Things you never knew existed...

Warning: This post may not be safe for work or appropriate for children... sorry...

I have known from references in books and on television that there is a rather enthusiastic subculture around the world that loves model trains. They buy them. They build landscapes for them. The give up entire basements to construct little worlds for these trains to ride through. What is critical, however is that all of the details, from the fake trees to the miniscule lights must be to scale. That means that there is an entire market for scale items to populate these strange little worlds. 1/87th scale model school buildings. 1/87th scale cars. 1/87th scale barber shop poles and lounging sheep and shopping carts. For the model train enthusiast, creating a realistic model world is key.

This never struck me as anything more than a bit eccentric. Sure, it's strange, but probably no stranger than collecting baseball cards or collecting Civil War paraphernalia if you really think about it. To be honest, I never really gave the model train community much thought.

Until last week.

Last week I learned that these miniature worlds, so focused on maintaining a representative-if-tiny reality, include people. Unlike tractors and trees, people spend approximately 97% of their time doing unflattering things. If you froze reality in the square mile around where you currently sit and made a 1/87th scale model of what each person was doing in that moment, what would you get? Well, you would get at least one person hunched forward looking at a computer screen with their chin in their hand (you). A few people would be sleeping. A couple might be walking or eating. Someone would be in the shower. Some teenager would be alone in his bedroom with a magazine. At least four people would be checking their smart phones. Probably ten are picking their noses. And someone, somewhere, is having sex.

And that brings us back to the world of our model train enthusiasts. That brings us back to the people who design the scale models to satisfy these reality-obsessed hobbyists. That brings us to the shelf of scale figurines in the toy department of a store that I was standing in front of last week in Augsburg, Germany. That brings us to this.

As you can see form Kris's thumb, these models are tiny. As you can see by looking at them, these models are naked. This company, in its pursuit to miniaturize the world, has miniaturized a community of nudists. Some poor factory employee somewhere spends his day with a tiny paint brush of black paint putting pubic hair on these figurines because, somewhere, one of these model train enthusiasts has decided his train happens to be driving by a nude beach.

Yes, there are more mundane models, but even in these the faithfulness to reality is astounding. Take this family outing, with the dog watching the children play in the sand.

Or these bank robbers holding a hostage; it is clear that someone puts a lot of thought into the body language.

Even these wandering street animals aren't just sitting around. No, they are stretching, sniffing, and peeing on things.

The sports fan collection is being notably unruly.

Clearly the person who designed the city-scene collection spent some time in  New York. There is a flasher, an old woman hitting someone with a purse, a beggar, and a man urinating in public! No world is complete without public urination.

And then there is this. The lower set can satisfy any of general need for your scale naked people being scale naked in their scale world. But, for certain situations, situations which include two of your scale people being scale naked, well that requires the top package.

Obviously displaying the figures themselves would be too graphic, but the customer needs to know what he is buying. So the company is kind enough to display the piece of furniture (a desk) and a stick figure cartoon of the models themselves. Out of morbid curiosity we checked the website to find that the "Sexy Times" collection is so popular that there are nine different scenarios for the model train enthusiast to pick from, each featuring a different piece of furniture and provocative cartoon silhouette. What more could a model enthusiast need?

I imagine that I don't want to know.

I hope that knowing these models exist has somehow added to your day. If you cannot get these images out of your mind despite trying, I am sorry. Know that you are not alone. Perhaps deal with it by making a blog post and ensuring that the images are burned into the minds of your friends and family as well.

The Economically Priced Christmas Tree

Today started as a 14-chimney morning.

It may sound cheesy, but every morning Kris and I check out our window for two things: whether we can see the mountains and how many chimneys have smoke coming out of them. The answers give us at least a small idea of what the day will be like. The answer to the first question, and the inspiration for the name of this blog, is typically no. This morning the early winter fog had lifted giving a beautiful view of France.

The second question focuses on the bottom half of our view and is a little more obvious: the more people using their fireplaces, the colder it is outside. Recently it has been about eight or nine. As I said before, today started as a 14-chimney day.

The brisk air and snowy mountains seemed a fitting start for a day with the goal of finding and decorating a Christmas tree. Having such a goal was oddly refreshing after weeks of goals like "get a key to our mailbox," "fix the bathroom door so that it closes," "find out how the leasing agency lost our 1800 francs," and "get a working fridge." After weeks of being ignored by the agency, finding the right person to talk to, and a flurry of contractors, we are finally able to shift our focus to other things. That meant today started with a trip to Ikea.

This trip to Ikea (hopefully our last) was to fill in all of the holes that we had discovered in our household since moving in. Some holes were small, like more plates and a shelf for the bathroom. Others were larger. Apparently, when buying a duvet for a new bed, the dimensions of the duvet exactly matching the dimensions of the mattress is not a convenience, it is a highly misleading coincidence. Perhaps, if one sleeps alone and never rolls from side-to-side more than once in a complete night of sleep, this arrangement can work. If, however, there are two people sharing the bed and one rolls around a lot, or likes to read for a while with her knees up, or systematically rolls to face his spouse and grabs the blanket then turns away and lets go at least a dozen times per night ... then this arrangement is non-ideal. We needed a bigger blanket.

Our list set and our goals clear we blasted through Ikea in record time. On our way out we stopped in their holiday shop, grabbed the ready-made pack of ornaments and looked for a tree. The trees were small, but nice enough, interestingly displaying hanging upside-down from the shop ceiling. After a few minutes of looking a friendly looking employee smiled her way to us and asked if she could help. We explained (with much stumbling and ample pointing) that we were looking for a tree.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, clearly happy to understand our question. She smiled brightly and said, "We don't have any trees."

Thinking we had misunderstood we asked again, pointing to the trees on display.

"No," she smiled again. "Out of stock. Anything else?"

We shook our heads and she smiled off. Mostly victorious we headed back home to drop off our things and run to the grocery store. Thankfully, the grocery store had Christmas trees for sale. Each box was clearly labeled:

For those of you who don't understand German, the phrase roughly translates as, "Basic: The Economically Priced Christmas Tree." Obviously assured that we were getting the best bargain for our money, Kris and I grabbed a tree and headed for the registers.

That is, we started to. Our triumphant exit was interrupted by a box of small, and rather hideous, tree ornaments. For any of you who know my husband, you know that he has moments of odd taste. His stuffed animals include a mandril, an octopus, and an opossum. The last he liked to keep under the bed to scare me when I went looking for lost socks. So, you can imagine his joy at finding small squirrels seemingly made from old pine needles, fake fur, and bad vibes. Some of them were deeply unsettling. One was missing an eye. Kris took a few minutes, picked out the "cutest" one, named it Henri, and took it home to live in our Christmas tree.

Here's how it all turned out.

The tree

and, of course, Henri.

Merry Christmas.

Getting Swissed

Imagine you are waiting to catch the metro. You are standing with a dozen or so other people at the empty platform. Everyone is milling around at the accepted distance, establishing their place but not standing so close to the edge as to be in danger. Then the train starts approaching. Immediately the person who had been standing next to you steps directly in front of you, and is now precariously close to the platform. This triggers the person who has been standing to the other side of you to take action, stepping up to the other person in front of you, ever so slightly closer to the edge. It does not matter that the train has yet to stop, and so the exact location of the doors is as of yet unknown. As soon as the train does stop the jostling focuses on the doors. Even if there are only three people vying for one door, the jockeying continues until the door opens. You let the two people who have been forcing themselves in front of you step onto the train, trying to be the more mature person. Just as you lift your foot to step on, two more people materialize and squeeze into the 3/4-of-a-person space that had been between you and the entrance. Just as the doors are about to close, you make it in. Welcome to Lausanne, you just got swissed.

Kris and I have even experimented, seeing how close we can stand to the door and still have someone get in before us. Frequently, even though we are standing next to each other as the train pulls up, we will end up with four people between us by the time we actually board. At first we thought that this was an oddly aggressive practice in a highly structured society, but we have since learned that it is because the entire swiss population suffers from a common disability: they are incapable of waiting in line.

As Americans, we wait in line all the time. In the cafeteria. At amusement parks. At restaurants. Waiting to come in from recess in elementary school. When we walk up and see two people waiting at a reception desk, we go stand behind them. If another person arrives, he or she stands behind you. Simple.

In Switzerland this situation almost never arrises. When you walk into a building - anything from the post office to a cell phone store - there is a ticket machine. Think of the numbered tickets you get at the deli counter. Instead of standing in line in the order you arrived, everyone takes a ticket and sits or wanders around until their number appears on the overhead screen.

It's a chicken-or-egg question whether this system exists because swiss people can't wait in line or swiss people can't wait in line because this system exists. What is clear is that if the ticket system is in place, it MUST be used.

When Kris and I went to register with the power company we walked into a room with no customers and five employees behind five desks. After consulting the labels above the desks, we walked up to the employee for people who had just moved. Before we can even introduce ourselves he waves both hands in front of his face and tells us that we must first take a ticket. Looking back at the entrance we notice a small electronic ticket machine. We also notice that there are no other customers. We look back at the man to make sure he is serious and go get a ticket from the machine. The man then greets us politely and asks us what we need. We start making our way through the French phrases we had rehearsed when we are once more cut off and told that we are at the wrong desk. We were supposed to go to desk four; he is clearly at desk three. We apologize and head over to desk four, but are immediately stopped by more frustrated hand-waving and emphatic pointing. You can't just walk up to the desk; you must first go get a new ticket. Please note that in the time it took for this exchange, no new customers have come in. We get another ticket, proceed to desk four, and register. Simple. So much better than standing in line.

This protocol may seem ridiculous, but the few places we have encountered without the ticket machines are havens of frustration and a constant sense of impending chaos. Our insurance office serves as an excellent example. The lobby is set up with a single desk and a line of four chairs against the left wall.

Each time we have entered there has been one customer at the desk and at least one person sitting in the chairs. Being from a line-literate country, we recognize that our place is to sit in the other chairs and wait until everyone else in the room has been served before we approach the desk. We sit down, smile at the people in the other chairs. They recognize that we know our place in the metaphorical line and smile back.

Then another person enters the lobby. This person, either willfully or not, does not notice the people sitting in the chairs. This person sees the customer at the desk and walks up behind them. This new person does not stand at comfortable line distance, but rather stands so close that if the person at the desk bent to tie a shoe, they would bump the new person with their behind.

The people sitting in the chairs now begin to experience the early stages of panic. Has the person not seen them? Does the new person not understand that the people in the chairs are waiting instead of simply sitting there to enjoy the fake ferns and strange hissing noise from the overhead speakers? The people in the chairs begin to shift to the edges of their seats, never getting up but clutching frantically at their purses and making intense eye contact with the new person's left ear. In the US, this is the point where someone would say, "Hey! There is a line here!" possibly followed by a gender-specific or body-part-themed expletive. In Lausanne the people in the chairs simply become increasingly agitated until the person at the desk completes their transaction. At this point the person in the first chair leaps up and hurls herself at the desk in front of the new arrival, never making eye contact. Now confronted with the solid evidence of a genuine person standing in front of them, the new person looks around and takes one of the vacant chairs. The process can then repeat itself.

Viewed in this context the free-for-all of boarding the metro seems to make more sense. It isn't that you weren't standing close enough; it's that where you are standing doesn't matter. The goal is to get on the train. If you get on the train, you win. It makes me wonder what would happen if someone put a ticket machine on the platform and had the numbers appear over certain cars as the train pulled in. Would this fix the problem, or would people peacefully move to the door of their indicated car and then proceed to force their way in front of the other people allotted to the same car? I would be interested to find out.

That's all for now. Au revoir.

A Evening of Sweat, Stepping on Strangers, and Portu-french-kor-english

There are many ways to spend a Friday night in Lausanne. You can meet friends at a wine bar. You can go dancing. You can have friends over who need to borrow your shower (true story). Or, you can go to a two-hour taewkondo seminar given by your master's master who is in from Portugal. Tonight Kris and I chose the last.

Not knowing what to expect we brought all of our gear along and arrived relatively early. We had been told that the three-day seminar was quite popular. Bruno was nice enough to save us spots even though we had been out of the country during the sign-up period. He greeted us at the door like old friends, shook Kris's hand and leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek. I have tried to channel my inner European with this, and even felt proud when I kissed him back without my usual, "Oh God, I am so american" flinch. I flubbed the second kiss, feeling so proud of the first, and completely failed to meet him on the third. Thankfully he wasn't weird about it and simply stated, "In Switzerland, we do three."

The kissing thing had actually come up at taekwondo before, when one of the blue belts asked me how many kisses Americans do. He thought Kris and I were messing with him when we told him none. After we showed him the handshake and the one-armed, bro-hug, he looked sad and asked if all Americans hate each other.

After a warm welcome and changing into our uniforms we milled around on the mats with a few of the people we recognized. Sam, a green belt, started to tell us about the visiting instructor's reputation for working black belts into the ground during practice. Having spent the week recovering from a chest cold, this did little to settle my nerves. Soon we were all called to attention and started warm-ups.

It didn't take long for me to notice that, even though I am used to understanding very little of what is being said, I was understanding even less. At first I thought it was the visiting master's accent, but I soon realized it was because he was speaking Portuguese. Since he is from Portugal, I guess I should have expected that. Things seemed to be going well enough for the portuguese students he had brought with him, and the french-speaking locals were getting by with the bits of critical French being tossed in with the Korean commands. Bits of English even made and appearance. An average set of instructions went something like this:

Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese, ok? Portuguese, the Korean numbers 10 and 20, French, French, French. Korean numbers, change. Korean numbers, stop. Portuguese, Portuguese. French, French. Go faster.

It has given me a new perspective on the idea of a melting pot.

As Sam had warned, the visiting master took the dozen black belts to the far side of the gym to make a separate group. With the exception of a few truly baffling language exchanges, Kris and I fell into place rather well. I was paired with the other short, female black belt and we did some more in-depth stretches. Unfortunately for my new (portuguese) partner, this included a number of wall stretches holding up your partner's leg. As my CW Taekwondo family has learned, my frame is quite deceiving. Even though I am 8 inches shorter than Kris, we have the same length legs. This meant that my more normally proportioned and equally short new partner had a hilariously hard time holding up my leg above her head. Rather than helping her out, the portuguese master saw this as a great photo op and took about 15 pictures.

The actual drills were fantastic and, though my legs may disagree tomorrow, felt really good to do again. Despite our limited ability to communicate verbally, my new partner and I were enjoying ourselves and sympathizing with each other by the end. Though the practice was long, it hadn't been as demanding as Kris and I had expected. We have since decided that it is probably abnormal that we have been to practices where people puke and keep going, have their legs just give out completely, or need help lifting their arms to put on a coat at the end. It made us miss our CW family a little bit more.

After practice we started the partner stretches again, with the added bonuses of walking up and down the back of your partner's thighs and pounding on their arms, legs, and back with your open palms. As we were standing around waiting for others to finish I rubbed my partner's shoulders. She moaned appreciatively and spoke her clearest English of the night, looking me in the eye and saying, "I should pay you." When I laughed, her boyfriend came over and she proceeded to tell him in Portuguese that I give better back rubs than he does. I laughed and felt like some of the cultural barriers were starting to come down.

The moment I enter the locker room I am reminded how far I still have to come. In the US, there is a certain set of expectations that go with locker-room etiquette. Once you are done showering, you will dry yourself and get dressed. Maybe you will stand around in a towel for a while. If you are one of those weird older folks, you will stand around naked for at least 20 minutes, but you won't make lasting eye contact with anyone. Ladies, if they are changing bras, will do so quickly. If a conversation is happening when underwear is being changed, no comments or eye contact are made.

In my Swiss locker room, everyone is standing around topless. Apparently, once you have showered, it is standard to put on some highly fashionable panties, and then mill around for awhile. You can brush your hair, talk to people. You can even weigh yourself and then talk about weighing yourself, sometimes holding panties or a bra in your hand seemingly just for emphasis. Once a bra is put on, you have a good long while before any other clothes are even considered. It is not uncommon at this stage to do your makeup. Apparently the situation is relatively similar in the men's locker room. Kris says that forcing himself to have conversations in French with a bunch of men standing around in boxer briefs is one way of fitting in.

Once everyone was finally dressed, we said our goodbyes and everyone kissed each other again. There seems to be no requirement for the language of the speaker to match the language of the listener. In French, English, and (we presume that was what was being said) Portuguese, everyone said they looked forward to seeing us tomorrow. I can honestly say that I am quite looking forward to seeing them.

Bonne nuit.
Boa noite.
Good night.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Scientist

I know from past experience that living outside of one's native country can cause your patriotism to pop up in the oddest of places. I don't mean that you will suddenly have the urge to shout, "I'm an American!" on the subway or anything, but you may end up cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner for two people or buying a basketful of a brand of cereal that you recognize but never even ate at home because you failed to figure out the Swiss Post Office that day. Recently that patriotism popped up in the form of our absentee ballots. Kris and I were so enthusiastic that we made ourselves some tea, sat down with our ballots and laptops, and complained that the ballots didn't come with a little "I voted!" sticker. Like I said, strange places.

The great thing about absentee ballots is that they let look up every candidate and read about every issue with the ballot right in front of you. You could take hours to fill it out.  

On the other hand, the terrible thing about absentee ballots is that they let look up every candidate and read about every issue with the ballot right in front of you. You could take hours to fill it out. 

Studying up on this year's election revealed some interesting things. Not so much about the issues issues; that would have been nice. No. This year I learned that in a state-level race between an idiot, a bigot, and a fanatical activist, I apparently prefer the fanatic. Sure, she may shout slogans and chain herself to her desk to show her commitment to a meeting, but at least she will have read up on the issues and doesn't dismiss an entire sub-population of the country as lesser people. 

I also learned that it is seemingly fashionable to use some part of your campaign website to hate on scientists. Come on America. If politicians bother to put down science in their campaign materials, it must be seen as a selling point. It must be seen as something that will help get them elected. Why?

That said, at least we didn't pull an Italy. For those of you unfamiliar with the situation, the italian judicial system recently convicted a group of scientists for failing to predict an earthquake. As a member of the scientific community, I find this upsetting. As someone who just spent five years discerning a ~800,000 seismic history from the plate boundary that has yielded some of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, this gives me stomach pains. Americans may currently be enjoying writing off scientists along with other questionable practices, like wearing jeggings and the use of puns during serious news casts, but at least we haven't done this. 

I'm not going to turn this into a rant about why our culture has turned its back on science; too many people far more eloquent and gifted than I am have already made that point better than I ever could. Instead I want to use this post to make another point: 

Scientists are people too. Just weird ones. 

Like our common understanding of most careers, the average person gets his or her image of a scientist from popular culture. But based on movies and television, that would mean that all lawyers are eloquent and attractive and spend most of their day drinking coffee in thousand-dollar suits, and over the course of five years all surgeons must have sex with all other surgeons. I imagine at least some part of those analyses are inaccurate.

Television representations of science and scientists have their own short comings. We do not all work in futuristic-looking labs in designer clothing while listening to The Who. We don't all have access to the latest technology, and we certainly aren't all attractive enough to be on the covers of magazines. We also aren't all mentally unhinged from our secret histories of hopping through various timelines and dimensions. The reality falls somewhere between the squints on Bones, the cast of The Big Bang Theory, that arrogant math jerk from Good Will Hunting, and Doc Brown from Back to the Future. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Scientists often laugh at these representations. I know that as a geologist most people base my job description on Jurassic Park or Tremors. This is adorable at parties and deplorable in politics. To deal with the rift that exists between the daily life of scientists and who society thinks we are, we turn to humor. Two of my favorites are xkcd and phd comics. For example, see how each of these web-comics handles the tv-science versus real-science problem. First, xkcd. 

...and television science, according to PhD comics. 

Taken a step further, PhD comics addresses how these misrepresentations of science affect those we know and love. Sadly, this happens more often than any of us would like to admit. 

All of that being said, scientists are not completely in the clear. There is a reason that we are so easily parodied. There is a reason that, if you showed up to a costume party in a lab coat with crazy hair and some goggles, people would know you are a mad scientist. There is a reason that Sheldon Cooper is freaking hilarious. I believe that xkcd uses the following comic to display this fully. 

In general, most scientists know that they are a little off. Sure, a few think that everyone else in the world is off, but most of us know. How do we get this way? How do people go from the curious and mildly self-destructive person represented in the comic above, to the socially non-functional person represented in the xkcd comic below? 

Basically, the problem is that we surround ourselves with other scientists. We go to labs and universities and spend the day talking to other people who have spent years devoting themselves to a singular task. We surround ourselves by people who are all doing this: (phd.comics)


















It isn't glamorous. We may be weird, but when encouraged that weirdness yields cell phones and cancer treatments and plastic and gortex and heart stints and electricity and the internet. Most of us want to make the world a better place. Most of us genuinely want to make sure that the things we put in text books and teach our doctors are as close to the truth as our most accurate methods can get us. When new methods develop, we don't complain about having to do it again; we fight over the chance to get to. We fight over that chance to slog through that mud and compile those samples and come up with the best data possible. That person collecting dead fish and sleeping on the lab floor pursuing truth certainly isn't your local congressman; it's your friendly neighborhood scientist. 

Starting From Scratch: Confessions of a Neurotic Couple

This is not my first time living away from home. It is not my first time living in another country. It is not even my first time making a home with Kris. But something about this time is different, and even if the lack of meaningful possessions and moving at least once every three weeks out of the last twelve are what are different, they aren't why it is different. This time is different because, as children, Kris and I both hoarded sticker sheets.

When I was a child, I loved the office supply aisle. All the notebooks and pens, all of the legal pads still unused with unbroken bindings. They were all little treasures of untapped potential, waiting to be used in the perfect moment. I still stare longingly at packs of legal pads at the grocery store, thinking about the mix of practicality and inspiration they hold. More often than not, I buy them. How can I not? Blank legal pads are like the future. The problem starts once you get the legal pads home. You want to use one, but you have all of those partial legal pads waiting to be used. Shouldn't you use those first, and save that new one for that novel you were going to start? Or use it only for letters? Or make it a secret collection of letters that you will never send? Oh, even better. Use it for that novel about a secret collection of letters that you write but never send?

In the end you decide it is better just to use the old legal pads and save the blank one for that new idea. Just make sure you carry it with you, in case inspiration strikes. (I have at least one blank notebook in every bag I carry. At least one.)

I had never met anyone else who suffered from this mix of being obsessively prepared but constantly compelled to wait for some future perfect moment. Then, one day I opened a drawer in Kris's childhood bedroom and found stacks of unused sticker sheets. I couldn't believe it. Could it be true? I had to be sure. So I dug and, yes, there beneath the sticker sheets with piles of coloring books, uncolored! Kris found me with a lapful of sticker sheets and, after looking at me like I had discovered some dark secret, said, "You never know when the perfect moment for a sticker will come. And once you use a sticker it's, you know... stuck."

Yes. I did know.

So now Kris and I have been together for eight years and married for five, and there are great things to be said about similarities within couple. Neither of us think the other is crazy for arriving twenty minutes before a scheduled meeting. We don't even think the other is crazy for arriving twenty minutes before a scheduled meeting and, when it is eighteen minutes before the scheduled meeting and no one else is there, becoming completely convinced that the meeting has been cancelled or moved to a new location. As a couple, we go early to meetings and panic that about them being cancelled together.

This brings us back to the issue of the new apartment. As obsessively-prepared/slightly-paranoid people, we are terrible shoppers. It takes us many attempts and much convincing to buy anything longer-lasting than cereal or soap. Clothing or shoes - those are items of commitment. So, as you can imagine, once we do convince ourselves to buy something, we are committed. Stuck, if you will.

When we moved into our last apartment, we brought those items along. We had our old desks and dressers. We had the cupboard and nightstand I bought myself when I was thirteen. We'd each had our bookshelves since childhood. Even the couch and futon were from college. There were a few new items - dining room table, etc, - but the general feel of the place was familiar. Ours.

Now, with the exception of a few suitcases and a guitar, we are facing the challenge of starting from scratch. Our first trip to Ikea took over four hours, and we didn't even buy anything. We discussed the merits of various dish sets and silverware. We avoided bowls that were too plate-like and forks that weren't the desired level of pointy. We tried all of the mattresses. We wanted things that were nice enough to make a home, but not too expensive for a expiration date of two years. We longed to find the section of cheaply priced but well-made items that would make the prefect home and then combust into dust when we left. We agreed on a clock. And and extension cord. Clearly things had to change. Our apartment looked like this.

We both knew we needed internet, so after a day of logistics so wonderfully swiss they merit their own post, it went about like this.

Then, after much waiting and obsessing that something had gone wrong, it worked. Which went more like this. 

Note: The apartment has no light fixtures.

By our next trip we had scheduled a move-in-date and hired a move-in-man as a means of forcing ourselves to take action. We could not leave the curtain section without curtains. Nor the bed section without a bed. After much turmoil and extensive decision making, we had everything picked out. This time it took us four hours. In the days since we have only had to stop each other a couple of times from speculating about the potential merits of a slightly different bed frame. Today, after carrying all of the boxes up four flights of stairs, we cannot question anymore. Thankfully, we are stuck.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of furnishing a household from Ikea, it provides an array of emotions. First is "Hooray, I have chosen the possessions of my future life. Just look at them!" It looks something like this.

Of course you should feel accomplished; look at all of those things! Items, that you bought and hired a man to drive across town and carried up four flights of stairs. Well done you.

But then you start to feel tired from all of those stairs and long for a place to sit down, and you start to really look at all of your shiny new possessions. Even though you know you purchased a couch, bed, table, and chairs; you don't see a couch, bed, table, or chairs anywhere. Everything needs to be assembled, and it needs to be assembled from directions like this.

I particularly like the bottom of the second set of directions, which seems to convey, "Don't kneel by broken items; it will make you sad and someone will tie your hands behind your back. Instead, stroke unbroken items while kneeling on a grey rug."

Eventually we decided to put together the couch we both so desired to sit on. It went something like this. Here is the couch. It is made up of two major components:

large brown pieces...

...and small silver pieces

Use the silver pieces to put together the big brown pieces. But, make sure you don't do it wrong, or the little man who strokes unbroken furniture while kneeling on grey rugs will be sad with you.

Be sure to upholster the bottom of the couch on the correct side. You wouldn't have to do this if the couch didn't have two options for how it could be assembled. Oh, who are we kidding, we would have made you do it anyway.

Be sure to use all three sizes of alan key and a screwdriver. Any design not requiring all four clearly wasn't made with the Ikea customer in mind.

Don't decapitate yourself, or the kneeling man will be most unhappy. 

Now be sure to admire your sofa-bed and brag about it to everyone from your blog who said they would come visit you in Switzerland as soon as you had a couch. Be sure to use pictures and sarcasm to highlight the time you took setting up this enormous piece of furniture for all of those people who swore they would come visit you.

Demonstrate for those potential visitors how easily this wonderful and roomy sleeping surface can be turned back into a couch. It's practically no effort at all. Kris can do it, and he's really skinny. 

Use Kris's skinny-ness to show off how large the couch is, and how comfortable. Make sure he looks relaxed and not at all sweaty. 

Actually, use Amanda, because she is smaller and sits with her feet up on the couch. Some people do that, you know. 

Take picture of the only completed corner of your new apartment. The kneeling-grey-carpet-man is most proud. 

All sarcasm aside, I must take a few sentences to thank Andronik, the wonderful and kind Italian man we hired to help us move. He was punctual and courteous and probably the least-sketchy-looking man we have met in a long time. He helped carry genuinely heavy boxes up the stairs while I stood by the illegally parked van looking pathetic to keep any neighbors from calling the cops. Andronik is also a highly educated spouse in Lausanne who cannot find employment, because he does not speak fluent French. So, instead of getting to do what he studied to do and had done for years in Italy, he drove us across town and helped us carry boxes up the stairs. He was wonderful, and anyone in Lausanne who needs help could not do better. Even if my foot were not a disturbing mix of bruised and cut open, today would have been a much worse day without you. Not that you will ever read this, but thank you.

I have another full day of cartoon-guided assembly ahead of me tomorrow, so I must go to bed. Thanks for reading. Friends and family please come visit.

Au revoir.

You Sank My Battle$#!&

Yesterday marked a milestone in our time in Lausanne. We got the keys to our new place, moved in the first load, and went to our first sparring class. I also got my first real injury. This injury was not the result of trekking heavy bags across town or fighting Swiss people. No. I knocked over a mug. I didn't even realize that the shards had cut me; I was so focused on the fact that we were going to have to pay the hotel back for the mug. But when I bent down to start picking up the pieces I noticed a disturbing 3/4 inch gash on the inside of my right ankle. It wasn't bleeding so much as becoming a more-defined red line, so I sat down to see how deep it was. I remember from first-aid classes seeing pictures of cuts that went down to that yellow goopy part beneath the skin, but I was not expecting to see one on my own body. Unfortunately Kris was looking over my shoulder as I opened the wound up, and he made a few shuddering noises and then promptly freaked out.

Having grown up in the Schroeder household I have both witnessed and experienced an array of interesting injuries. Dusty's head catching on fire, Mom slicing her hand open on a mandoline, Dusty sanding the tip of his finger off, Mom dislocating her shoulder, Dusty lighting his hand on fire, Dad's numerous work-related wounds, Dad and I falling off the motorcycle, Dusty cracking his head open the third time ... you know, life things. The Baker household apparently did not share the same flare for excitement.

Thus Kris's initial reaction and concern that we needed to go to the emergency room. Not that we knew how to get there, or if public transportation was running that late, or how to call an ambulance. These are things we should probably figure out.

I was trying to do the basic "Do I need stitches" routine of "Can I stop the bleeding?" and "Can I close the wound?" The answers to both were yes, but the question of "Do we have a bandaid?" was proving more difficult to answer. After digging through every piece of luggage we had and turning up a single, Harry-Potter-themed bandaid, we eventually found our first-aid kit in Kris's backpack. The bleeding had effectively stopped, but until we could go buy butterfly bandages the next morning, I wasn't going to be moving around much. Opening it up to that goopy yellow stuff was too unnerving.

As of today I have the wound closed up and the bleeding stopped, but walking is both painful and impractical for a little longer. So instead of moving another load of our possessions across town as planned, we played Battleship.

More specifically, we played Bataille Navale, the 13-franc knock-off version of the original.

The pieces are the same, the gameplay is the same, but the manufacturing quality left us longing for versions we grew up with - with those letters and numbers you could read and pegs that actually fit into the holes. The instructions do provide some extra entertainment, with points like "Set up the game board by centre to 90 degrees position," and "Players will actually take turn to shout the shot."

Determined to enjoy my mandatory immobility, we sat down to play. The first hint of trouble came when a few of the ships would not fit neatly into the board. After some creative shoving, our Sea Battle (as the game board itself is labeled) was underway. At first we were trying to be clever and were calling out the coordinates, hits, and misses in French. But, since E is said A, and I is said E, and J is said G, our desire to know what was going on eclipsed our desire to feel like we were doing something productive.

Then, Kris started having the luckiest game of his life. Here is where things stood after the first 5 turns.

And here is the standing after 9 turns.

Clearly, this was not starting out as my game. It turns out, however, that the shoddy quality of the board adds a few new components to the game. First, since the top piece of the board is wobbly and the pieces don't quite fit, marking your attempts is no longer a trivial step but rather something more like pick-up sticks or operation. Here is Kris on one of this turns.

The double-sided nature of the center piece makes this level of care particularly necessary, because if you shove one of the ill-fitting pegs in too aggressively, the pegs on your opponent's side are likely to pop out and scatter. So it becomes Battleship-Pick-up-Sticks-Operation-and-Don't-Break-the-Ice.

Added bonus, some of the pegs won't stay in at all, so it is also part Memory.

Somewhere in among all of these complications, and because battleship isn't based on luck whatsoever, I started to make my comeback. Finally, after reseting the pegs that either shot or fell off the center board a dozen times, I prevailed.

Yes, note for those who actually bothered to look. One of my red pegs would not stick, so it is down on the bottom instead of marking its victory.

My foot is feeling better, though it probably still won't go into a shoe, so I can at least make a hobbling attempt at being more useful tomorrow. Or, at least, to accompany Kris as he is useful. Otherwise, you might end up with another post about Battleship.

Au revoir!

I don't need to speak French to fight you.

Back in 2008 Kris and I found ourselves in desperate need of some regular exercise and, both having always wanted to try a martial art, signed up for a trial run at CW Taekwondo. Now, a little over four years later, we find it hard not to alienate ourselves from conversations by bringing taekwondo up too often. There are other people who understand, other people who have fallen in love with a sport to the point that bruises and sore muscles don't even register anymore. It doesn't matter if you are a climber, soccer player, runner, or martial artist. There are just some people who mesh with a sport to the point that the only thing that upsets you about an injury is that it will prevent you from training. It didn't take us four years to become those people; it took about a month. Then, after four years of spending 4-5 days a week at 2-hour practices with people who made you bleed, laugh, and push yourself harder than you knew you could, we moved. I know that we will never replace our CW family, but finding a new dojang was very high on our list.

That brings us to this week and the middle of a trial period at a new gym. I mentioned in the last post why, after a lot of time on the internet, we started with the gym we did. There is an active children's program, men and women in the photos, a range of ages in the adult class, traditional taekwondo mixed with self-defense, and a charismatic and very welcoming group of members. After some entertaining, mixed-language emails Kris and I headed out for our first class in more than two months. The gym was easy enough to find and Bruno, the instructor, welcomed us almost the moment we walked through the door. I say almost, because he had to peel an exuberant 10-year-old green belt off of himself first.

Bruno was extremely friendly and, based on the number of accented "hellos" we received, had told people who we were and that we were coming. Considering how nervous we were, this counted for a lot. The rest of my nerves melted away as I got to put on my uniform and step back on to a blue floor with mirrored walls.  I could tell Kris felt the same way by the way he jumped around on the padded floor like a giddy child. Though nothing was quite the same, enough of it felt familiar - the stretches, the warm-ups, the Korean flag on the wall, the poomsae, the technique - that it felt a little bit like coming home.

That isn't to say the transition has been completely smooth. The flag next to the Korean one is a red and white cross instead of the stars and stripes, so all of the instruction takes place in French. Yes, the commands and counts are in Korean, which is helpful, but anything regarding the specifics of what we are doing is in French. Every so often Bruno would toss some English our way, but we miss any of the banter that can't be conveyed in numbers and pantomime. At one point a green belt came up and put her arms around Kris and I and said something to Bruno that made everyone laugh. They sent a few more verbal jabs around, everyone laughed again, and she went on her way. Kris and I just looked at each other and shrugged. Apparently nothing about the exchange had been deemed important enough to translate.

 It also became clear pretty early that Bruno was trying to see what we were made of. I imagine that any two hour practice covers a range of content, but it seemed that we were getting a tasting menu. When it became clear that we could keep up during basic kicking drills, he added partner drills. Then rolling. Then jumping over people and rolling. Then kicks with targets. Then speed kicks with targets. Then self-defense against an unarmed opponent. Then self-defense against someone armed with a knife. Based on the subsequent practice, I can attest that it is not normal to do one round of an exercise and move on. He was testing us out. When it finally came to take-downs as part of the self-defense, he seemed quite pleased with the abandon Kris and I use when hurling each other at the floor. To be doing such work again, we were quite pleased ourselves.

The work with the rubber knives was the most memorable, largely because it was something completely new. In the past any grappling we have done has been a lot of body contact, patience, and using what your opponents actions to guide your own. At CW a grappling match could easily last half an hour. With a more self-defense mentality against a weapon, things change.

"First of all," Bruno tried to explain to us, "anyone who attacks you with a weapon is a chord." After some confusion and a lot of help, we discovered that he had been trying for "coward."

So rather then spooking the attacker and taking a defensive stance, our first move was to put up our hands and look terrified. Just looking around the room at everyone thrusting fake knives up against the throats of their sniveling friends was pretty entertaining. Then we learned to deflect the knife hand, twist the arm to drive it back towards the attacker's own body in the process of hurling them to the ground. Then begins the fun exchange of both people trying to aim the knife towards their opponent's body and away from their own by twisting limbs and rolling around. Of course, all of us got fake stabbed. No one is perfect.

At the end of class as we all cooled down, Bruno started to give a small speech. As I could understand nothing he said, it gave me time to think about all of the little speeches I had heard from Sabumnim over the years during sit-ups and push-ups. Everything from the lessons learned by losing to how everything that matters happens in the second half of a match to lunch being good. Afterwards Bruno solicited the help of one of his students to try to pass his little lesson for the day on to us. It was about instincts. Everyone has instincts, he explained, and those instincts are what dictate our actions when something dramatic like an attack happens to us. You can never get anything to react more quickly than your instincts, but with practice and training, you can change what those instincts are. That being said, he laughed, no one should go out looking for fights or anything like that. It was a variant of something Sabumnim had said to us at one point, but it was nice that Bruno went through the effort of making sure we could understand.

At the end of that practice and throughout the next one we have started to bond with some of the other students. The bonding is slow and depends a lot more on facial expressions and pantomime than we are used to, but it is encouraging. A bond also formed when Kris and I got grouped with a six-foot-tall red belt for take-downs and he was extremely slow and careful about the way he threw me. Kris gave me a look and I took the guy so off guard that I almost hurled him into a wall. After that, the three of us had an understanding. In the end it seemed like he enjoyed working with people who knew how to fall and how to throw with enough intent and control to really grow. A lot of communication can happen even without the ability to form complete sentences. 

Sparring class is tomorrow, and we are excited to see how it goes. I am allowing myself some cautious amount of optimism that this will work out. As an added bonus, the dojang is a 10-minute walk from our new apartment. With how much trouble we have had with everything else we have tried in Switzerland, we are truly thankful that this has been encouraging. It feels good to be sore. It feels good to yell. It feels good in a way we had yet to in this unfamiliar place.

Au revoir.  

Knife Fights and Spilled Paint

Yesterday was supposed to be a good day. Kris was going to go to work, I was going to turn in a job application, and then we were going to go to the apartment and pick up our keys. That was the plan. Plans are linear. Plans are smooth. Switzerland is not linear; it is not smooth. In the words of my beloved husband, it is made up of rays of hope and pits of despair.

Yesterday's first pit came in the form of a paystub that did not list the amount we thought it would. As planners who budget down to the point of keeping receipts for every loaf of bread we buy, this presented a problem. Budgeting is especially important when you are paid monthly, spreading things a little thin at the beginning of your time in a new country. Apparently, in addition to being paid monthly, Kris is paid 1/13 of his salary each month, not 1/12. The extra 13th is paid in December, but only for the number of full months you have worked in the previous calendar year. That means that this December Kris will receive 1/3 of the 1/13 that would make up his whole salary. Eventually the math evens out, but it meant some creative budgeting to start the day.

This pit was followed by a welcome ray of hope in the form of EPFL's Human Resources Department. After waiting patiently while another international employee fought with the HR rep about taxes and paystubs, and ultimately insulting the HR rep's country to his face, I had my chance to smile and turn in a job application that was two months past due. Thankfully, even though applications were supposed to be in by August 10th and the job started on October 1st, the position was actually still open. I handed over my application and felt a little better about the day.

Then we went to the apartment.

In retrospect, things really aren't that bad. But after a month of floating between residences and ultimately visiting 28 apartments around Lausanne in 22 days, we were ready for a win. We got to the apartment early, as us planning-budgeting-types do, and found a foyer filled with bags of trash, dirt smeared on the front door, and two men traipsing fresh paint all over the hardwood floors. My immediate reaction was denial. I became convinced that I was once again confused by the strange, European floor-numbering system, and decided that our apartment was one floor down. I refused to even wait in the apartment and went back into the stairwell. Kris tells me that that decision deprived me of the pleasure of watching the men peel the thin plastic tarp on the floor for painting the living room and hearing it tear off of all of the sections of paint that had dried to the floor underneath. After that, Kris joined me in the stairwell.

After a few minutes, the smartly dressed man from the agency arrived with his leather briefcase and polite smile and introduced himself to us in the stairwell. Sadly I followed him up the stairs to what, apparently, was our apartment. Stepping over the trash and glancing into the living room, the man from the agency managed to contain his noise of disgust. The look, however, came right through. He went into the kitchen and began to put out his neat little stacks of papers and his neat little clipboard, talking all the while in rapid French and gesturing around. He stopped after noticing the lost expressions on our faces. We asked if he spoke any English, he said no, and we started farther into our pit of despair.

Resigned Kris and I began our systematic testing of everything in the apartment. The man from the agency watched us for a while, then grabbed his neat little clipboard and headed into the rest of the apartment. The porch was full of trash bags. The tub was filled with paint. White footprints tracked all the way form the front entrance to the back bedroom. The doors were dirty and light switches were just missing. By the time we ran into the agent again, his demeanor had shifted significantly and he was in the middle of a rather animated phone call in the bedroom. He hung up, gently told us his English-speaking colleague was on his way, and then went to tear into the guys in the living room. Kris and I had no desire or ability to interfere, so we retreated to the bedrooms.

At this point I had no idea what to do, but I wanted the apartment to feel like ours. We haven't had a home since July, and I needed to do something. So I grabbed a sponge and started washing the dirt and stains off of the doors. I didn't care that it wasn't my dirt or that someone else was supposed to clean it, that was my bedroom door. I didn't even notice when the agent walked up and started watching me. When I finally did, he had a confused and kind of sad look on his face. I put down the sponge and he told me again that the man who spoke English was on his way.

When we came back out of the bedrooms, the men who had been painting (the younger of whom was apparently the previous tenant) were frantically removing the trash from the apartment and stashing it at the top of the stairwell. I ignored the liquid that had leaked from the trash bags and went out on the porch to take this picture. Everything was going to be ok.

After that Greg, the English-speaking rep from the agency arrived and met us on the porch. The original rep introduced us and started firing off in a stream of French that Greg did his best to translate. He apologized that we would not be able to move in today, but it was clear that the apartment was not ready. They needed to do a "deep cleaning" and would like to meet us again on Friday. At that point, we would also have access to a contractor for all of the little things that were clearly wrong, but would not be ready by Friday. Greg explained that he would be there with us to make the list. I asked if we would be responsible for paying the contractor, Greg passed the question along, and after a scathing look back into the apartment, the original agent said no. After a longer discussion of terms and exchanging information, we set up a time for Friday and went on our way.

Here are a few pictures before the story continues.

 Tub full of wet and dry paint.

Trash-filled porch

After the trash was removed

A reenactment of first arriving at the apartment

Some of the paint from under the tarp

The only picture I have of the angry man from the agency who rescued us.

Also shows damage to the doorframe...

And now for some of the good ones (ignore any paint and such)

Entry way after all of the trash was removed. 

Kitchen

Living room and balcony

View out from the living room

Bedroom

Second bedroom (actually taekwondo room...)

I plan on being excited on Friday. We will see what Switzerland does to those plans. 

After grasping on to the Friday ray of hope as a response to the spilled-paint pit of despair, we came home and readied ourselves for the next adventure: taekwondo. For any of you who know us well, you know that finding a new dojang is almost as important to us as finding a new home. Numerous internet searches and phone calls had led us to the one we thought was the best bet. It had programs for multiple age groups, photos of both men and women in their classes, poomsae and sparring, additional curriculum in self defense, and a mission statement about the non-profit status of the program. 

Our initial contact with Bruno, the head of the school, was promising. His English, while leagues better than our French, was still in the realm of adorable. Statements like "It is with pleasure!" and "We have places to change you." hinted that communication would be exciting. 

Though the story is exciting, and involves the knife fighting mentioned in the title, I am going to call it a night and leave most of the telling for tomorrow. I will leave you with the knowledge that our time there was an enormous ray of hope, and I hope will continue to be one throughout our time in this notably un-smooth country. 

Au revoir.