After living in Switzerland for more than five years, I think these 33 things (most of them) are becoming a natural part of my life. Some good, some amazing, some strange and some really weird:
- You think it is safe to watch Swiss fighter jets from a nearby mountain…
- You punch your newspaper pages to turn them.
- You voted against the basic right of six weeks of vacation.
- You think that Sunday should be a day of rest.
- You get interested in Schwingen.
- You have a view from your office that other people save up their whole lives to go see!
- You often think that you live inside a postcard.
- You have declined an invitation because you had to clean your apartment (!)
- You know where each cat in your town belongs.
- You carry an empty bottle to the city to fill it with fountain water.
- In a cafeteria, you grab a table and reserve it before getting food. That’s normal though, no?
- You walk to the store with an empty paper bag.
- And you remove your produce from all the plastic clamshells right at the store to reduce waste at home!
- Or you consider shopping across the border in the Euro zone.
- Either way, you wonder why anyone would want to shop outside of working hours.
- You start planning a two hour trip several weeks in advance.
- You stop to like peanut butter.
- Instead, you start judging the quality of the whipped cream on pastries.
- You consider food with garlic in it to be spicy.
- And you buy a new ski suit every year to keep up with ski fashion.
- You appreciate the differences between the cantons.
- You feel comforted by quad-lingual courtesy announcements that your train is running three minutes behind schedule.
- You get asked whether you speak Swiss.
- You don’t think it’s funny when someone confuses Switzerland with Sweden. Seriously.
- Your only bumper sticker reads “CH”.
- You drive bumper to bumper with the car in front of you at maximum or even over speed limit! in motorways.
- You get annoyed when the car ahead of you doesn’t turn off its engine at a traffic light.
- You decide not to understand irony.
- You think spontaneity is OK, as long as it’s planned.
- You apologize for being two minutes late for an appointment.
- You become interested in the myriad of insurance offerings.
- You deliberate which lake to either bike, hike or roller blade around on the perfectly maintained paths through the woods that might occasionally block a view of the mountain!
- You like to get up at six o’clock in the morning.
- You hear the name “Justin Bieber” and you immediately think of “Biberli”!