though we all speak different languages (quite literally, there are those who prefer German and those who prefer French), we get along very well. One time I actually spent the entire break talking to a group of university students in English, but I don't anticipate that happening again. In general, I try to discourage people from speaking English with me, with the exception of other exchange students whose first language is English. The only difficulties I have with the other orchestra members are that there are so many names to remember, and that it's hard to remember who prefers which language. But I'm sure it will get better after a while, once I have had more time to talk with them.

A Swiss Travel Guide, or I Hop on a Train with my GA

I thought I would let you in on my travel experiences in Switzerland. Rotary has generously paid for my general subscription ticket (Generalabonnement in German or abonnement général in French) which works on trains, buses, and boats throughout the country for the entire year. Thus, it is very easy for me to travel around when I have some time, like on weekends or breaks. And I have been all over the place.

On a Friday in the middle of September, each class in the school takes a day trip somewhere. My class rode the train to Bern and went to the Paul Klee Center in the morning and then spent the rest of the afternoon free. I walked around and took pictures with the two other girls in this picture, Fitore and Sophie. It was nice to spend time with classmates outside of school.

Another weekend, I went to Luzern with three other American exchange students that go to my school. I almost missed the train because the bus I thought I was going to take into Fribourg apparently doesn't run on Saturdays, and the next one came ten minutes late! But I managed to run to the train and jump on before it left. One of the students I was traveling with, Jessica, knows a girl that lives in Luzern because she spent an exchange year in Missouri, where Jessica is from. We met her there too and spent the day walking around and seeing what there was to see. We also took advantage of our GA tickets and hopped on a boat that went around the lake. Luzern is a beautiful city, especially when the lights reflect off the water at night. And, yes, those are swans at the bottom center of the photograph.

There is an organization, called Rotex, for people who recently did an exchange with Rotary, and they sponsor weekend outings for the inbound students. Our first one was in Chur, or Coire, and we were to bring a dessert from our home country to share. So a day or two beforehand, I made cookies in my host family's kitchen. It was something of an adventure. My host mom obviously had never made cookies, which didn't surprise me because they don't really exist here, and when she saw the finished batter in a bowl, she asked, "How many does that make?" And I told her it would be enough for four dozen cookies, which she didn't believe until she saw them. Also, my ingredients were slightly different from usual, plus I had to convert the recipe from cups to milliliters so I could measure my ingredients. I was originally offered a scale to weigh the ingredients, but since the American recipe gave the amounts in volume, I did not feel like looking up the densities of each ingredient to convert to grams. Anyway, I commented that they looked flatter than normal, and my host sister said, "Can you still eat them?" And my host dad, who was sampling one, said something along the lines of, "Yes, and they are pretty good!" So the cookies were a success.

And so was the Rotex weekend. We spent the night in a nuclear accident bunker under an elementary school. The bunks were three high. I was convinced I would hit my head upon waking up, but I managed not to somehow. It was great to see everyone, and it is a really unique group of people. Of course I hung out with some Americans, but also with people from Canada, Ecuador, Germany, and other countries. Most of the inbounds speak English as a first or second language, and the ones who speak it as a second language speak it surprisingly well. On the first day we competed in a scavenger hunt involving finding the price of a certain bakery product, taking a picture of the whole group in front of a monument, and finding people in the city to teach us a song in Swiss German and draw a picture for us. Since I was the only one in my group who could speak German (the others are here to learn French), I had to do all the talking. And it was raining, which led me to discover that what I thought was a rain jacket that I was wearing was just a simple windbreaker and didn't block the water out at all. But it was still fun, and I dried out eventually. The second day was spent at the Viamala Schlucht, the beautiful ravine pictured below.

I have a fall break here, something I always wished I could have in high school. My host family wanted me to tell them where I wanted to go within Switzerland, but the problem was that I am unfamiliar with the country and didn't know what to tell them. I asked a lot of people for suggestions, but even the Swiss people I asked had very few ideas to give me. It made me think about how familiar people really are with their surroundings. When I asked my host sister if she had any places that she wanted to see, she said, "I don't really know what there is to see here." I think people get stuck in their daily routines and become familiar with just a few places, their homes, the office, school, the nearest grocery store. So I encourage all of you to find something new to do in your own cities or familiarize yourself with a new area somewhere near to you. It could come in handy if you ever host an exchange student!

Well, we ended up finding some places to visit, and it turned out to be a spectacular week. On Monday we visited the Aletsch Glacier, located in the heart of the Alps near Fiesch. The night before we left, my host mom said, "You aren't scared of riding on gondolas, are you?" I suppose that if I were, it would have been too late. So we rode on some trains, then some gondolas, and the glacier was beautiful. We were lucky enough to have chosen a very clear day with few clouds, and I could see the most famous Alps from there, including the Matterhorn, Jungfrau, Eiger, and Mönch. The two people in the photograph can give you an idea of its scale.

The next two days we spent in the canton of Ticino, in the southeast of the country, where Italian is the official language. Unfortunately, my Italian is sorely lacking. But fortunately, everyone in the service industries there also speaks German, meaning I could order my food in German. Ticino is apparently the warm, sunny place for Swiss people to go to on vacation if they don't want to leave the country. It wasn't terribly warm and sunny while we were there, but it was still very nice. Near Lugano, there is a miniature park (Swissminiatur) with representations of all the famous sites in the country. So if you ever come to Switzerland and want to be able to see everything there, just come to the Swissminiatur, and you won't have to go any farther to see buildings from all the major cities, small versions of the most famous mountains, and examples of architectural styles of the different regions.

We spent the night in Ascona. As we neared the hotel, my host mom said, "By the way, I'm using bank coupons to pay for the hotel room, and technically, it is supposed to be four family members listed, so if anyone asks, your name is Krista Tinguely and you only speak French and a little German, absolutely no English." I guess the idea is that the hotel people would be able to speak good German and English but not as much French. But nobody asked. Ascona is very pretty. It's on the edge of Lago Maggiore, which is a pretty big lake that extends into Italy. The town itself has a lot of narrow, twisting alleys full of shops. There is also a modern art museum, where my family left me for an hour. Either they aren't interested in art, or they ran out of coupons from the bank. Probably both.

Something I noticed at about this point in the trip is that being around my host family all the time had an interesting effect on my Swiss German. When not directly talking to me, they speak to each other in Swiss German. And hearing it almost constantly, while sitting in the train, while walking around, while eating, I began to understand it more and more. By the end of the week, Swiss German phrases were floating around in my head. Now, I am not at all boasting that I have a mastery of the language. In fact, I still have a lot of trouble understanding most of it. But I am making progress. The other thing about spending a week just with my host family is that I only spoke German all week, and I found that I have gotten comfortable enough with it that I can joke around. Jokes and puns are something I have always enjoyed in English, but at the beginning of my exchange, joking around rarely came to mind because it took so much effort to try to explain things seriously. And jokes are a completely different level of communication. So I really enjoyed being able to use my sense of humor in another language. It made the week that much more fun. Speaking of jokes, here's one from my host dad, who often tells me jokes in German, few of which I understand completely. But he tries. So the joke:

-Philosopher 1: Do you know what time it is?

-Philosopher 2: No, I don't have a watch. Sorry.

-Philosopher 1: That's okay. It was nice to discuss the matter with you anyway.

This is a rough translation. And it's not even that funny. It was just funny to me because I usually laugh when I think I'm supposed to, even if I don't get what's funny, and this time I actually understood the joke.

After we got back from Ticino, there was no set plan for the next day because it was supposed to be kind of rainy and nasty. One of my dreams in coming to Switzerland was to see CERN (Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), so of course I had been looking around on their website for ways to visit, and I found that tours of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) have to be planned three to four months in advance. But there are also exhibits about the research that goes on there, and I suggested that we go to Geneva and see them. My family isn't really into science that much either, but they agreed to go and my host dad suggested we see the UN while we were there. We did, and the tour at that time was in English, so I understood it okay and so did Dominique, but the host parents were a little lost.

Finding CERN was a tram and bus adventure. It takes about thirty minutes to get there from the train station. This wooden dome was a gift for CERN's 50th anniversary. I guess I was surprised to learn that the research facility opened in the 1950s because it seems like most of the hype has been more recent. But the exhibits were pretty interesting, and I'm definitely going to look into taking a tour of the LHC sometime later this year.

The last day of the week was spent in Sion (Settin) and the surrounding area. In St. Léonard there is an underground lake that we visited. It was cold and rainy and nasty but kind of cool. The hills there are covered in vineyards. In Sion, or just next to the city, there are a few castles. We hiked up to two of them, the less elevated one first. The view from the top was beautiful, and at Château Tourbillon, part of which is pictured below, I finally found a place that felt magical to me. Don't go thinking of the Disney Castle, please. I think there are different places that speak to different people, and I found mine. Inside those walls on the top of a very high hill, surrounded by high grass, trees, and little yellow and purple flowers, I felt like I could have spent hours just sitting. The elevation somehow elevated my mood, which continued for the rest of the day. And just look at it! Doesn't it look a little magical to you too? And on the right, the cat was looking at me. I just had to take a picture.

Treatise on a Few Disconnected Topics, or How Ultimate Frisbee Came to Fribourg

This is a view from the inside of the bus stop looking out. I thought it was neat. I'm settling in here after a couple of months, and I keep doing things and thinking, hey that would make a cool blog post! And then I am busy doing something else and never actually wrote the blog post. So I have a list of things to write about, and I'm going to cover a few here for your reading entertainment.

First, something funny I noticed is that I don't really know how to answer my phone. A couple of times someone has called whose number wasn't already in the contacts list, and at those moments I was unsure of what to say when I picked up. I think I just defaulted to "Hello?" but theoretically anyone calling me could be wanting to speak any of three different languages. Once I called my piano teacher to change a lesson time, and he answered the phone simply with his first and last name. So while people answer house phones with the family name, I guess individuals answer cell phones with their full names here. So I guess that would solve my problem.

Another thing: whenever I have to approach someone and talk to them to ask a question or something, I always have to think beforehand of which words I might need to use. And if I'm in Fribourg, I usually have to do this in French and German so something intelligible comes out of my mouth if they don't understand the first one I try. So one day I thought, once I get back to Kansas and I can pretty safely assume that everyone I approach will understand if I speak English to them, it's going to be so easy to talk to people! I think that if I was ever nervous about asking for directions or whatever back home, it will be much less of a problem when I return because I won't have to plan everything I am going to say before the conversation even starts.

My host dad keeps bees. And, accordingly, he has a beekeeper outfit. It's so cool. What's more, one time he came down to dinner in a firefighter outfit! I think he's part of a volunteer fire department or something. Anton is full of surprises. One time he came to pick me up from an orchestra rehearsal and on the way back he gave me sort of a linguistic tour. He showed me the borders between French-speaking and German-speaking neighborhoods, and he gave me examples of French words that have been assimilated into the German spoken in Switzerland (not just Swiss German dialects, but also the words that are used in High German in Switzerland). He reminded me a little of Gus Portokalos, the father character in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who likes to point out how every word has a Greek root. Anton likes to point things out. He's very proud of Switzerland. And when we went to pick up Dominique from a friend's house, he introduced me as "unsere American girl" with a big grin on his face. If he wears some other fun outfit in the future, I'll definitely let you know.

Cows. Left and right, here and there, and everywhere, on the hill, around the house, on the street in front of the bus. And the melody of their bells is there all night while I sleep. They ate the field next to the house. Zumholz is sort of in the countryside. There are a lot of agricultural buildings and vehicles and animals all over the place. I love cows.

A few things I miss: water fountains, Kleenex, and lunch boxes. And don't be offended if your name wasn't on the list. Notice I wrote "things" and not "people." So if you aren't on the list, you are probably not an inanimate object. I really was looking for water fountains for the first couple of weeks of school before I realized that you bring a water bottle and then fill it in the sinks inside the classrooms or in the bathroom. These sinks are also great for rinsing off the utensils that you bring from home to eat lunch with. There are utensils in the cafeteria, but both times I have used them, it was when I forget one from home, and I had to ask politely if I could borrow them. Kleenex boxes, as far as I can tell, are nonexistent. I haven't seen anything like this in my house, so I have just been using toilet paper. People have these little packets of ten or so tissues that they bring to school with them when they have a cold. I shudder to think how much it would cost, so when I had a cold I got through it on lengths of toilet paper and hope. Refrigeration here is, well, less powerful than it is in the States. Sometimes things from the refrigerator just don't feel cold when I take them out. And newly purchased items sometimes sit on the counter for a while before going in to the fridge. Maybe it's due to the generally low temperatures that food safety seems to be less of a concern. And I've definitely become less paranoid about food safety since I've come here. Like the thing about lunch boxes. You don't chill your food all morning before eating it, you just bring it in an old Coop or H&M bag and then eat it. Lots of people bring leftovers and microwave them. I usually have the same thing for lunch every day, unless there are leftovers, because the only food I know about that I can take for lunch is sandwiches (bread, butter, cheese, and lunch meat), yogurt, fruit, and Farmer cereal bars. So I eat these virtually every school day. Somehow I'm not tired of them yet.

I love ultimate frisbee. Many summers of learning from the best gave me a good basis on the proper rules and strategies of the game, and I had a chance to use my experience this month in gym class. I chose New Games as my gym subject, and with about twenty other girls, I played lacrosse, American football, and ultimate frisbee. One day we had a substitute teacher who tried to explain the rules of ultimate frisbee, and then we played a tournament of sorts for a couple of hours. There was an odd number of students, and the sub ended up on my team. After a while I figured out he didn't really know the rules, so I proceeded to explain them. And every time I came up with a rule as it applied to the situation, he would say something like, "This game is actually really cool. I had no idea it would be this much fun." So I was proud to have shared a bit of the expertise I gained at Village Thursday morning ultimate sessions with the Swiss. I think it's summed up well by something one of my teammates said every time we scored: "Kansas power!"

Musings on a Sunday Afternoon

This is a picture of the cat that is sitting on my lap as I write this post. I have discovered that I am more of a cat person than I thought. Thank you, allergy shots! And since my blog always looks cooler with a picture in the post, I thought I would throw it in.

Well, it's Sunday afternoon. I assume most of you inferred that from the title. It's that lazy time of day between lunch and dinner, when not a whole lot is going on. So I thought it would be a great time to write another blog post. I guess that makes my posting patterns irregular because they had been getting farther and farther apart, and now there are three in the course of one weekend! I, however, appreciate the break from all the weekend activity that had kept me from posting very often for the past couple of weeks, mostly because I am getting over a cold. Parents: don't worry, I am taking my medicine and drinking water and sleeping and all that. I would even gargle with saltwater if I knew where the salt was.

I think my project for this week is going to be figuring out the kitchen. I have a basic idea of where to find stuff, but I want to actually cook something. And I have the perfect opportunity, which is that next weekend is a Rotex weekend. Half of the inbounds to Switzerland go hang out in Chur for the weekend, and we all have to bring a dessert from our home country. So I will probably make the family cookie or coffee cake recipe. I also considered trying Rice Krispy Treats. I know for a fact there are Rice Krispies here, because I have eaten them for breakfast mixed with various flavors of yogurt. I am not sure, however, about the availability of marshmallows. So that recipe might have to wait until I have a chance to check for myself.

This morning I slept in quite late to give my immune system a chance to catch up, and as I was eating peanut butter toast and apple slices with peanut butter around noon (thank you, Rotary Leawood!), I thought about what Sundays meant before I came to Switzerland. In the morning, church. In the afternoon, homework and chores. In the evening, youth group. Here it's a bit different. My host family doesn't regularly go to church. The only time I went was shortly after I arrived and a church in Plaffeien was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its being rebuilt after a fire. My host mom offered to visit a church with me a couple of weeks ago, but I have not yet been able to take her up on it. Maybe next week. I do have homework here, but so far I don't have that much, though I have been assured that it will get worse. And my responsibilities in terms of chores are very minimal here. It might seem weird for me to say this, but I kind of miss manual labor. There is something ever so gratifying about mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, folding the laundry, or scrubbing out the bathtub. Granted, once I return, I probably won't want to do those things. But here all I really do is clean my room every once in a while.

News from this week is orchestra-related. For the past few weeks, I have been researching and visiting different orchestras in the area. The first one was a youth orchestra, but the director thought that since I was only going to be here for a year, it was not a good idea for me to join. They have a concert pretty much every month, which is a lot. The first orchestra I actually visited and played with in rehearsal was in Düdingen, a town between Zumholz and Fribourg, and I really enjoyed meeting the people there and talking to them. Unfortunately, I was not as excited about their level of playing. The second was at the Conservatory where I take my piano lessons, but the level there was also not quite up to par, mostly because a lot of the musicians were very young. The third was also in Fribourg, and it's called l'Orchestre de la Ville et de l'Université de Fribourg. I was much more impressed, and I was not the only new person there. The orchestra seems to be continuously growing, which is a good sign. Also, I noticed that the viola section was proportionately smaller than the others and let slip the information that I can play the viola but that I didn't bring one with me. The person I was talking to (a bass player who is also the president of the orchestra, as I understood it) immediately ran off to find someone with an extra viola. So it looks like I may have a chance to continue the exploration I began last year on this instrument, which is exciting.

As my host sister does her religion homework in the next room, I'll think about starting my own homework (answering some complicated philosophical questions in French, plus some nice, simple limits and such for math). As for the rest of the day, I have borrowed copies of Lord of the Rings in French and The Little Price in German, so I might dig into those. And I brought some Shakespearean comedies with me, since we never managed to get around to them in school. If I want to keep reading in English after that, I will probably turn to www.gutenberg.org for some of the classics. I would send you all letters, but my host family doesn't have any stamps. Looks like it'll have to wait until Monday when I can go buy them myself. Another thing I need to do: translate names of ingredients into German so I can ask whether we have them or not when I want to bake something. So, until the next post, have a nice Sunday afternoon!

Snail Mail Cabbage Challenge

Dear Readers,

I love getting snail mail. Don't you? Other than the packages from my Rotary Club in Kansas (club flags I forgot to pick up before I left plus PB&J) and my family (computer backups and thank-you notes), I have happily received letters from two very good friends of mine. What I found interesting was that there was a common theme between the two letters: cabbage. Now, the whole cabbage thing is sort of an inside joke, and I know a lot of you aren't in on it, but here is your chance! I challenge you to write me a letter (if you want to send drawings or pictures or anything else, that would be cool too) and include somewhere either the word cabbage or a picture of a cabbage. No real cabbages, please. I think they would not stand up to the transportation. If you send me a letter in the mail, I promise to send something back. But wouldn't it be fun to get mail from Switzerland? Of course.

Here's my address:

Andrea Brown

c/o Fam. Tinguely

Allmend 62

CH-1719 Zumholz (FR)

Switzerland

I hope some of you will take me up on this challenge, because it would be fun for both of us.

Sincerely,

Andrea