Tonibler and Beau Marais

There are apparently quite a few Kosovan children wandering around with Tony Blair’s name.  This cracks me up; these kids will undoubtedly go into the big wide world at some point in their lives and tell people merrily that they were named after Tony Blair.  And this will cause some amusement I imagine, since their names are not Tony Blair but Tonibler. If you read that in a different way it sounds like Toe Nibbler.Read the full article here.

It reminds me of a pupil I taught in Calais who put his hand up and in thick Ch’ti asked me ‘Madame, Madame, vous aimez le Beau Marais’ (the hideous council estate where I was teaching, living and where burning cars was the favourite pastime). To which I diplomatically responded ‘Oui oui, biensur’ then I went on about how it was a fun place to live (the children were unable to read, so definitely incapable of reading between the lines; by fun I meant ‘damnright dodgy and fairly horrific’). All the kids looked baffled and giggled because I clearly had not understood what the question.  Little Pierre (except he was probably an Ahmed) has actually asked me if I liked Bob Marley. Except he had frenchified the name to the extent that it sounded like Beau Marais.

It is one thing that never ceases to amuse me; the localisation of people’s names in a foreign language. A British friend called Ruth who lives in France has the dilemma of whether she introduces herself as Rooth using a sound she knows the other person cannot make, or to frenchify her name to Root.  Japanese and Chinese students I have taught in the past choose an English name, but it seems no new names books have been published since about 1940 as they all choose names like Gertrude or Doris.

Names, huh. Curious stuff. Nothing is funnier than teaching a class of kids and having a Fanny and a Willy in your class. Classic. Actually making them sit next to each other and asking them questions is also pretty funny. Poor kids.

Wavin' Flags

I've got increasingly excited about the World Cup. I'm not into football, (and certainly not the spoilt, cocky and evidently quite incapable English team), but Switzerland is a great place to enjoy such an international tournament. Every apartment block is now adorned with flags. Obviously there are the Swiss flags; but they tend to be there all year round and also decorate rock faces, pavements, baseball caps and anything else that might need a little Swissifying... but there are flags from pretty much every nation that has been involved in the World Cup. Where I live, there are mainly Portuguese and Italians (although their flags came down pretty quickly), and in some neighbourhoods, the St George's cross hangs from balconies.  The trick to avoid racist attacks or accusations of being a bloody auslander is to hang the Swiss flag alongside your nation's colours.

The excitement of watching a televised game in a bar here is that you can pretty much guarantee that there will be people from both team's countries present, (unless you head to a bar called Mama Afrika like I did last night for the Ghana game.), so the atmosphere is awesome. So, football really can be a great experience...I think I had let those hooligans back home put me off perhaps.

Pimp my Brixton

A bit of urban architecture and renovation in Brixton. Lovely.

The girl with one shoe

One thing that is very noticeable in France is that you cannot walk around in Flip Flops (unless you’re at the beach) in any season, without every Tom, Dick and Harry dropping their lower jaw in aw, disgust, or perhaps bafflement. This is a strange thing for me; Flip Flops are my favoured footwear unless there is 7cm of snow on the ground. I remember wandering through the streets of Calais with my then bearded friend Stevie in his sandals, me in my flip flops (even with lovely painted toe-nails), and we elicited quite a lot of jaw drop (even though Calais is a seaside town).

Switzerland, it seems, has similar issues with feet.

I injured my right foot at work on Tuesday (Switzerland is not as safe as it pretends to be; the wall fell onto it) and had to go and get it x-rayed. It was raining heavily, thunder rumbling the skies, and Zurich was under a giant puddle. I had worn ballet pumps to work, and because of the swelling and the cut on my foot, I could not wear the right shoe after the incident in the office, so I took it off. I hobbled with one shoe to the tram stop; the doctor’s had no more crutches and all the pharmacies were closed for the night.

It is astonishing first of all that no-one helps you onto and off trams when you are clearly struggling, and wearing only one shoe, (the old trams here have huge steps to get into them), and secondly that people look at you like you are absolutely bloody bonkers, and wearing only one shoe, even when they can see your foot is swollen to the size of an elephant turd, and you are clearly in quite considerable pain (or heavily constipated; it’s the same face).

I feel like my journey home with one shoe on made me see Zurich from a very different light. Or perhaps it just saw me in a different light. Either way, if you intend to rob a bank, I recommend you wear shoes, otherwise you’ll stick out like a sore thumb and will instantly spotted.

[ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœːkʏtl]

Get your tongue around a volcano
In answer to my afterthought below; check out the link above.

What Eyjafjallajökullv teaches us about travel.

Returning from a weekend in Milan, I shared the train with a lot of people who were returning from far flung corners of the earth and being forced to complete their long-haul trip over land. It was announced repeatedly over the tannoy in Milano Centrale that all trains to Northern Europe where full until Friday 23rd March. I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing (although admittedly I don’t have a flight booked until two weeks time, when hopefully high winds will have blown the culprit volcanic dust away, and the eruption will have stopped); the volcanic cloud is creating many adventures, it is reinventing (temporarily) travel. People are not just going to a place and returning. They are going to a place and have to get creative about their return journey. Living in the centre of Europe it is quite common to go by train to another country, but I imagine for many of the Brits stranded, they will be taking their first trip across European borders on trains.

People are travelling, as opposed to going from A to B and back. Strangers are exchanging stories in full train carriages, they are discovering the humanity of train travel, and its contrast to the sterility of identical airport lounges and cramped planes. I am guilty of treating air travel like shuttle buses; it is all too easy to hop on a plane to visit some friends. You go with a purpose and rarely see anything outside what you intend to. Train travel has an eventual purpose, but it is so much more about the journey, and the people, and the places you pass through. There was a triumphant cheer of the group at the neighbouring table as we drew into Zurich HB last night. Doubtlessly, a city few had visited before had transformed into a milestone, and they were going to have the chance to scratch its surface with a group of fellow travellers, before continuing their journey north.

Perhaps I am romanticising, but I wonder how many new friendships, new discoveries, new projects this Eyjafjallajökull cloud is inspiring across Europe.

As an afterthought, how the hell do you pronounce Eyjafjallajökull?

It's that time of year again

Lunch on a jetty by the lake in early April.

Einfach wunderbar!

Swiss psychitsophrenia

Switzerland ranks fourth highest in Europe for suicide rates, behind Hungary, Finland and Belgium (in that order). There is one thing that strikes you even after just living or even visiting the country for a short while, and that is the fact that if you don't conform, you have a bloody hard time of it. Swiss society, more than anywhere else I have thus far experienced, is based on money. Money equals success. Many openly discuss salaries, and most cover themelves head to toe in the most expensive brands. This applies not just to the Gucci's and suchlike, but also to the Mammut and North Face and Peak Perfomance outdoor kit. A simple unlabelled t-shirt for a hike just will not do for the Swiss.
A scene on my tram commute shocked me this week. A lady; not the mentally ill, drunk, Parisian metro type, but rather the mother of two point four children and an admin job genre, started verbally attacking another completely innocent commuter. The trams (and particularly the new ones) are cramped at peak times, particularly if you have anything more than a small handbag to transport. The victim was quietly reading her French novel, with her handbag on her lap, and a small sports holdall between her legs on the floor. The lady opposite joined at the next stop and started to shout at the reading woman; if you need so much room on the trams then you should take a taxi, where do you expect me to put my legs, tut tut, huff huff. (And vociferous rants sound all the more nasty in thick Swiss German of course). The reading woman, who was as shocked as I was at this rather unnecessary outburst (there were other seats avaible that the angry woman could have sat at).
So I have a theory about the Swiss (I hate generalisations of course, but when you see similar things so often, you do start to wonder...). The theory is that if there is one tiny thing that is not right, or wobbles their rigid daily routine, they go completely AWOL. The Zurich commute is a far cry from the stressful London underground journies. It is safer than a stroll on an Italian pavement. I guess if you know no different, a woman having the cheek to transport her sports kit on public transport is massively inconvenient. You have to give up that extra 50cm of space for your cute little NavyBoot pumps, and you're obliged to hold your Chloe handbag that little bit closer to your cashmere sweater; having to hide the label that displays your wealth.
Coming back to the suicide thing; I think that perhaps if you're not a fan of only living by the strict societal rules of Swiss life, and only doing your recycling until 7.30pm, and not showering after 10pm, and so on, then life is tough. It's a slightly different ball game as an Auslander of course, but it is easy to see that if seemingly normal people kick off on a tram about a sports bag, there is a certain level of oppression and pressure to do everything according to the book.
Thank God I'm an Auslanderin and am therefore quite used to not living by the rules!

Travel gaffs

I seem to travel quite a bit, and therefore believe that it is entirely normal to have had some cock-ups, some of which verge on catastrophe. I’m now accumulating quite an impressive list.

1. Missing a flight by one week; made worse by the three hours sleep I had managed the night before, the huge amount of mojitos consumed the night before, and the fact that it turned into a bit of a race to get back to Switzerland before my parents arrived in Switzerland. Did manage it, about £100 later (quite a bargain considering), and no tears, although it was very nearly a heart attack as the consequent rush left me with no time to eat or drink.

2. Booking the flights the wrong way round. Only realising when checking in online. Rebooking expensively.
(Interestingly both the first points happened with Easyjet flights; perhaps a sign that one should not travel with them ever!)

3. Having to spend an entire night in a café to avoid paying for an hours cab ride in the middle of the night having missed the last train. Coincidentally, the café that I stayed in with a friend is a bit of a cultural wonder, the Lillois equivalent of Café Flore; where the profs from the city’s universities gather at 6 in the morning to eat onion soup. Didn’t quite believe that story until I saw it, through sleep-deprived eyes.

4. Taking a chocolate cock through security. To be fair, I think that the security guard was a little more embarrassed than I was when she made the discovery. I found the whole affair ridiculously hilarious.

5. Asking my French host family to pass me the condoms at breakfast, having guessed (incorrectly, I soon found out) the word for ‘jam.’ I had thought that it would be similar to one of the English words for jam, chose preserve, Frenched it up a bit and then got it well and truly wrong.

6. Been chased down the street by a drunk tramp in Verona. Not just any drunk tramp, but a drunk tramp shouting ‘Pikatchu, pikatchu, pikatchu’

7. Getting food poisoning and sunstroke in Hungary and making the mistake of telling the particularly unhelpful doctor that I could not swallow tablets. “Then I stick it in your arse” (Hungarians are generally not so good at English). I sat out the food poisoning and the sun stroke.

8. Falling off a horse in a French orchard, rolling under a bush in an attempt to avoid being further injured (I broke my rib), and then being collected in a very shoddy Fiat Panda; which I am convinced injured me further.

9. Losing the dog of the family for whom I was au-pairing, chasing it round the streets in an attempt to catch it before it got squashed by a speeding, shaky and battered Italian car. And calling said dog in German, because the dog was never spoken to in Italian (something to do with the S sounds in German which dogs can hear better, which must mean that all Italian dogs are quite confused.).

Swiss Seasons

One thing I adore about Switzerland (or perhaps about most places that are not the UK), is that you really get to enjoy the different seasons since they don't just merge into one big damp grey mass.

This picture above was taken in Zurich on March 11th.

And this one above on 23rd March after a picnic dinner by the lake.

Why do they wear hats?

A Swiss take on East London

It is always interesting to hear what people have to say about places that you are familiar with; to get the outsider’s eye. I have commented before how I often feel I have acquired this outsider’s eye even in the country I grew up in, but I still obviously have a different level of familiarity than that of a tourist on a flying visit. Having landed at City Airport, I was then standing next to three Swiss university students who had been on the same flight from Zurich. They were gently mocking the ‘very British’ accent and doing what is often amusing to do in a foreign country; repeating the announcements of the station names in their best British. In my experience it is more amusing in a country where they consider one vowel sufficient in a ten-letter word, such as the Netherlands.
The girls on the DLR were clearly excited about their trip to London. In their polka-dot mackingtosh, Converse trainer combo, they actually looked more London that Zurich. They observed that the brick houses were cute; they would love to live in a brick house with a coloured door. Then they spotted the more common sombre sky-high rise blocks of East London; ‘can you imagine living there?’ said one, as she took out her pink Pentax to immortalise the multi-coloured laundry hanging out to dry on the balconies-come-entrance halls of these blocks. I realised that I evidently turn a blind eye to the sad poverty of it all; you grow used to such sights in London in a way that you never do in Zurich.
The girls were excited by a red bus. I found that quite endearing. It is so interesting to notice what other people find fascinating, for them to point out that in fact, little brick houses are quite appealing. They said less favourable things about the torrent of rain that was bucketing from the heavens, but I guess they’ll still get used to that.

Mind the Gap

I am beginning to believe that the United Kingdom is inhabited by mindless idiots. Or is it just that those running it believe it to be. Or is it?

(I think the BNP might argue the UK is being stuffed full of idiots, but that is an entirely different matter.)

When I return to the UK and hop onto a tube, a bus, a train, I feel my stress levels rise rapidly, sometimes to the extent that I worry steam might be coming out of my ears. It is simply impossible to relax on a train, for example. Public transport in the UK is undeniably linked to social class in the majority of cases, to a much greater extent that in other European countries, such as France, Spain and definitely Switzerland. So if you are not a fan of those groups of louder than average Elizabeth Duke jewelled Everton supporters, then trains are certainly not for you.

What bothers me more is the treatment you get, as a paying passenger, from the tannoy. Mind the Gap. They don't put similar signs up on limestone pavements in Yorkshire, and really, you have to be an ejjit not to mind the gap, but really, does it need to be announced every second minute, several decibels outside of your comfort level?

We are approaching Diss. If you are leaving the train at Diss, please take care to take all your belongings with you. (Oh no we're not approaching Diss, we have to wait outside the station for ten minutes while the driver of the train (that was supposed to have made a space for us at Diss station) takes a leak.) It is notable that there is often a pause between the announcement that the train is approaching the station and the name of the town itself, while the train driver wipes his Upper Crust sandwich crumbs from his daily script and attempts to pronounce the town name, making sure to drop all 'h' and 't's so that he does not sound to snobby to the proles aboard.

Train travel in theory should be a pleasure. In the UK, I fear, it will never become that the choice beyond those who have no choice; it is geared towards those who have no other way, which only pushes those who have a choice to choose an option that does not make them feel like a degenerate.

Surely I do not need reminding to mind the gap every 120 seconds? And what's this you keep telling me about a heightened security risk? And why do I need to know that eleven people have broken their hips falling down these very stairs in the last 365 days? And do I really need telling that the doors are closing?

And how the hell do I get you to shut up dear Mr Tannoy Man?

British polyglots

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/12/polyglot-language-teaching-demand

The future is not necessarily in language teaching in primary schools, as Ruth Collins suggests, but rather in highlighting the relevance and the context of foreign languages to blinkered islanders. Make school exchanges easier, emphasise fluency and enjoyment rather than grammatical perfection. I think that until the UK ceases to see itself as a superior island, an 'exception culturelle,' languages in the UK will never really catch on.

The BBC could help enormously by showing films in VO, with subtitles rather than horrendous dubbing, and radios in the UK should provide a platform for non-English language music. Gordon Brown could help by ensuring that policies follow on through from primary school to secondary school. Exposure is the key; and exposure to foreign cultures and languages is fairly non-existent in the UK (with the exception of the US), compared with the inter-cultural melange you see and feel on the European continent.

Kinder leicht!

Winter in Zurich

Pestalozziweg, Zurich. Looking towards the Uetliberg.

Werdinsel, Zurich.

Totter, totter, totter.

Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse leads to Paradeplatz, where the mighty (perhaps less so these days) banks have their headquarters. Where countless men in unimaginative black suits, mackingtosh jackets and dull shoes trundle in to the sombre looking buildings early in the morning, and where they daundle out of after dark, leather briefcase in hand.
It makes sense that the street that leads to this money pot is also paved with gold. Dior, Luis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci and other pretentious places where they deem themselves so trendy they need door staff. I tend to find the customers of these sorts of places rather amusing at the best of times; they dangle their hideously shiny silver handbags on their elbows, they drag their Gucci-coated anorexic grey dog on its pink ribboned lead and they totter along on the uneven paving on their uncomfortably angular shoes, into one guarded shop. Out of one guarded shop. Into the next. Out of the next. Totter totter totter.
In my mind, many of these women are the wives or lovers of Russian oligarchs who are off in some less ordered corner of the world making a 'Deal.' I have no idea if they are indeed wives of oligarchs. I don't particularly care; they look daft, whatever they are.
I have even less respect for these women since last week when large graceful flakes of pure white snow danced their way down onto Zurich's pavements at a speed and volume quicker and greater than Zurich's fleet of snowploughs. It was beautiful. The women tottering on their high heels in the snow were not. But they have been practising balancing their handbags on their elbows so they are pretty good at that, even in the snow in their overpriced shoes.

A different approach to responsibility

March 7th. Six days before my twin sister will marry. Sunday. Paris. I will, in theory run a half marathon. It should be quite a pleasant trip. I will meet family, we'll enjoy some good food and a little wine, perhaps nip around on a Velib', if the machines will take our non-French cards as deposit.

A place on the race costs 36 €. A reasonable sum, and I think you get a free t-shirt. A medical signature on the 'certificat medical' which all runners are obliged to present when they collect their numbers will cost me 450CHF. The doctor must, according to some seemingly archaic French law, sign a form that states that the running will not fall over and die during the race. I present the form, having fought to get an approved translation of the form in German, to my (very) Swiss doctor (although this is an international event, the organisers did not think so far as to fully translating the website. Mainly leaving the most important pages and necessary documents untranslated), and I attempt to make a joke in my stinted Swiss German about how ridiculous French bureaucracy is.

He instead turns the joke on me. Starts to go through a list of tests I will need in order for him to judge me fit to run a half marathon. I was expecting him to ask me if I smoke, drink and exercise. Instead he ticked, he named tests (which he then translated into English after seeing my puzzled expression, and the translations were not much help), he ticked again, he named more tests. 'Were you expecting it to come to this much?' he asked, with that cocky smile that the Swiss often have when they (often) demand money for something. I said in my best German 'I had no flipping idea!'

My brother's doctor in the UK has refused to sign the form, since he cannot judge, after almost a decade of medical study and perhaps triple that medical experience, whether my brother, who has a job where fitness is a strict requirement, can safely run a half marathon.

We will fake the signature and stick our fingers up in the face of French bureaucracy. I simply do not understand how it is up to a doctor to judge whether you should be running a half marathon. If you collapse in a heap on the second kilometre, then it is almost entirely your fault for stubbonly ignoring your body. If you are knocked over by an arrogant Frenchman in a beret waving a string of garlic in your face on his bone-shaker, then it may well not have been your fault, but there isn't much you can do about it.

Life has to happen without stupid pieces of paper that graduates of the Grandes Ecoles are paid to create and then fossilise so the stupidity can remain for decades and decades without a single bonhomme parisien questioning it.

Vive le non-signing of les formulaires debiles. (Et le franglais, bien sur!)

Old world, new eyes

Bizarre as it may sound, I find that as I return to places that I knew well as a child or even more recently, I now see them through the eyes rather of a tourist than a local...

This is the village where I went to primary school, gym club, Bonfire Night...

The picture captures the feeling; I have never seen such a beautiful sunset over the village green.