Lausanne and Geneva

On the first two days of school vacation, Caroline and I saw relatives in Lausanne and old friends in Geneva. Which mostly served to remind me how rare this is and how life would maybe be different if we had either relatives or old friends, or both! in our lives on a regular basis. As people generally do?
 I think?

 

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I so wish I could find some time to really write, but writing and life seem to be orthogonal planes at the moment. Tomorrow I finish packing and on Saturday morning we leave for a week away. I'm going to try to figure out whether I can at least post pictures from my phone, but in case that doesn't happen, a million thanks and lots of love to whoever is reading this, have a good week!

the color of God

I spent last Saturday at a retreat with the GCL. We met in the parish church in Brugg and then walked over to see the stained-glass windows at Kloster Königsfelden, a 14th century monastery long ago closed and now a canton-owned museum and event venue. It's in a park-like area it shares with (1) a big and horror-movie-esque psychiatric hospital and a (2) museum about the Roman garrison whose excavated ruins can be found around the town. Quite the combination.

Windows in the apse (yes I just looked that word up).

This set shows scenes the early life of Jesus, from conception (bottom row) to baptism (top row).

A bit further back there's a window dedicated to the life of Mary. Along the bottom you can see the ancestors of the Old Testament - Noah drunk and naked (left), Jesse (middle), and Eve being formed from Adam (right).

In the first session of the day, the retreat leader invited us to think about the windows from the perspective of physics. Electromagnetic radiation, she said, is all around us, but it becomes visible when it passes through the glass of the windows and towards our eyes at a wavelength we can see. Similarly, God is invisible, and the craftspeople who made the stained-glass images of the stories of Jesus and the saints were making God visible to those present in the church. 

I spent my meditation time thinking about whether stained glass as God-made-visible was an apt analogy. What does it mean we point to these windows, completely fabricated by human hands, and says "there - that's God!" On the one hand, yes, these stories are our common heritage, the lenses through which we view our lives and world as Christians. On the other hand, are they not something of a distraction from the God who is in fact not invisible at all, but visible in nature and in every one of us? I wasn't the only one in the group who spent time pondering the enormous tree just outside.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. (Matthew 6:29)

Also, looking at the building from the outside, the windows are just dark - there's no light shining from the inside out...which seemed somehow like another unfortunate but apt metaphor for the Church.

For lunch we had a Teilete, which is like a potluck in that everyone brings something to share, but *not* like a potluck in that it seems to connote a lighter meal - you'd bring bread or cheese or fruit or a salad to a Teilete but never a lasagna. I brought a lentil salad. At least four other people also brought lentil salads. I felt well-integrated.

In the afternoon session, the leader talked about the content of the windows and pointed out cool details like the figures that hold up the "floor" in some of the medallions, and instances where the characters break pane boundaries for dramatic effect. The amount of detail is completely stunning.

Among the questions to ponder were "do I have a place in these pictures?" (I couldn't come up with one) and "is this a place where I can encounter God?" (not today, somehow). After I got my fill of windows, I walked back towards the parish church, sat on the wall of the Roman amphitheater next door, and watched the clouds gather into a storm while a drunk and/or mentally ill guy further down the wall yelled at the world.

The amphitheater. You have one of these in your backyard too, right?

The question for the closing circle was, "what color is God for you today?" Everybody but me had something to say about this - God is all the colors together, God is a rainbow, God is the green of new growth and photosynthesis, God is a creative fiery red...

I didn't feel like trying to share but I did know my answer: God was the stormy grey of the clouds, powerful and incomprehensible and no color at all.

God, made visible.

Fäscht

This weekend was Züri Fäscht (scroll down that link for some cool pictures), the once-every-three-years street festival in Zürich featuring food stands, rides, really loud music, a diving platform, amphibious vintage cars, fireworks, more fireworks, even more fireworks, and eco-friendly drone shows which will not be replacing fireworks just yet. There was a church-shaped food tent / performance space sponsored by the Catholic Church, which according to my church friend represents a shameful and wasteful sell-out to the sins of Babylon...but it proved itself to be a very useful shelter for me when it started pouring rain.

Okay, this is a bit silly. But as you can see, that's a very black cloud.

Just after the rain stopped, one of the Swiss Air Force acrobatic teams performed.

My favorite part of [an admittedly pretty short visit to] Züri Fäscht. You can take the girl far away from aviation, but you can't take aviation out of the girl...

I had some other thing I was going to write, but I've forgotten it due to the brain-numbing effects of an hour-long phone conversation with our US insurance company, the entire point of which was to tell them that nothing in our situation has changed since the last time they reviewed our policy (?!). So I'm giving up for now. Good night!

a chocolate fortune

Summer vacation is nigh. Dan's mom arrives tomorrow. I spent most of today cleaning the apartment, which is not nearly as de-cluttered as I hoped it would be at this point, but progress has been made, and the floors and the bathrooms and the kitchen are (for the next few hours, at least) clean. So there.

Since arriving in Switzerland, we have slowly but surely been collecting visits to chocolate factories. This is more interesting than you might think, because although they all basically do the same thing, each visitor center sells chocolate-making from some slightly different angle. The touristy Maison Cailler near Gruyères has a Disneyland-haunted-house style tour focusing on the history of chocolate making; in Maestrani's Chocolarium "in beautiful eastern Switzerland," visitors search for the secret of happiness (spoiler alert: it's in chocolate); the Läderach Schoggi Erlebnis is smaller and requires a trek through an industrial park if you go by public transit, but you get a sweet little tasting spoon to take home and all the liquid dark, milk, and/or white chocolate you can stand. The Frey visitors center in Aargau tells the story of their chocolate through the stories of its happy employees - not coincidentally, Frey is owned by Migros, the ubiquitous Swiss supermarket cooperative.

This is all to say that today when I was cleaning up, I found a printout from a station in the Frey factory where you can answer questions about what chocolates you like and find out your "chocolate type." Mine came out as "the golden gourmet." This may have happened because I didn't understand the questions well enough and my answers were no better than random guesses, but I'd like to think it is because the chocolate machine has me pegged and I am just this awesome. Check it out [translation me + Google]:

You are someone with a keen sense for the uniqueness of the moment. You avoid worn-out habits. You belong to that rare species of human who has no preconceived patterns of thinking and behavior, but always approaches life with a fresh spirit. Friends value you for your curiosity and openness - but also for your fairness, because you always try to see things from all sides. You are therefore not easy to classify: you are a very versatile person whose behavior isn't predictable and you often have a surprise up your sleeve. Being with you is never boring. 

This is reflected in your chocolate type: you enjoy almost anything. Above all, you love to try new things. If you were in a foreign country and dove in chocolate sauce with cinnamon and grapes were on the menu, you'd probably go for it. But you can just as well put a piece of classic nut chocolate on your tongue and taste heaven. The important thing is, you have choices. Because nothing bothers you more than being trapped in the same routine - food included. 

    Best. Personality. Test. Ever.

Here's a bonus photo of Caroline dressed as a praline at the Frey factory.

You can tell that this was quite a while ago. Let us not think too hard about how this relates to my cleaning habits, or lack thereof, ok?

at speed

Just after we moved here, a German friend was complaining about the Swiss. “They’re just so SLOW,” she said, “they talk slowly, they walk slowly, they drive slowly, it’s infuriating!” The talking-slowly was in my experience real and worked to my advantage as a German learner - the Swiss generally aren't crazy about speaking High German and therefore speak it at a pace I can understand. I think I’ve made great strides, but to this day I can’t understand a German at full speed (see: the Autobahn). But I hadn't noticed that anyone walked or drove particularly slowly here, and Daniel and I laughed this off as yet another perhaps-based-in-reality-but-wildly-exaggerated stereotype (ster-Euro-type?).

But this week I was sitting at a table where the group was lamenting the fact that everything in the city moves too fast. Someone cited a study that revealed that people in Swiss cities walk twice as fast (!) as people in the country. It’s downright inhumane, everyone agreed, for people to be under so much pressure that they have to stride from one place to the next.

So there you go: Swiss people are not only slow, but proud of it, and would in fact prefer to be slower. Since it's been on my mind, I've noticed that I do indeed blow right by 95% of the pedestrians I encounter, generally because I'm in danger of being late to whatever is next on my agenda. Would slower be better? Slower would mean I was more organized, and goodness knows that would be nice. Slower would be more relaxed, and I could certainly use that too.

But...slower would also mean concentrating on the things I must do (feed the kids, do the laundry) and dropping the extra things I do “for me” (theology class, coffee with friends)...things that are worth some extra stress because they keep me sane. And also...here's my personal ster-Euro-type: the Swiss are fantastically efficient but can also be infuriatingly narrow-minded, and I think the two are related. Once you've found the best way to live and the best country to live in, there's no point in looking further, right?

On balance, I think I'll stick to my American striding. For now, at least.

party on the 4th

The Swiss take clubs (Vereine) very seriously. Sports clubs, social clubs, church clubs, women's clubs, rifle clubs, yodeling clubs, whatever. There are legal structures around the formation of clubs: financial management, bylaws, leadership, annual meetings...and there are traditions, like the Höck, a word guaranteed to totally confuse foreigners because it is (1) deceptively short yet impossible to pronounce and (2) also not in the dictionary, but it refers to the annual party a club throws for itself. So today we in the Gospelchor Albisrieden had our Höck, and it was a fun evening, because the weather was perfect and because even when the weather isn't perfect my choir is a truly lovely, friendly, caring group of people. Someone noticed that it was July 4th and planned a Trump impersonation by our loudest male choir member, followed confetti poppers as "fireworks," and we three Americans in the group sang our national anthem...not well. But it was a lovely night and I am tired so that is the end of my super informative blog post for the evening. Happy 4th everyone!

stomach-turning

This is a leftover bit from two weeks ago when we visited the prison, and I can't bring myself to close the browser tab I opened when we got home without saying something about it.

We left the prison via the giant gated entry for delivery trucks, and in this area there was a screen with a whole collection of frankly unconvincing-looking "oscilloscope" readings. On further investigation this turned out to be a seismic scanner for detecting stowaways. "Any type of lorry can be checked on the presence of stowaways with almost a 100% precision" says the website of S4h Science 4 Humanity, who manufactures this system, "it was found that the smallest motion, a sniff, even a heartbeat could be detected through the chassis of a vehicle, whether empty or loaded." I mean, intellectually I understand. It's a prison. You don't want people to escape.** Hiding in/on/under a delivery truck would be an obvious way to escape. Therefore a way to detect people who are doing this is useful. But it still turns my stomach. This is science for humanity? Whose humanity???

I guess what this did is trigger a flashback to the visceral doubts I always had about working in research. One time while I was doing my PhD, I was home for a visit, and my dad said some proud-dad thing to the effect of, "Oh I was telling my friend John that you are working in England and you're going to cure cancer!" and...oh, God, no dad, I'm not going to cure cancer. If my project goes really really really well the work I'm doing *might* contribute to some research which someday far in the future might lead to an alternative diagnostic method for one specific type of cancer, for which there is incidentally already a gold standard diagnostic method we have no chance of ever competing with (cf. https://lolmythesis.com/).

Science is a force for good.
Investment in technology will move us forward.
We have to stay on the cutting edge.

...are things I felt like I should have believed, but never really did. "Why don't you find a job in your field?" everyone says. Because this. This is why. Not that I have principles or anything - it's this AND the fact that my husband makes plenty of money at a company fully invested in all three of these ideas, and if he didn't, I'd probably go out and find a job in my field. But still. There it is.

**the prison director talked about how 20 years ago the system was entirely different - except for the most dangerous inmates, prisoners left the prison every day and worked in the surrounding farms and industries. There were, unsurprisingly, many more escapes - people just arranged to get picked up at work - but the great majority of prisoners still served their time, and when they got out of prison, they had skills and experience in the wider world that made re-integration a much easier process. Today, approval to leave the prison is granted in only a handful of cases every year. The prison is locked down tight and no one has escaped in years. The director attributed these policy changes to a societal change in the perception of the risk prisoners pose to society at large - and it seemed relatively obvious that this change in perception was at least correlated with the change in the makeup of the prison population from mostly-Swiss to mostly-foreign. All food for thought.

football

Productivity zero tonight in favor more Scrabble (sigh) and watching the Women's World Cup semifinal. Which...just wow. In the words of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme song, "females are strong. as. hell."

What I somehow find most inspiring about the whole thing is the preponderance of women in the whole operation - not just players but referees, coaches, commentators, aides, all professional and looking 100% like they belong there and know it. This is just an entirely different ballgame (ha) from the Olympic women's gymnastics that was on TV when I was a kid, and I'm glad that Caroline gets to see it. Particularly as girl power is...not really a thing here in Switzerland.

party mood

I've said this before but it's worth repeating: one of the things I love about our apartment is that it's close to a community center, so on summer evenings when we have the windows open we can hear the music of whoever has rented the party room that night. It's rarely loud enough to be annoying, just a bit of bass to make life here feel less lonely and sterile. (Another thing I've undoubtedly mentioned before that all the street- and sidewalk-cleaning vehicles here are emblazoned with the motto "Damit es in der Stadt so schön ist wie zuhause" - "So that the city is as clean as your house" - which never fails to make me giggle, I so wish they'd come over and make my house as clean as the streets of Zurich!)

A related thing I do *not* love about our apartment is that said party people have an annoying habit of deciding to set off fireworks in the park at all hours of the night, which I always worry will wake up my explosion-phobic offspring. Luckily, he's a pretty deep sleeper.