Month: July 2017

Ali – It’s hard to believe but a year has gone by. It’s July 31, 2017 at 6:30 am and I’m in the Zurich Flughafen waiting for my flight home. You may be surprised to hear I am taking Condor Air, which was the disasterous seasonal airline we flew when we moved to Switzerland that stranded us in  Frankfurt. I am, naturally, headed first to Frankfurt so we’ll see how that all works. Maybe I won’t be leaving Europe after all! 

This past weekend I got my Swiss life all packed up, saying goodbye to a few friends and crying in a few more large Swiss beers. I also did one last trip to the Flussbad, and I will miss its hepatitis-free water. However, I have already been in touch with my city and state representatives to ask them to clean up the Baltimore/Maryland waterways. So who knows what hepatitis-light Flussbads may be in my future along the Jones Falls. 

In my last couple days I got in two last Swiss experiences. First some friends took me to Bauschnäzli, an artificial island that was an old Zurich fortification from the 1600s that is now a restaurant where you can go listen to live music and watch elderly Swiss people dance (note: those are Maya’s friends, Lil and Sarah, dancing and not Swiss old people).I was looking for an opportunity to use the rest of my Lunch Checks, which I call my Swiss food stamps. They are a work benefit that gets you half off restaurant and prepared food. But before you get jealous, may I point out that restaurant food is about twice as expensive here so I’m only paying what you would pay in the states. I think our beer plus fries bill came to 130 CHF.  

The second treat was a very very very Swiss restaurant that my Greek Swiss friend, Alexia, and her dad took me to out by Pfäffikon (so out of the multicultural Zürich city center). I didn’t take pictures, which is a shame (lots of cowbell), but I ate the local Swiss dish: horse. Yup. The Swiss farm and eat horse, which for Americans I think may seem like eating the family dog. The matron of the establishment came out to make sure it was cooked to my liking – not that I had any clue what she asked because of the heavy Swiss German being thrown at me. In Swiss German es ist gut?  becomes something like eschguet? I just smiled and nodded at whatever she said, like a good foreigner. Anyway it really was indistinguishable from medium rare beef in taste and is prized for its leanness – its true, you rarely see obese horses. 

Well that’s about it for me. I’ve had my airport capuchino and last butter gipfeli. I’ve been told I should at least keep up the blog until I get back to regular life in the US, so I can document my culture shock as a returning American. Then we will see what the future brings to the Swiss Family Abraham. 

Good bye Switzerland. It’s been fun. 

Ali- With the health care ….eeerrrrr…midnight benefits roulette game… roaring in the US, I thought I would take a couple minutes to share how the Swiss do health care. Some may be surprised to hear that Switzerland doesn’t have a single payer system like most of Europe. Instead they opted for what is essentially Obamacare (but they did it first – Swiss health care law passed in 1996). In fact, this New York Times article pointed to Switzerland during the 2009 health care debate as a potential model for the US.

First, there is a big fat individual mandate. Now Americans can’t stand the idea of someone telling them what to buy but the Swiss seem to be well onboard with the fact that the only way to have a stable health care care system with controlled rates is to have healthy low risk people paying in to support sicker high risk people. Proof is in the pudding here: according to Wikipedia, in 2010 the Swiss spent 11.4% of GDP on healthcare while the Americans trying to tame their Wild West insurance market spent 17.6%. 

 And they are REALLY serious about the individual mandate.  When we got here, I brought with me all sorts of letters from Johns Hopkins Employees Health Care saying that the Abrahams were covered for overseas care. I was determined to get out of this extra burden on our budget, particularly since we were 1) already covered and 2) anticipated not using any health care while here because frankly I figured gynecological exams or teeth cleanings were not going to be more enjoyable in Swiss German. 

So note that when you arrive in Switzerland they give you 90 days to get your health care butt in gear. We spent a good portion of that submitting paperwork under the assumption that, once the Swiss knew we were already insured in the US, they would let us out of obligatorische krankenversicherung, i.e. obligatory health insurance. Well we fought the law….and the law won. As of 2014 they shut down almost all loopholes; basically only poor visiting students are exempt. Switzerland 1, Abrahams 0. So Joe dutifully went to the insurance marketplace called Comparis and shopped for a bare bones policy. 

Ok a little more about how Swisscare works. First, rates for policies can’t be based on any personal characteristics like age or health status. They are just a function of the benefits, health care model you choose, and the deductible you pick. Second there is a fixed maximum out of pocket amount that an insurance can make you pay, which is the deductible + 700 CHF.  Third, there is a set list of stuff that has to be covered including a whole rainbow of basic services. You can find this information all in English or 3 other languages on the Comparis site. 

For plans, you can choose one of four different health care models: standard free choice plan where you can see any doctor you want, a family doctor plan where you have one primary doctor who triages you, an HMO which locks you into a network and a telemedicine model where you start all care with a phone call. The later three options will lower your monthly premiums. 

So for our purposes, Joe got us a 2500 CHF deductible telemedicine plan, for a total cost for all Abrahams of 578 CHF per month. Now by arguing the point we had managed to secure a stay of execution for another 2 months, so we had to sign up by the end of December 2016. 

Now what happens if you don’t sign up you ask??? Weeeellllll purely to satisfy your curiosity, we neglected to sign up until February, at which point we received a very polite letter in English telling us that we owed a fat penalty of around 600 CHF in total, but we managed to talk them down to about half that after mailing in our extensive collection of letters to and from the Zurich Gesundheitsdirektion. 

So we have paid into the Swisscare system now about a total of 3000 CHF, and used Swiss health care 0 times. You’d think I’d be bitter about it but I’m really not. In the end we could afford to subsidize some poor sick Swiss person or imigrant. And while we didn’t use health care here, we certainly used a fantastic public school system and beautiful clean rivers to swim in and well managed transit, etc etc, all of which someone else subsidized for us because we paid very little by way of Swiss taxes. 

And that’s how public services have to work. Everyone pays in and some use more and some use less but it all eventually goes around because eventually the subsidizers get sick and become the subsidized. 

Last note about Swisscare. You also get a pretty awesome health card with a chip that can hold, if you want, all you health care info, which sure beats carrying around a fat folder full of medical records. 

Ali – Last weekend I was really reaching the end of my opportunities for checking off the remaining items on my bucket list. I still hadn’t managed to make it to a Via Ferrata route, and I was sure that would be the culmination of a full and satisfying year long Swiss experience.  The problem was this: most folk I knew had already said something to the effect of ‘hell no!’ when I mentioned it. However, on Friday I was invited to join Laurel, Martin, Sophia and Lil on a gratwanderweg by Schwyz – gratwanderweg being both the literal German term for a ridge hike and the figurative German term for navigating between two extremes – and I figured this was my chance to make my case for the via ferrata. 

On the way up to the hike start, however, I found out that via ferrata was not the only Swiss experience that I had missed. Imagine my surprise when I learned I had somehow missed hearing about Schwingen, which is a kind of Swiss sumo wrestling where two guys try to wedgie each other out of a ring. The best Swiss wedgie giver is called the Schwingerkönig or Wedgie king. But alas my time grows short and I had to focus on something more achievable than Swiss wedgies.

So one gets to the start to this ridge hike using a 78% grade funicular, which is a pretty amazing engineering feat, and then a gondola to the top. 

Now I have to say that ridge walks are pretty cool. Ridge walks in the Alps are down right amazing. The hike was only 2.5 hours including a stop for lunch but probably one of the most scenic I’ve done. Martin pointed out a place by the Vierwaldstättersee (fancy German name for Lake Lucerne) that one could see from the hike (meadow of the Rütli), which was supposedly the birthplace of Switzerland: in the 13th century, the cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden united to form the Swiss Confederacy. 

Of course along the way there were also the ever present tranquil alpenfauna-munching cows, lovely alpen flowers and (my personal favorite) requisite beer at the end. We took gondolas back down at the end and I got to hear Lil and Sophia sing all of the songs they learned in Swiss public school. I can say now that songs about blowing your nose and tying your shoes sound much cooler in German. Everyone was in high spirits and game for a little via ferrata on Saturday ….mission accomplished. 

Saturday the weather was looking good and I had a reservation for 6 via ferrata harnesses in Braunwald, where Manuela, Sarah, Laurel, Sophia, Lil and I were going to attempt the kids via ferrata while Rick and Martin drank beer and did fallen body retrieval duty.  Anxiety was high but I was proud of my little team of acrophobics, who were bravely giving this a try so I could fulfill my Swiss dream (which was really now to see Swiss wedgie wrestling, but via ferrata was still number 2).

We arrived on yet another funicular to yet another gondola and found our way to the Gumen berggasthaus for harness pickup. The harness guy was surprisingly nonchalant about our obvious complete ignorance of via ferrata. He suited us up and gave Manuela – our best Swiss dialect speaker – a run down on the route. I ended up giving the safety lesson on hooking in, which I derived entirely from my 2-3 times going to the kletterwald (i.e. Ropes course)… by which I mean to say that I had zero clue what we were supposed to do. Then we tromped up the hill, bushwacking our way to the start. I ended up leading with Lil behind me, which meant that the two non-acrophobics were in front with little ability to calm the panic that was happening down the line. However, except for one notable panic attack and an early exit by our rearguard, Laurel, I have to say it was an impressive showing. Though over beers and Rivella all but Lil said they would rather have hot pokers in their eyes than ever do it again. 

As we made our way back down the mountain we took in the awesome view and then stopped for a coffee to counter the sleepy beer effect. 

Here I found out about the second Swiss thing I had somehow missed out on: Helene Fischer! She is apparently a well know Schlager singer – a term I had to look up in Wikipedia: “Schlager music (German: [ˈʃlaːɡɐ], “hits”)[1] is a style of popular music which is generally a catchy instrumental accompaniment to vocal pieces of pop music with easy to understand, happy-go-lucky and often sentimental lyrics”. Ok so technically she’s considered a German artist but Rick (a physical therapy expert who used to work with Cirque de Soleil) just got hired to go on tour with her and keep her acrobats healthy and I got the impression that the Swiss are pretty big fans. Anyway I’m still holding out for Helene Fischer Schlager tickets to show up in the mail from Rick and a small part in the acrobatics show would be nice too. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. As Helene Fischer says: Atemlos durch die nacht. I’m holding my breath Rick…all night. 

Ali- Last Saturday our Baltimore buddies, Lorie and Jackie, arrived in Zurich, having found a budget round trip airfare that required a drive to Philly, a plane flight to Laguardia, a Supershuttle ride to JFK and then a 1 hour wait on the tarmac all before their red eye to Zurich. We met them at the airport and you can see they were clearly excited to be out of the flying tin can major-artery blood-clot free.

Sunday. Lorie told us they had come to hike so Sunday we trekked up our local mountain, Uetliberg, heading for the tea hütte to have lunch. Our original plan was to do Via Ferrata  in Braunwald, which means iron road in Italian and is an interesting mix of climbing and hiking. But alas, it was raining and hanging off a mountain side in the peeing rain sounded like a less good idea. Plus Lorie and Jackie got to experience the joy of hiking to beer, one of my favorite Swiss activities (Note to Child Protective Services: that is my beer and not Maya’s…. she went with the hot chocolate with schnapps)

Monday. On Monday, after taking Maya and Joe to the airport, I sent Lorie and Jackie on the Golden Circle, a scenic touristy day trip we did last summer to Pilatus. This trip involves a train to a boat to a cog train (steepest in the world!) to a gondola, to a train. That evening I was told the highlight was the cog train (steepest in the world!) but otherwise, this was too much riding and not enough hiking and too many damn tourists! Check. Good to know.

Tuesday. So for Tuesday I sent them on one of my favorite hikes: Seealpsee. The plan was for them to hike up and take the gondola down but of course, things went array (plan C anyone??) with a missed turnoff. Despite that they had a fantastic time and declared it a really hard but perfect hike.  The highlights were the scenery and the cows, who were easily wooed by Lorie into a little roadside smooching. Jackie was very understanding and decided it was ok to open up their marriage to cows but goats were out of the question. 

Wednesday. On Wednesday I played hookie (thank goodness no one from work reads my blog!!) and we hooked up with the American Women’s Club for a guided hike. Our experienced hiker guide, Tory, was taking us on the Seven peaks hike or in German: Sieben Gipfel Wanderweg. Imagine my disappointment when I found out this didn’t refer to buttergipfels, the delicious croissant like Swiss pastries, eaten during a leisurely stroll, and instead we were actually hauling ourselves up 7 bloody hills. Well after a late start at 9:45 am from Zurich hauptbahnhof and a lovely gondola ride up from Unterterzin, we made it to the beginning of the hike at a quarter to noon. The hike time was billed as 5 hours and 30 minutes. The last gondola down was at 6pm. No one did the math. Instead, our group of 7 intrepid American women (Superhero names: Puissant Patti, Locked and loaded Laurel, the Torynator, Stormy Stacy,  Jackie Onasty,  Lorie Lovesalot and Ali-xander the Great) started hiking, immediately disturbing the mountain peace. There is no argument: American women are ridiculously loud. I can say this as a particularly loud American woman. Hikers far ahead of us would nervously look back as they heard us coming and would hike on with renewed purpose. 

Peak 1 was a tease, but peak 2 was serious business. We decided to stop for lunch to gather strength, convincing ourselves that large doses of “hiking chocolate” would make the next peak ascent seem ok.Damn hiking chocolate didn’t work and peak 3 was devastating.We all crawled the last few feet to peak 4 and engaged in a little selfie blitz to leave last precious moments for our loved ones in case we died ascending peak 5. Here Jackie and Lorie are trying to get a feel for what it’s like to look down from heaven, which is a big assumption about their ultimate destination given the whole cow love thing.

We hiked on distracting ourselves from an increasing awareness of how screwed we were by enjoying the amazing mountain flora (check out the tiny truffula tree from Dr Seuss’s  Lorax) and scenery. Morale took a dive when the trail headed down through an impressive rock slide, which was navigated mostly on butt. At last we reached a sign that said we still had several hours to go and it was nearing 5 pm. We could no longer stay in denial; we were not making that gondola. The decision was made to skip the last several peaks and instead head down the mountain, making the 1700 meter descent by foot. Now the hike became more of a forced march that took us along foot wide paths hanging to the side of the hillsand steep rocky paths.

As in all good epic tales, there was even a panicked flight for our lives, when a herd of cows started chasing us along a road.

At last, as the sun began to set we made our way into town, passing a beautiful waterfall that we all claimed made it worth the 4 hour descent on foot (this was a huge lie, which wouldn’t even have been true had the waterfall been made of beer or gold).

The entire hike ended up taking 9 hours, which is a personal record for me for a day hike. My step counter claimed 42000 steps and 14.6 miles. Lorie and Jackie had 16 and 18 miles respectively, which I found to be a shocking degree of measurement error. So who knows how far we went but my consumption of ibuprofen and subsequent muscle soreness told me it was a f!$%!ing long way.

Thursday. You are probably not surprised to hear that Thursday was a day of rest for loud American women. I went to work and then joined Lorie and Jackie at one of the local Flussbads for their first float down the Limmat. We then headed up the hill to the forest and they had their second Swiss cultural experience of the day: grilling würstli over an open fire. You’ll be happy to know Lorie still has all 10 fingers after using a Swiss Army knife to prepare our würtli sticks.

Friday. All of us had been told that Gruyère was the place to go and I had not yet made it there during our year. So Friday morning we boarded a train for the 2.5 hour trip. The things on our to do list included the cheese factory, the Giger Alien museum and the Gruyère Chateau. After getting our bearings we hiked up the hill from the train station to the cute medieval town (I realize originally cute went with medieval the way fun went with torture but I think this is the modern description of any small tourist town with cobblestone steets) of Gruyère. Our first stop was the HR Giger Museum, which holds the collected works of HR Giger, the artist responsible for the Alien movies. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside (the photos above are all from us embarrassing ourselves in front of the museum and in the gift shop) but you’ll have to take my word for it: Giger appeared to be a guy who watched only sci-fi movies and porn as a young man. Across the street from the museum is the Giger cafe where you can get ridiculously overpriced ‘Alien coffee’ ….which is just coffee. 

Next we headed to the cheese factory to see cheese made. This was less exciting as the cheese making process takes months and mostly involves watching cheese mold on a shelf. So all we saw was a vat of milk being stirred. But we did get a Gruyère cheese sampler pack and learned some great fun facts, like the fact that the US is the second biggest consumer of Gruyère cheese behind Switzerland. 

After that we headed to the Gruyère Chateau, where we watched the most bizzare informational video I have ever seen and then toured the 1200 odd year old castle. We all had different favorite sites here but I think the random severed human hand had to win the prize for ‘best exhibit dug out of the castle cellar’. I also appreciated the sundial which never saw the sun.  

Well no trip to Gruyère would be complete without consuming cheese products. So we found a nice little restaurant and practiced our bad French while challenging our lactase production. We then waddled back to the train and complained of our cheese bloat for the 2.5 hour ride home.

Saturday. I had big plans for Saturday. I still had paragliding on my Swiss bucket list and Lorie was foolish enough to agree to go with me. Jackie, being generally smarter than us, decided to be the official videographer at the landing spot. While one can foolishly jump off any mountain in Switzerland strapped to a parachute, I chose Interlaken, which is home to Jungfrau and the longest paragliding season in Switzerland. I randomly chose a tour company off the My Switzerland website – because why would you want to research that and check reviews?? – and paid 340 CHF for two of us. 

The tour company picked us up at the Interlaken train station and drove us and some very nice Canadians up 1000 meters to a spot overlooking the two lakes that give the area it’s name. There was a 10 minute informational spiel and then we drew straws for who got which instructor. I was hoping for a really hot guy to be strapped to for my tandem paragliding journey, though I was slightly concerned that I would pee on him. I ended up with a local Swiss guide named Kusi, who was less beef cake but pretty funny and highly capable, probably preferable personal characteristics in a paragliding guide. At the top, we all got geared up and final instructions. Basically the idea is that you run like hell down a hill pulling your instructor and the parachute until you both trip and roll down the hill or (this is the preferable option) you get enough lift to take off. Here is Lorie about ready to go all teathered into Miki, the guide from Tokyo.

I decided not to opt for the full video and photo package so there are no pics of me in the air but here is one of Lorie so you can see how the tandem system is basically a giant baby Björn. 

In summary the experience was not terrifying at all and I didn’t pee on Kusi or vomit on him, which he politely asked me to warn him of if it was imminent. In short I loved it and may have to invest in Paragliding school at some point. 

Jackie met us at the bottoms and got this video of our landing. I’m the first yellow parachute landing and Lorie is the last yellow and red chute coming down. 

After an exciting morning we did a leisurely hike through Lauterbrunnen in Interlaken, traipsing past a number of waterfalls before hoping on the train for home. You can tell the week has been an exciting one for the loud American women.

Ali- It’s 7 am Monday the 3rd of July and I’m heading home from the airport, having just said goodbye to Maya and Joe. For them, the one year Swiss adventure is over. I think it’s safe to say that we all are feeling varying degrees of sadness ranging from deep melancholy to mild depression. We have spent the last couple weeks saying goodbye to friends and it has been emotionally draining. We have also oscillated between tragically listing all the things we will miss- ridiculously punctual and expansive train system, clean rivers and lakes that you can swim in, fantastic expat community, cultural and language immersion, etc etc – to tempered cheerfulness at what we are excited to return to – friends and family, ……errrr …… friends and family….. hmmmm…..did I mention the friends and family??? It may be that a year abroad is not enough for one to really get to know the downsides of a country and culture, and thus our feelings may be chalked up to never getting past the honeymoon period. But I don’t think that’s entirely it having listened to a lot of American ex-pats tell us how little they miss from the US. So while the American politicians continue to proclaim America the greatest country on earth, I’m not feeling it right now. I wonder if it might do America a bit of good to be more humble and look around the world at what those less exceptional countries are doing. Because right now I’m thinking of taking Emmanuel Macron up on his offer of a new homeland for disenchanted American scientists.

Here are a couple pics from Maya and Joe’s last weekend: Canada day celebration (Canada is 150!!), sunset dinner and playing on Lake Zurich, and hiking to lunch at a teehütte in the mountains.