Month: May 2017

Ali – On the 15th of May we had to hand the keys to our fancy Zurich sublet back. We knew it was coming. Our central Zurich, 3 bedroom 3 bath flat was a fortuitous find on Sabbatical Homes.com where roving academics can exchange or rent houses for weird periods of time around the world. We rented the place site unseen from a couple doing a 2 year fellowship in Toronto for 4100 CHF per month including utilities. Now if you are like me, 4100 CHF sounds like a horrendous amount of cash. But go ahead and puruse the listings on a housing website and you quickly find out that this is standard…for like a studio apartment. The problem in Zurich is that there is relatively little stock to satisfy the large number of folk trying to rent. We heard horror stories about folk having to provide full financial statements and letters of reference in order to rent a place. One rental finder service I emailed told me to call a day before arriving and then they would get started. That’s right. They wouldn’t deal with us prior to our immediate need for a place….mind you this was a service that we were going to pay thousands of dollars to for the assistance. Many folk told us it was so difficult to find housing that they recommended a relocation service. Become Local was one such service and for only 3600 CHF they would haul our butts around Zurich for 3 days to find a rental and settle into it.

 However, we got lucky and instead simply had a nice Skype chat with the couple in Toronto and it was pretty much a done deal. 

Another interesting thing to note about roving academics is they leave all their stuff behind. So we just moved into this couple’s fully furnished place and used all their stuff. Meanwhile, back in Baltimore, a lovely couple from California moved into our place (also found through Sabbatical homes.com) and is enjoying all our stuff.  It’s an interesting process of letting go of your attachment to your stuff. 

But alas now we are in subsidized university housing in a 2 bedroom, one bathroom flat with a shared laundry for $1800 CHF. It’s not bad but certainly screams ‘university housing!’ The university rents housing to visiting academics on a temporary basis because of the challenge of finding permanent housing. It solves the problem of “call the day before you arrive and we’ll see what we can do”.  But we have had to share the apartment with a few thousand ants that have no sense of personal space. 

The other thing we have learned while here is that you really don’t need a lot of stuff to live. When we moved, we reduced our lives to about 10 boxes worth of stuff and have since found that we could have done without at least half of it….. particlary when we had to haul it by foot the 10 minutes up hill to the new appartment. Joe has worn two pairs of pants the whole year as far as I have observed. So the plan for our return is to ditch almost everything. I’m looking forward to a little purging when we get back to the states as well. I really find my life it much better when I only have 5 pairs of pants to choose from in the morning. 

Ali- A month ago we had Andreas and his family (Yana, Paulo and Mateo) over for dinner. You may recall from a past blog post that Andreas is the nephrologist here who pays most of my Swiss salary. You may also recall he’s not one for long term planning and detailed instruction (see post on how to break into a Swiss Chalet).

So during dinner it came out that the Abrahams had not spent any time in the Italian section of Switzerland. Andreas, being of Italian origins, has a soft spot for the area and had a line on a little cabin of some sort somewhere near Lugano or Locarno or ??? Details were fuzzy. So we made a tentative plan to all go for the weekend of the 13th-14th May. 

Flash forward and it’s the Monday before this penciled-in trip. I email Andreas asking for the probability that we are actually going and my email goes into an email black hole….no reply.  Sooooo I figured we were not going and had started to look at some hiking options. Thursday 10pm my phone buzzes and it’s a text from Andreas saying “Friday we will go to Tessin! Hope you are ready!” 

Tessin? Errrr ok. Where the heck is Tessin? We look up trains to wherever Tessin is and the SBB app tells us that it will take us 11 hours to get there on Friday night. So here I’ll just cut to punch line. After Andreas makes fun of us for 5 minutes via text, it turns out Tessin is the Canton (think State) and not the city and says we should just meet him at the train station because clearly we can’t be trusted to navigate around Switzerland on our own. I’ve added the actual texts so you can get a sense of the Swiss superiority. He also sends a picture of what he’s packing… all climbing equipment. That’s right. He’s taking the formerly active and sporty, now aged and decrepit Abrahams climbing. I, of course, respond with a picture of what my plan for the weekend was: wine and Harry Potter auf Deutsch. I was planning to exercise…. my liver and left hemisphere of my brain. 

Maya had big plans for the weekend as well, which involved hanging out with her buddies in Zurich. She took the news that we were going away with the Serras with angry disappointment and then resignation. Her main problem was that both Mateo (age 8) and Paulo (age 6) speak only German, and her confidence in her German had yet to fully blossom. 

So Friday night we all meet at the train station for a 3 hour ride to Locarno (turns out Lugano was another red herring direction from Andreas, who proceeded to use the two city names interchangeably for the rest of the trip). We arrive in Locarno and pile in a rented SUV for the 20 minute drive to a random road side parking spot next to a crazy bridge across a river. After a 10 minute hike we arrive at a cabin in the middle of nowhere backing up to a huge cliff face. 

Morning comes and we discover that there is no coffee bean grinder in the cabin with which to grind our whole bean coffee. After considering a cheese grater and a motar and pestle, we decide to walk back out to the car and head down the road to a campground where they have coffee and breakfast. 

There are tons of independent camp ground all over Switzerland highly reminiscent of KOAs in the US. This campground featured both miniput and ping-pong tables. Surprisingly the lure of miniput and coffee was far stronger than the lure of a cliff face, and we ended up spending the morning slurping capachinos rather than getting our climb on. Another thing happened at miniput. Maya discovered she was perfectly well equipped to communicate with Mateo in German. So just to give you some time reference here, in 10 months Maya has gone from zero German language skills to fully able to communicate, though it took a situation of no other communication option for her to fully realize it. 

Ok it’s noon and we are back at the cabin and out of excuses for not climbing. So we gathered up gear and walked all of 3 minutes to the cliff. At this point I discovered that the kind of climbing that at least one fully expendable person would be doing is lead climbing. I’m putting a link to a helpful you-tube video with tips for lead climbing that I did not watch before lead-climbing. Luckily 8 year old Mateo is the first climber and is therefore the one putting in the anchors that the rest of us will rely on to keep from plummeting to our deaths. Joe is designated as the belayer, a job he is qualified for only because Mateo weighs so little one can just hold the rope without any use of equipement or proper technique. 

Maya goes up next and makes a good start of it. However, coming down can be more disconcerting than going up, as one is completely at the mercy of your less than perfectly qualified belayer. Andreas had to go up and get her when she decided that staying up on the rock was a long term solution to Joe’s questionable qualifications as a  belayer.

Joe took a turn. Luckily photos don’t capture all the complaining and limb tremors so he just looks cool.

When everyone was pooped we headed the 3 minutes back to the cabin for playing in the tall grassy meadow. Hmmm tall grass. I feel like there’s something I should be watching for when playing in tall grass. Ah whatever. Another beer anyone? 

So the next morning was more climbing but now with sore muscles and the anemia that follows a full night of several ticks sucking your blood. 

I don’t have any pictures of me climbing, because I needed my hands and Joe refuses to participate in the blogging at this point, but that leaves me free to tell you all about my lead climbing awesomeness without any contradiction from visual evidence. Trust me. I was awesome. And I only wet my climbing shorts during a couple hard spots. 

Well all good things must come to an end. After a morning of climbing we headed out. The Serras took us to one of their favorite spots called the America. 

Here we got some Italian sodas and Joe showed off his muscles to a couple of female climbers at the next table.

Ok ok. He was showing them his tick head that was still imbedded in his bicep but ignore that and just let the picture speak for itself. 

Then we made our way back to the train station for the ride home. I end this post with the best ‘fart’ sign I have seen. It’s the German word for Drive but that doesn’t keep it from being funny to crass Americans. Gute Fahrt! 

Ali – Maya turned 11 years old on April 26th and had a birthday party sleepover last weekend. Right now you are feeling angry at the false advertising of the blog post title, as you realize this is just a boring post about Mays’s birthday but Ha! Elf means eleven in German so there. It’s not my fault you were picturing woodland dwellers with pointed ears. I suspect you have a desperate need to escape reality and suggest you seek counseling.

Anyway, as I was saying, last weekend Maya held her birthday party. 6 months before that, she was telling us that she didn’t really want a party because she had very few friends here and didn’t know who she could even invite. It’s not that Maya hadn’t made friends; she’s got by far more social ability than I and makes a new friend about every week. But the foreign immigrant/ ex-pat population that is the main source for her Aufnahmeklasse “integration” class in the Swiss public school system is pretty transient. So there was Ori who went back to Australia. Then Elouisa who transferred to another school. Then Maia and Eva who moved to Russia. Then Sixteen who went into the regular class in another school. Etc…etc….

But here we are at month 10 of our year stay and she has this solid friend group composed of Swiss, Expat Americans, Expat Canadians and Expat Brits. Four of the girls made it to the birthday party and we all started off in the woods grilling wurst over a fire, because that’s what Swiss people do on the weekend. Then I organized a scavenger hunt and sent them off into the woods to accost strangers and collect items. Mind you there is zero stranger danger in Switzerland. This is just not a thing here. So sending kids off alone to run through woods is not only ok, it is essential childhood training. I should also mention that every kid owns a pocket knife and is standing over a hot fire with a sharpened stick grilling meat by the age of 4. 

After the scavenger hunt, the girls came back to our place for chicken pot pie, cake, movies and, eventually, sleeping. The next morning there was a cook-off in our kitchen.  Poor Joe would have benefited from beta-blockers or heavy drinking, as the thought of 5 girls given free reign in our kitchen sent him into heart palpitations. 

I’m happy to report we all survived and Maya is a happy 11 year old who has made some very lovely friends. 

Ali– Our last destination in Italy was a place called Cinque Terre, which translates to ‘five cities’ or something like that…all I really know is that Cinque means 5. And for you monolinguals, it is said like Chinkway. This is important because if you use the ignorant American pronunciation, the Italians have zero clue what you are talking about. Now Cinque Terre is a region on the northern west coast of Italy that is famous for these 5 cities that are perched right next to the Mediterranean waters surrounded by terraced hills. I first read about this place in a NYTimes article 36 hours in Cinque Terre and I knew it was a good destination for the Abrahams, as the area is well known for all the hiking trails that connect the 5 towns. 

After some research I decided that Corniglia, the middle of the three towns, would be the best place to stay. It’s the only town not right on the water, which means that it’s slightly less touristy and also means a less than full day hiking commitment is necessary to reach either end of Cinque Terre. 

Now when I mentioned to my Italian friend that we were staying in Corniglia, she gave me a blank stare, having no clue to what I referred. Then, once she figured it, proceeded to spend 10 minutes trying to get me to correctly pronounce the town name. The ‘gl’ is pronounced like a ‘y’ so it ends up sounding like Corn-e-ye-a. But don’t feel bad when you fail at this the first 20 times. The Italians can’t pronounce ‘dehumidifier’.

It took us a whopping 6 hours to get to Corniglia from Orvieto on the Italian train system. But upon arriving we met our airBnB host, Cristiana, at the charming little cafe/bar, Pan e Vin that she and her husband own in town. This became our breakfast spot, as breakfast came with our AirBnB, making the other B actually stand for breakfast instead of what it typically stands for in our experience: bupkis.

Unlike most tourist places, where the AirBnB host will give you tips on what sites to see and maybe a primer on the local transportation system, Cristiana gave us a trail map. Blue trails were the tourist ones you pay for and red trails were the free ones for seasoned hikers and locals. We prepped ourselves that night by eating gelato and wandering around the town.

So Monday morning we roll out of bed at 9 am ish, stuff our faces with pastries at the Pan e Vin, go back to the apartment for ‘post-pastry activity’ and finally hit the trail at 10:30 am. We decided to take the red trail south, with a hike time estimated at around 3.5 hours. I decided these hiking times were clearly based on the average ‘just bought my hiking boots yesterday’ tourist hiker, as you can SEE the southern most town, Riomaggiore, just a couple bumps down the coastline. We manage to locate the trail head, which is hidden behind a church and start going up…and up….and up. Mind you it’s raining a bit and the trail is lined with stones, so it’s a bit like a slip ‘n slide on a hill. 

We finally arrive at a spot where a picturesque town is visable below us and Joe asks,”Is that our destination.” I giggled a little hysterically as I informed him that was Corniglia. We had only just arrived above it.

Luckily the trail did eventually flatten out and we found ourselves hiking through beautiful terraced vineyards with amazing views of the Mediterranean. We passed a lot of people on the trail speaking a bouquet of languages. Finally we hit the descent, which is also called the ‘place in the trail where I lost my knees’. Luckily, there were lots of beautiful wildflowers to look at to distract myself from the joint swelling. 

At last we reached Manarola, which is crazy packed with tourists. Now one of the specialties of the area is the focaccia with pesto. So I was immmediately on a quest to find some. Unfortunately every other damn tourist was also on a quest to find some. 

Bellies semi full, we started hiking round 2, climbing back up over the next hill and down again to Riomaggiore. When we reached the southern most town it was 5.5 hours after our departure from Corniglia.  We dragged ourselves onto the train, and in less than 10 minutes we undid 5.5 hours of hiking. By the time we dragged ourselves back up the hill to Corniglia, we had logged some impressive mileage and stair climbing.

As the sun set, we nursed our knees with ibuprofen, wine and more pesto.

So Tuesday morning comes and we follow the same morning routine. Then we head for the northbound blue route, known as the Via dell Amore, which I think translates in English to ‘The trail tourists pay twice the train ticket price to hike’. Joe and I can both say we have never hiked in crowds like this. It was like transporting a line for a Disneyland ride onto a mountain. Crazy. But still the views were spectacular. The trail is also surprisingly challenging given the general physical fitness level of the tourists we saw and you do meet some fun characters on the way. We stopped at a nice cafe with fresh squeezed lemon and orange juice along the way to momentarily get out of the crowds. That’s right. Let me repeat that. We got off the hiking trail and went into a cafe to avoid crowds. Never thought I would say that. 

So the first town north is the famous Vernazza, which is the most photogenic of the towns and has a big port. This place was too crazy for us, so after a desperate hunt for a cash machine, we headed on. The last town is Monterosso al Mare, which is the one with a beach. This was part of our plan for the day and we were packing suits. 

The Italians had told us that the water wasn’t quite warm enough yet ,but I had assumed they were all thin skinned and spoiled. I had grown up swimming in the brisk waters of Canada so would be fine. I did manage to achieve a semi-comfortable level of numbness during my 20 minute swim but can’t say my skin felt particularly thick. 

Back on the train we returned to Corniglia for more inbuprofen, wine and a nice dinner. 

Our last day we just puttered around. We visited a beach with the world’s largest sand. Then on the morning of our departure, the 26th of April, our hosts had a birthday torte for Maya and a gift. That made the 7 hour trip home on her birthday a bit nicer.

Ali – After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were dark days for the former Romans, who were harried and pillaged by roaming barbarians (and before you let your stereotypes of barbarians run away with you, I think these were mostly Germanic types so blond, blue eyed hunky dudes in metal hats). So what’s a Roman to do? Run to the hills and build a big fat wall all around your city-state. Et Voila! The Italian hill towns are born. Now I know you won’t be surprised to learn that Rick Steves has a segment on the hill towns, which are located in Umbria and Tuscany. All of the towns are ‘medieval’, which means they have that ‘we just got toilets yesterday!’ feel.

We chose the town of Orvieto to visit, which is in Umbria and relatively easy to get to unlike Civita di Bagnoregio. A two hour train ride from Rome and then a funicular and you are there. Once you get to the town, the view is astounding looking out over the vineyards and rolling green hills.

Now there’s not a ton to do in these places as they are literally walled off from the world, but Orvieto has a couple really cool sites… and by a couple I mean exactly 2: the Duomo and St Patrick’s Well. The Duomo is a giant cathedral that decided to dress in stripes, which honestly makes its butt–resses look big. Get it? Butt–resses?

 One of the chapels has some cool frescos by Luca Signorelli, who was apparently one of Michelangelo’s inspirations. If you are a fan of naked people in biblical scenes, then you will love these frescos.

Saint Patrick’s well is hill dwellers answer to the water problem. It was designed in the 16th century with a double-helix pattern so that folk going up didn’t bump into folk going down. It’s a total of 496 steps up and down.

So now you have visited the two sites in Orvieto and you still have 1.5 days left out of your 2 day stay. What do you do? Well it’s Italy so the easy answer is eat through the next 36 hours. Our favorite was the Grotte del Funaro, which was located in a cave. Not a lot of view but pretty darn cool.

So that’s about it folks. Our airBnB was right next to the primo sunset viewing spot and we did a lot of sunset gazing, which isn’t a bad way to spend your evenings, as the best thing about these towns is the view.