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!"