Variowoche and the Not-Strictly-Nessacary-But-Somewhat-Welcome-Vacation

(MORE PICS TO COME LATER TODAY!!! I have to go to school and learn Chinese, Physics, read some Berdholt Brecht, and beat my class at math. ) EDIT: Done for now, with love from Switzerland, the land of wilhelm tell and Fleischkäse (more to come on that next time), Alyssa





(written 10/9) Well I haven't posted in approximately a month, but that is Switzerland for you. Actually, Truth be told it isn't Switzerland so much as my own laziness. But hey, bygones and so...

First off, my hair is ungodly long. Why you ask? because a haircut in Switzerland by a professional costs 80 CHF. that is more than a concert ticket. More than 3 concert tickets actually. That is a lot of money in my eyes, so at the moment I am just pretending that I have those spooky side bang things and hoping that in a month it won't look so weird.



I am looking through my camera and I have a picture of a graveyard, which I thnk is a little spooky, as I don't remember going to a graveyard. Then again, I am probably the kid of kid who would just go to a graveyard and sit around, I am kind of weird like that.



On to Variowoche. During Variowoche at my school, the kids get to do soemthing entirely frivolous for a change. I was in fashion design. On the first day I was dressed up in a lovely paper dress that my partners and I designed. I think on the third day we were assigned to make clothes that expressed something about us that clothes normally can't express (sore throat, in love, etc.) out of natural materials that we collected in the woods (cause that totally is not at all a weird assignment). As i recall we were instructed to wear nice underwear for the photoshoot. Umm, yeah. the American in me is not quite used to the ammount of nudity in europe. It is seriously everywhere. There is a series of ads with the phrase "Love Life. Stop Aids" and in all of these ads people are naked. they are fencing naked (oww...). They are playing ice hockey naked (cold...). That I can deal with, but the idea of taking off real clothes and putting on ones made of leaves for a school photoshoot is a little odd to me.

Looking through my pictures, I have one of the restaurant we hiked to in the mountains with one of my host parents friends. It was good, I ate some Lebkuchen and hot chocolate. Delicious. I also have a picture of the cows with the bells, but I finally found out what the huge bells are for. Apparetntly the oldest cow gets the biggest bell. They wear bells so that when they are lost in the mountians, someone can hear them.

And as an intrseting sidenote, military duty in Switzerland is compulsory for men. I am not sure how it works really, but springing out of this is a really hot issue that I find facinating: weapons in the houshold. These young men who are doing their Militärpflicht as it is called take their weapons home. Not ordinary shotguns and hunting weapons, I am talking about the kind I used in James Bond video games with my brother and dad. Huge, Automatic weapons. It seems to me that the majority of men think that the women are making too big a fuss about it, but to me it seems to be something that one should make a fuss about. Something like 60% of the suicides in Switzerland are committed with these weapons. There are also horrible stories about women whose husbands basically held them hostage with them. When a divorce is impending, the lawyers apparently advise women to hide these weapons. I find it crazy that apparently every house in Switzerland, a country which hasn't had a war for something like a 100 years, has an automatic weapon that I have only seen in video games...And as this picture demonstrates, on the bus...

The rest of my photos are kind of dull and touristy. I went to the Rheinfalls, which are really impressive. And the Matterhorn, the highest mountian in Switzerland. I also was in France for a day, but I only really got a picture of a really neat church. Ironically, in france, every french restaurant in the town was closed; So we had to have italian (which was the best choice out of Kouskous, Chinese, and Kebab).


(you know this is going to be your new desktop, don't fight the force of switzerland!!!)


Other than that, not much is going on. I have to sign up for a Rotary outting today, then find 5 sponsors in the next week. I am not quite sure that it is a fair system; it must be really hard for the kids who don't really speak German all that well yet. The hardest thing is that people, especially older people, can't stay speaking High German for extended ammounts of time. First of all, it isn't their language, it is quasi-foreign. second of all, as my host father told me, people who lived through WWII see it as the language of the Nazis, and therefore won't speak it. Even though my German teacher and the Rotary Club insist that I should ask people to speak high german around me all the time, I rarely ever ask if someone starts talking to me in Swiss German.

I hear high german all day in the school, and I would say that I am fairly fleuent. I understand the news (TV and the newspaper), I can understand spongebob (which for some reason, i find entertaining in German when I never watched it in America), most movies on tv, the teachers, I can hold a conversation about as well as i can in english (which doesn't say much because i have horrid conversational skills). If I concentrate a little, I can also understand most swiss german, and swiss german doesn't sound so foreign either now. English is weird. When we were at the Matterhorn and there were assorted tourists from english speaking countries, I honestly couldn't understand what they were saying without really focusing on it.