Intro to my Ethnography Project...

        The man next to me on the train had engrossed himself in newspaper articles, (or pretended to,) and I watched the boy on the seat across from me restlessly rub his eyes and close them again, trying to sleep.  His effort was, of course, futile, as I knew for a fact that no one in our vicinity on the train could fall asleep with the cheerful noise the other students from my group were making.  They didn’t realize how loud they were, of course, or that their occasional bursts of laughter startled even me, but as I hadn’t noticed any signs of deep annoyance displayed blatantly across the faces of those near me in the train car, I decided it wasn’t necessary yet for me to walk down the aisle and hint to my fellow students that perhaps they aught to mute themselves a bit.

  We were a group of students from Georgia State in Atlanta studying in Switzerland for maymester, and we were on our way to Geneva.  I was the only one in the program who was not an applied linguistics student; I study English and art, and I was there for the simple fact that I find Switzerland stunning.  Last summer when studying in Madrid, a couple girlfriends and I took a weekend off to visit Switzerland, and I was utterly enchanted.  I remember writing a postcard in Lausanne to my parents, swearing that the next place I’d study abroad would be Switzerland.  I was kidding, of course, but now I thumb through the freshly printed pictures from the trip, pictures of my Swiss home, faces of new friends, of the verdant scenery - I returned, even if just for a month.  I was there.
  This trip, however, was decidedly different from the last one I took to Switzerland.  I’d signed myself up for a lot of work in a course I didn’t need just so I could come back.  I’d lived with a host family for three weeks, started to become a member of the family, and connected with them so thoroughly I’m embarrassed to admit I feel tears in the back of my throat whenever I read a new email from them.  I’d traveled alone this time, saw some stunning scenery and experienced some amazing things on my own, things I can’t really share with anyone else.  And then there’s the group I came with - they were a puzzle to me from the very beginning.  A puzzle I needed to solve if I wanted to be one of them.

  Enter ethnography project.  Each student must pick a microculture to study.  These projects will involve observation time and individual interviews.  Ethnography is all about studying a culture and trying to understand it by learning how to be a part of it.  I knew I’d be studying the students in my group anyway, whether or not I made it official.  I made up my mind.  “All right guys, hehe, um, who wants to be interviewed?”

An article with Beni in it!! Anyone read German?

http://www.jungfrauzeitung.ch/artikel/66974/

If you click on this link and scroll down to the bottom of the web page, you'll see two photos of Beni! The guy I wrote about an entry or two ago. (We've been keeping in touch.) I personally find this article very interesting. Although I'm not sure what it says. I'm sitting here on the computer willing myself to understand this German gibberish.

Which is the same thing I do in the train in the morning - pretend to read the articles in the newspaper. I just sit there and stare: please, please let there be "bahnhof" somewhere in this mess of words; I can understand that.

(Bahnhof = train station.)

Some Swiss girls I met here made a card for me with pictures of us and presented it to me  a couple days ago with a pack of colorful pens - a going-away present!! Tonight I met them at the Mc Donald's in town, which was the last time I'll see them before I leave. I'm jealous of them getting to practice their English on me. Reminds me of practicing my Spanish. I wish I could practice German on them, but I don't know enough.

Tonight's my last night here in Grenchen. (On to Zurich tomorrow.) I have to say goodbye to the Christmas lights on the wall, the poufy, colorful blankets, the mattresses piled in the corner, Desperate Housewives playing on the computer in the next room. The people. This special freedom that Switerzerland seems to have - an odd mixture between city and country, responsibility and relaxation. A freedom I think I will miss.

I'm in the kitchen right now, doing the dishes and cleaning up.  I can hear Esther & Ferenkeh in the other room, discussing plans they have for Monday.  By Monday I'll be gone.  Completely gone. Not even on the same continent anymore.

I swear I have not forgotten to post.

It's more that so many things have happened, and that I still have to write papers for class on top of it all. So. I will hopefully compose and post at least one snazzy new entry sometime during the next 2 days.

Meanwhile, dear reader, I give you these enticements as hooks til the next post is available:

On Friday I meant to take the train to Grindelwald from Muren(sp?), but on my way to the train station I spied an intriguing little dirt path leading off the road. I decided to follow it for just a moment, however, I ended up spending the rest of the day there climbing trails that apparently only base jumpers use, and hanging out with Beni, this wonderfully nice, 25 year old closet-base-jumper who works as a paragliding instructor. We talked for a long time, sitting in a little cave in a cliff over a green valley. He told me about all these intense struggles he's been going through, also his passions and dreams in life. He really opened up. Then, before we left, he kissed me. He said that his brother (who died) must be watching over him, sending him this American angel. Dadgum.

I didn't know what to think;  I tried to write when I got on the train, but didn't know where to start. So I stopped and did what any sensible girl would do to cope - go to a store and senselessly spend money. (Just kidding, Mom, I only bought two magazines.) But seriously. It's something about giving your cash, permanently, to someone else, I think. You have to desensitize yourself to the handing-over-of-it, which makes it easier for you to desensitize you to whatever else is bothering your mind. Then, your only remaining feeling is happiness with your new stuff!! That's my clever theory.
Heh.

On Saturday I went to a barbeque hosted by Naomi, a smiley girl I met at a street fair/exhibition this week. I think mostly everyone at the BBQ was Christian. Some of them spoke understandable English, but most of what I heard was Swiss-German. I didn't feel very left out, though, somehow. I think I was at my most outgoing that night, because at the end of it they all seemed to like me. (Yay America.) Naomi told me it is 'such a good thing that I am so open,' and I have heard that Swiss people are generally more reserved, so maaybe I'm just "open" in comparison to them.

I hope all these sentence structures are correct. I don't want to know if they're not. Goodnight.

Getting ready to ride a motorcycle for my FIRST TIME EVER. :)

Fuzzy Love

I love the pigeons here. I love how fat they are, how healthy they are, how they waddle.

I love the dogs here too. You know the people here bring their dogs everywhere? People leave them tied up outside when they're going into the grocery store. To do other shopping, they just bring the dogs in the stores with them. Yep. Pets have a nice level of freedom here, I think. Outside grocery stores, there are even hooks specifically designed to hold the dog leashes, so I guess this behavior is expected.

I love the cats here too. There's this one white cat in Grenchen that runs up to me when I walk home from the train station. She's white all over, and so sweet. She rolls over on her back so I can pet her belly, like a dog.

That's all I wanted to say. I know everybody likes to hear about fuzzy creatures as much as I like to talk about them, right? Right.

Fluent boyfriends... I hear they're the best.

In response to a mandate I've received from some of my friends to "get a Swiss boyfriend" while I'm here:
There IS this really tall, adorable guy in Ferenkeh & Esther's young adults group. He speaks almost no English, just bits and pieces, but his English is still INFINITELY better than my literally nonexistent Swiss-German. Sorry to let you down, but mostly we just joke around, and get confused, and I laugh it off, and he smiles so cutely. His name is Florian, (but since everybody here shortens their names) he goes by "Flor."

Everyone satisfied? Males exist here, (lots actually,) and I am finally beginning to describe them to you.

-

I went with my host, Ferenkeh, to a university in Geneva this evening to attend a conference where the special guest was an important guy from UNESCO. Sounds cool, right?

Before we left, I asked Ferenkeh what I should wear; (I had just gotten home from class.) He advised me, "oh, just whatever a student would wear." So I stayed in my slightly ripped jeans and fitted Tshirt. We arrived at the university in Geneva, and the "conference" was more of a meeting in a nice classroom. Everyone else was dressed in buisness attire. I was DECIDEDLY the youngest and most unofficial-looking person in the room.

After the high-up man from UNESCO had been given an incredibly impressive introduction recognizing his incredibly impressive background, he took the stage and said that now that we'd heard about him, he wanted to hear about us. He then had us go around the room and introduce ourselves.

You may think, "oh, that sounds sort of cool. He wants to learn y'all's names!"

No. What the invitation to "introduce yourself" apparently means over here is to 'take the stage' yourself for a few minutes and describe to everyone where you're from, (geographically as well as job/experience-wise,) where you are now, where you're heading for the future, and why you're at this meeting.

And make sure you sound as official and awesome and geniouslike and bighearted as possible.

Crap.
Um, do you want me to talk too?
Somehow I scraped through the introduction phase well enough to gain a couple smiles from around the room and Ferenkeh's approval. Yay. At least nothing to draw any more embarrassment in this direction.

After the entire conference-meeting was over, we left the classroom and drinks were served, and Ferenkeh and I met one of the youngish guys who works at the University and was in charge of setting up this event. He discussed some specifics of the school with Ferenkeh, and then just talked to me about traveling around in Switzerland, living here, and learning the language. He said (with his adorably Belgian accent), "Christine, you must know what they say. The best way to learn the language is to get a boyfriend who speaks it!" And then added a couple minutes later that he would be glad to show me around Geneva anytime... just to pop him an email. *Wink.

Oh Christine, please for heaven's sake, no blushing, no blushing, blushing is not allowed, Christine, Christine! You are too old to keep this embarrassing habit up. Stop yourself. Now.

Ugghhhhdsjklfjdk.
Dork.
Christine, you are  a dork.

Midnight trivia, anyone?

I just heard Grenchen's bell tower chime midnight. The clock on this computer just turned to 00:00. People are still talking and laughing in the flat beneath me, the flat which is actually a coffeehouse run by the methodist church. Young people (in their twenties?) serve drinks and hang out every Saturday night, and call it "Coffeehouse Connect." Esther and Frankie are a big part of it. I hung out down there with all of them tonight, and at least 1 third of those people can speak English pretty well. Yay.

You know what? I have never come across a person from ouside the United States (especially if from Europe) who does not like Obama. Everybody abroad seems to be a big fan of him.

And believe me, I do not start the political conversations here. Or, well, anywhere. 

I would just like to put forth two things:
- I feel that the healthcare bill would work quite differently in the United States than it would work in a country the size of Switzerland. The situations are not the same at all. Just want to point that out.
- What kind of business does a person from Switzerland have knowing the intimates of legislative bills and policies in the United States? I mean, why would one care?


And on a lighter note, here's some baffling trivia I've heard.
- Did you know that the whole country of Switzerland is smaller than the state of Georgia?
- Or that the population of this entire nation is smaller than the population of Atlanta?
Dang. "Phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty living space."
(Name that movie?)

Fire & Solothun

I've been avoiding writing, mostly because I'm hesitant to tell people things they may not care enough to hear, and hesitant to tell impressions or random thoughts I'd just rather not reveal. But - here is something I cannot picture anyone would fail to find interesting.

Last night, the flat that Cory's staying in got struck by lightening. The roof caught on fire. I know. Firemen and police all came, and Apparently, Ferenkeh went and picked Cory up at 4am and brought him here, because the neighbor his host had frantically taken him to stay with had dogs and cats, causing Cory to have a bad allergic reaction. Like, dadgum. Nice night, right?

Not knowing any of that, I wake up this morning and walk down the hall and see Cory - in my hosts' house - and he sees me, with my beautiful morning hair (an exaggerated Beiber sweep plastered to my head with random pokey pieces. Thanks a lot, pillow.) Good morning, Cory. Hope seeing my lovely head right now is cheering you up. His morning hair is somehow the same as his normal hair, those nice little blonde curls on the top of his head still perfectly curly from the night before. You lucky dork.

Anyway, today I took the train to... crapIforgotthetown'snamealready... and wandered around. It's a nice, compact, very old (yet still modern) village, and so pretty, and it was so cold that I had to wear my coat, so I was happy. (I'm not even going to try to fix the faulty structure of that sentence.)

There's an old cathedral there, which has the longest twisting staircase ever, leading all the way up to the belltower. You can step onto a tiny balcony around the tippy top, and view all of Solothun. It's gorgeous. But the stairway up is strangely frightening when you're alone, even to me. 

OH - the town's name is Solothun, I think, (but it's pronounced like "sollu-turn.")
I'll leave my storytelling at that, for now.
Good night, dear readers.
I love you all. (Well, probably.)
If you think you're a person that I probably love, then imagine yourself receiving a hug from me. I'd probably give you one.

Better late than never?

(This post is a couple days old...)

My heartbeat's been keeping me awake at night. It's eery. The second I get completely calm and relaxed under the covers is the second it starts thumping too loudly to be ignored. I feel like it's trying desperatley to remind me of something, but I'm just too stupid to understand what.

Tomorrow, I give a presentation to my class on the ethnography of tattoo parlors. I'm still not quite sure what that is.

Baby Noelie has soft, soft skin - skin the color of coffee mixed with cream. Her eyes are dark, and still at that indiscriminate stage between brown and deep blue. Her hair is all tight brown ringlets. She laid on the floor in the kitchen tonight, gurgling happily while Esther and I ate dinner.

You know Esther and Frankie met only 2 weeks before they fell in love, and 6 months before they were married? They've been married for several years now, and Esther tells me people kept telling her that getting married that fast was crazy, but she's never regretted it even once. She and Frankie (whose name is actually spelled "Ferenkeh" - I've been spelling it wrong this whole time) met when she went on a 2 week mission trip to Sweden. Ferenkeh was living & working in Sweden at the time, an intern for Youth with a Mission, and during the last two days of the trip, they admitted to falling for each other. When he took her to the airport to say goodbye, they decided to give their relationship a try, even though they were separated by international borders. Six months later, they decided to marry. (OMG, right?)

But it's working out wonderfully, and you can tell. Everything surrounding their small flat seems to have been permeated by this aura of love.

"Even samurai have teddy bears, and even the teddy bears get drunk."

I needed something special to start this entry off, so I googled "weird quotes" and this popped up.

My group is a really bizzare mixture of people.
4 undergraduate and 4 graduate students, plus a professor, make up the mixture. All of us are women, except for Cory, one of the undergraduates. Our personalities and backgrounds are so different.

I live about an hour outside Bern in a town called Grenchen. Camille, a graduate student, and Cory also live in this town with me. My host parents, Esther and Frankie, are about my age, have only been married a few years, and just had their first baby - Noelie - 11 weeks ago. Needless to say, this experience is quite unusual for me, having 'parents' who are only, like, 4 years older than me, max.

Also, besides talking deep with Camille (who's a couple decades older than me), Cory (who's 24) seems to really gravitate to me, which is so weird for me, never having had a gay friend before. Sometimes I don't know how to respond to his attention, so I just fall back on being myself, and he keeps liking me... I'm just gonna let this thing go where it goes. He's depressed. Sometimes I can make him genuinely laugh aloud, though, which I feel is a feat worthy of praise. 

I don't think he realizes I'm the kind of person he sometimes rants against, though. That I come from those people. He told me today that his parents are Christian, so I guess he may have come from that background too. I mostly just listen when he talks, so far.

According to my host, Esther, only 4% of Swiss people are practicing Christians - evangelical Christians, she calls them with her lovely Swiss-German accent. Ironically enough, Camille, Cory & I are all living with practicing Christians for our host families. What in the world are the chances? All three hosts go to the same Methodist church here in Grenchen.

Esther drove Cory and I into Bern for the host family meeting today, and we listened to a Hillsong Australia CD the whole way, with a couple breaks for Bruno Mars on the radio.

Stuff is weird. People get so close, so fast, because we have nobody else. And suddenly here we all are, good friends, with so little in common.

Cory and I talked to Kaity for awhile today. She's one of the other students, and she's been an "au pair" in Marseilles, France for a year. I asked her tons of questions.

I have tons of reading to do for class and a mini-paper to write each night, so it's not all fun-and-games. Switzerland is a real place - it's not the magical, dreamy memory I have from that weekend last summer. (Although I must say, the river running through the city of Bern has the most magically colored water I've seen in my whole life.)

Zurich, and now Bern

First day in Zurich.

Landing around 7 am and not getting to our hotel til about 10 pm was rough, and I think some of the people from the group didn't have the best day, persay, but as I sit here on my bed in a dark hotel room, listening to my temporary roommate snore like a dad, I know that today was actually really nice for me.

 Ahem, I would like to congratulate myself on somehow not sticking out like a sore thumb among the average Swiss people here. People kept speaking to me in German all day, making jokes to me, asking me for directions or just general questions. It was so odd. In the beginning I'd cringingly respond to them with "I can't speak German," but by the end of the day, I'd realized I could get through almost any of these little situations with a chuckle, smile, shrug, or a "danke," if the myteriously babbling person in question was a cashier. (Not that the Swiss seem to babble a lot, because they really don't.)

 -

I wrote the above two paragraphs last night, but didn't post til now. There's a lot more to what happened yesterday, but I'm having trouble deciding how much to put in a blog, (as I'm not a huge fan of an online journal that hypothetically bares you to the world.)

So. To sum things up, right now I am sitting on a white wooden bench in a small, beautiful, homey living room. There's a pile of mattresses in the corner, covered with colorful sheets and the most wonderful pillow and poofy blanket that I have seen in awhile. There are little strings of Christmas lights plugged into different parts of the room. This flat, this family, leaves me with a warm, fuzzy, cottonball feeling, the kind of feeling I get when I kiss Cobra (kitty) on the head and she doesn't complain. The kind of feeling I get when it's winter and I sit next to a window, and the sun shines through and warms me.

It's so odd. Weird things that relate to God keep happening to me. I mean, literally, this is what, the 2nd? 3rd day? And at least one weird thing that links me to him has happened each day.

Sleep well, mi familia americana.

[Oh - by the way - Dad! Your Russian cord was the best idea ever! Thank you!]

In Zurich! Ja!

Entry 2

Still on the plane. This morning I awake to one of the previously mentioned toddlers, angrily screaming his head off. A movie about the Antarctic plays on the prominently placed TV screens, and we all get to watch pristinely white polar bears bloody themselves fighting, wolves and buffaloes turn on each other, and penguins barf breakfast into each other's mouths, only before being hungrily hunted down by the mother of all seals. Ahh. Good morning, sweet world.

My foot is tapping to a cheerful John Mayer song that I slowly realize isn't playing, and so I stop.

Entry 1

Just starting off, the plane seems to be stumbling around in the sky, something I can hear the intercom voice calmly referring to as "turbulence." The air conditioning vents above in the body of the plane are blasting cold air at us, just about as thickly as they're able. An air of general quiet exists in the rows of people stacked in the plane's refrigerated body like eggs in cartons, and I am an egg too, and I know it. How easily we crack. How oddly calm we all are. I love being shipped, but the thought does occur to me that someone could drop us all, and then where would we be?

There is a Matt Damon movie on, "with Elle Fanning." I'm huddled into my fake leather jacket, and the woman next to me, huddled in her blue jean one, suddenly rises and steps into her seat, standing to reach the air vents above us. "You want yours...?" she asks me, after screwing hers shut, and I quickly comprehend. "Oh. No, no. Yes please close it - thank you."

There's a four year old girl in front of me on her dad's lap, a pacifier hanging from the side of her mouth, and she gives it a good chew every couple seconds. I am annoyed by her and her ridiculous pacifier, for no apparent reason, until she stands, leans over the back of her seat in front of me, and grins. Fine, honey, melt my heart.

But then I look to my left and see another child (a boy of three maybe?) standing on his parent's lap, sucking a pacifier as well. My suppressed annoyance immediately returns. Another baby for me to watch adults pacify. I am not sure why this bothers me.

I feel I ought to be writing more about my destination, my companions, etc, but somehow the destination still does not exist to me. People ask me if I am excited, but I am not, so I have to twist the truth to answer correctly. It's not like I am unexcited, though. I am glad, surely. If this opportunity suddenly disappeared and I couldn't go, I'm sure I would be really disappointed.

I ought to sleep. It's 11:35 pm in Zurich now, our eventual destination. Our plane shouldn't land til 7 am ish.

Good night, sweet world. I know you're not actually sweet - you're quite rough - but I'll call you sweet anyway.

Gooorgeous colors, huh?

Angelina Jolie nursing, as photographed by Brad Pitt.