Pictures of Switzerland, Part II

Deborah and I put on tricks to confound the local villagers in Glarus, site of Europe's last execution for witchcraft.

Fleet-footed swine and a confused child strut their stuff at the races at Olma Fair, St. Gallen. In Switzerland, pigs are raced for entertainment and high-stakes gambling, while horses are carved up into sausages for human consumption. Furthermore, cows are entered into national beauty contests that everyone seems to take very seriously.

An age-old Swiss tradition in Rütli: waving red flags to scare away prospective immigrants.

Lake Oeshinen, in the Bernese Oberland. Hiking in Switzerland isn't so different from hiking in British Columbia, except that the trails are maintained to an engineer's standard by the military, and there's a goddam helicopter-supplied restaurant on almost every hilltop.

The Rites of English

October 20, 2006

For the past few weeks I’ve been working as a teacher in a language school in Geneva, but I’m leaving after this week in order to find something closer to home. This is too bad in a way, because it will mean the end of my daily communion with The Method. The Method is the teaching approach we’re supposed to use to bring the light of English to our benighted francophone students. It’s also, I imagine, about as close to organized religion as corporate language instruction ever dares venture. “Just trust in The Method,” our boss would say repeatedly during our two-week initiation period for new teachers, smiling benevolently upon us. “Its ways may seem strange to you now, but in a few days they will become part of you.” Being living embodiments of The Method, however, did not give the teachers the right to interpret its doctrine for ourselves. In fact, the very word “teacher” turned out to be a misnomer: as our starry-eyed trainer was fond of reminding us, “it’s not you who teaches. The Method teaches.”

If you’ve read this far, you might be getting curious as to what exactly The Method entails. Well, it’s pretty simple. The instructor fires prescribed questions at beginner students extremely quickly, then interrupts their stuttering replies and answers the questions himself. The students are thus left confused and humiliated, and whole learning process can begin again. This goes on for fifty minutes, and never once is any student allowed to formulate a sentence without the teacher cutting in and taking the words out of his mouth.

Such an approach may sound strange enough to the uninitiated, but even more peculiar is the actual material we teach. For one thing, we introduce new vocabulary in an order that an infidel might call random: the word “madhouse”, for example, is taught before the word “hello.” And the many of the prescribed questions border on the macabre. They begin innocuously enough – “What colour is this pencil?” – but very quickly proceed to some quite different themes. “Is it pleasant to see a dead person?” the method probes, and later asks casually: “If you jumped from the top of a very tall building, would you definitely die?” (“Yes,” the hapless student is forced to respond, “I would definitely die.”) This last provides a nice segue into an inquiry introduced a couple pages later: “Why do people kill themselves?” “Because they have failed in life!” The Method thunders at the students through the humble medium of the teacher, drowning out their flawed, hesitating responses.

Pictures of Switzerland, Part I

Glowering patriots on board the boat to Rütli, site of the heavily-secured Swiss national celebration. The well-groomed young gentleman in the foreground, whose shirt bore the message "Heil Helvetia!", was grabbed by police immediatly after docking.

Deborah's house and one of her neighbors in the middle of Herisau, Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Despite being the largest town in Appenzellerland's two cantons, Herisau proudly features farm animals crammed onto almost every urban grasspatch big enough to hold a badminton court.

Sometimes an eight-foot-long phallic wind instrument is just an eight-foot-long phallic wind instrument: alphorn players celebrate Swiss nationhood with a venerated stereotype.

Combining Italy's sun and scenery with Switzerland's capacity for running a country that isn't a flagrant embarassment to the European continent, Il Ticino is probably the best place in the world.

In Search of Swiss Culture

June 20, 2006

At dinner with Deborah’s family, I asked her mother, Vreni, whether there were many cuckoo clocks in her part of Switzerland (my imagination, you see, is sadly limited). “No,” she replied, “we have very few colours here.”

The response gave rise to more questions than it answered. Was Vreni saying that the land was too drab and monotone to offer the necessary inspiration to the tortured artistic geniuses who poured their souls into making the clocks? That hardly seemed likely; Appenzell bursts with more country-fresh colour than an entire family pack of Fruit Loops. Or could it be that she meant there was a shortage of paints in the region with which to decorate the jaunty little timepieces? This seemed more plausible, insofar as it could form a semi-workable plotline for a Swiss-flavoured children’s cartoon. Herr Müller, the kindly old clockmaker, is in a fit of hand-wringing grandfatherly panic the night before the county fair, with a shopfull of unpainted cuckoo clocks. Will the deficiency be made good at the last minute by a plucky paint-carrying chipmunk named Brushstroke?

I was ready to accept this comforting explanation and move to discussions of fondue and Swiss Army knives when Vreni dropped me another clue. “Lots of Yugoslavians,” she offered, “but few colours.”

This detail made the plot more complicated. Were the Yugoslavians trying to manufacture paint and not succeeding? Or, on a more sinister note, were they trying to stop Brushstroke from making his delivery, perhaps because they wanted the first prize in the county fair clock-making contest for themselves? Impossible to tell, but I feigned understanding. “Not as many colours as Yugoslavians,” I agreed thoughtfully.

“Not like the United States,” Vreni added. “Lots of colours there.” This was true, I realized as soon as she said it. All other attributes aside, the US really was a land of paint plenty. In the sequel, I reasoned, Herr Müller and Brushstroke would probably move there.

“It’s still a big problem in the United States, no?” she pursued, leaving me more puzzled than ever. What was the big problem? Surely not a bountiful supply of paint? Was there yet another challenge in store for dear old Herr Müller? “Which problem do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“The Ku-Klu Klan,” she responded simply. And suddenly the clockmaker’s shop, the paints, fretful Herr Müller and his bright-eyed woodland brethren vanished like a puff of smoke from a burning cross.

I brought Deborah’s mom up-to-date on English racial terminology, and tried to persuade that I was not, contrary to how it may have seemed, scoping out the possibility of joining a local white-supremacist chapter.

If you’re still wondering about cuckoo clocks (enunciate carefully now!), it turns out there aren’t any of those in Appenzell either. As I learned, they’re actually an invention of Southern Germany, not Switzerland, and only irritating tourists ever ask about them.

The Speaking of German and the Being of Retarded

July 27, 2006

When I was five years old, my kindergarten teacher contacted my mother with bad news.

“Nicholas is a very different child,” Mrs. Ross confided. “I think he’s the most different child I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of teaching.”

She then invited my mother into the class to observe what she meant. In one particularly memorable demonstration, which has ever since been one of my parents’ most cherished anecdotes, she assembled the class on the floor, and then told us to go back and sit at our desks. Everyone did so, with one exception. I remained slack-jawed on the carpet, gazing out the window, dumb as an old tin bucket.

“Perhaps he’s iron-deficient,” my teacher offered hopefully.

Alas, medical tests soon shattered this charitable hypothesis, and poor Mrs. Ross was left shaking her head. “He’s just so different,” she offered at last. “He’s not on the same level as the other students. He doesn’t seem to grasp what’s going on around him. I’ve seen nothing like it in my 20 years of teaching.”

It’s hardly an auspicious start to be ranked not only the most retarded child of a class, but of an entire career. Still, having managed to get through the first 22 or so years of my life without swallowing more than the average number of shiny objects, I had begun to nurture hopes that Mrs. Ross’ grim prophesies were misguided. Would I be able to live a full life just by trying hard and being myself, as Arthur the Aardvark promised me every afternoon?

As it turned out, no! This summer, I found myself reduced once more to a simple-minded state – and yet again there could be no blaming the problem on a lack of iron. But almost: this time my deficiency was in German.

Now, like any other freedom-loving patriot, I grew up thinking of the German language less as a mode of a communication than as an available feature to add colour to a villain, like a rakish sidekick or a disfiguring scar. So it was difficult, when I first arrived in Switzerland, to actually contemplate learning to speak this rude tongue myself. At Deborah’s extended family reunion, rather cruelly scheduled for three days after our arrival, I only smiled affably and chuckled when barked at. And if any of the myriad aunts and cousins had been instructing me to go sit to my desk, I would have been blissfully unaware.

But very quickly my lack of German knowledge began to have dire consequences. And while it’s true that harping on about charming linguistic misunderstandings is a staple of very bad travel writing, it's also true that I have never pretended to rise above this level. In any case, one debacle occurred when I was trying to explain to some Swiss people the workings of a traditional Swiss game that Deborah had taught me to play in Vancouver. The game consists of two people rapping a couple of hard-boiled eggs against each other while chanting pagan doggerel (this being what the Swiss were doing when the rest of Europe was building mighty empires). I had expected my listeners, being Swiss, to recognize what I was talking about immediately, but I hadn’t counted on my exceedingly poor command of the language. What I had thought meant “tapping eggs together” actually meant “striking testicles”, which won me some strange glances from my listeners as I gushed about how quaint I found this supposed staple of their culture.

A more troublesome misunderstanding occurred a bit later on a train running through central Germany. The conductor twice favoured me with a stern lecture whose only intelligible word was “wagon,” so I assumed I was sitting in the wrong car and got up and moved. Joke’s on me! Turned out she was saying that the train was about to separate in half, and both my wagon and I were shipped off to an end-of-the line station in east Bavaria, where I had plenty of time to ponder the curse of Babel while I spent the night in a ditch by the station.

The only really successful German conversation I have had so far was with Deborah’s wunderbar grandfather, Ernst. After an indecipherable preamble, he told me I had beautiful teeth. I told him he had beautiful hair. We parted as friends.