Uncategorized

Zurück in Zürich

Autumn

Back in Zürich. 30 weeks pregnant. The flight wasn’t too bad considering, and no one asked for any Doctor’s notes or anything but I’m definitely grounded now for the time being. P was so well behaved. I’m starting to feel like I was an idiot not to just stop at one child. How could another boy compare?

Weird arriving back. The apartment seemed like a blank space half-filled with some of our stuff (Did we used to have more furniture?) It’s familiar but it doesn’t really look, smell or feel like “home”.

It seems like a reasonable time to start panicking about giving birth. I’ve been blocking a lot of stuff out while on holiday. And that was nice. Unfortunately I think I have to face some reality checks now.

To be honest, it doesn’t feel like there’s much here for me in Zuri going forward – no job, no family, few friends, that damn language barrier etc. But I have to stick it out for the time being and try to “make the most of it” whatever the fuck that means. So far today, that involves grocery shopping, buying antacid and going through the bills. Woo! This should take me about half a day. Then there’s just the rest of my life to fill.

It’s definitely Autumn here. The leaves are falling from the trees and it’s dark from 5pm – 7am. I guess it’s time to start thinking about Christmas…

I will write some more interesting, longer entries soon. I’ve got a few thoughts on Australia – Sydney, Perth etc. to cover. And hopefully some more positive emotions about Switzerland will emerge too. We’re going to try to buy a car so that should be all sorts of fun and games. For now, just saying I’m back: Hello.

Poor kid, Rich town
Coogee Beach, Sydney Australia

Coogee Beach

I’ve been back in my hometown of Sydney for a week now and it’s really got me thinking about relative riches/poverty. There’s many ways to be rich and/or poor of course, and possibly even more ways to feel or perceive those states of being.

But I’ll start with the obvious – financial. I’ve read studies about whether people prefer a higher income but to be less well off than their neighbours/peers or a lower income but feel better off. And it seems that many people are happier feeling slightly better off than those around them, regardless of actual income. I tend to agree. (Google “relative income satisfaction” for actual info – I might be projecting here!)

When we lived in the UK, we were in a fairly gritty area of North London by dent of buying the best house we could afford without taking out too sickeningly large a mortgage. Anyway, we were certainly part of the new wave of gentrifiers in our particular street and subsequently, we felt quite affluent in our surroundings. Of course, in London, it’s very easy to feel poor too, almost no matter how many ££s you have. Just spend an afternoon around St James’s, Mayfair, Chelsea, Notting Hill, Primrose Hill, etc. and you start to despair that you’ll ever “make it” in that way. Give up, go home… or move to Tottenham.

In Zurich, it’s kind of the opposite for us. We are the poor kids in a rich town. Not that we’re doing badly. But there’s so much wealth there with all the bankers, lawyers, watchmakers (!) and millionaire playboys and playgirls (playpeople?) about. Plus everything is so expensive, even just normal groceries. And you need to take out a small personal loan if you want to eat out regularly. It doesn’t really worry me that much, although it’s a bit depressing to think while there, we won’t get ahead and, if anything, will slowly leach our savings away, particularly if we want to Take Advantage of All Zurich and Being In Switzerland has to offer – eg: holidays, skiing, eating food. I guess that’s what you get for moving to one of the world’s most expensive towns in the world’s most expensive country (depending on which survey you read).

Unfortunately in Zurich at this stage, we’re also poor in other ways. We don’t have much of a social life, we have very few friends so far, no family, we’re not particularly sporty and we have a toddler so adventurous hikes or suchlike are out of reach for now. Plus we’re mostly illiterate, which is horrible. Even health-wise, I’ve been suffering morning sickness and HI’s latest bout of 2 months hard yakka averaging 5 hours sleep/night has put us behind the 8-ball on that front. Thank goodness we have nothing seriously wrong and P is healthy at least.

So I’m holidaying in Australia. The world’s fourth-most expensive country. And I have to say I’m enjoying it, but it’s also making me sad. I’m loving it because I feel so rich here in the best ways: I am a wealthy woman in terms of friends, family, beautiful city, lovely living conditions (thanks to mum & dad and my in-laws), amazing beaches, birdsong. Easy shopping (and groceries seem so cheap after Switzerland!), in fact, easy everything with my own language, really. Don’t get me started on the relief I feel dealing with authorities, shop assistants, anyone when for once I know all the words and have the right accent!

But… and I hate to say this because it upsets me to hear so many people in Australia moaning and cyring poor when they have it SO GOOD… but but but… the house prices here are insane. And I think I’d like to move back. Seriously. But I don’t know if we could actually afford to. Of course, that is ridiculous. We could absolutely afford to – except we wouldn’t be able to come back and live the lifestyle I fantasise about. Which is not to say some incredible 5-bedroom villa overlooking Coogee Beach, but just a nice, proper house in a decent suburb. Our mortgage would be AUD$1 million plus for this. Insane. Or we could rent, which would be fine. And it’s not gonna happen anytime soon anyway – we need to give Zurich at least another 12-24 months. And by then, we might truly love it and have gained some wealth where it counts – in friends and good experiences.

But right now, I feel a little bit stuck between a rock and a hard place. I’m not where I want to be and I do not know quite how I can get there, or even if I can get there. And feeling like a poor kid in a rich town sux.

 

Home Sweet Hauptbahnhof?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We took a mini-break to Lake Como on the weekend and it was lovely. It’s great to have places such as this within easy striking distance (3.5 hours by train). I feel a tad guilty that we haven’t explored more of Switzerland itself yet, but there’s plenty of time for that. The train journey is amazing. The same route as I took to Milan a few months ago. And it was good practice for entertaining a toddler in a confined space for several hours (result: not great, the 12-hour plane trip on Sunday without HI’s help is going to be nasty).

Lake Como is spectacular. I was actually unprepared for how beautiful it was. According to Wikipedia, it’s been a tourist destination since Roman times and it’s easy to see why. Very dramatic landscape with steep mountains rising on all sides of the lake, which is quite large – it took us nearly three hours to putter on a Ferry from end to end (almost). We stayed in a tiny town called Carate Urio, right round the corner from George Clooney’s house. Mr Clooney was getting married on this same weekend in Italy, in fact. Our invite must’ve got lost in the mail…

Wow it was steep though – there was a road for cars but the easiest access to the water from our AirBnB apartment was via winding staircases down the mountainside between other houses. These little cobblestone walkways seemed quite medieval and were somewhat confusing, especially once it got dark and was raining! Luckily we found our way home on the first night (after eating one of the town’s two restaurants Il Filo d’Olio) without overshooting the mark by too far. Next day I completely misjudged the timing to get down to the ferry dock and ended up having to run for it. As there’s only 3 ferries a day, I was very glad to just make it in time! My baby belly didn’t thank me for the exertion though. Phew. I was quite glad the ferry trip itself was a couple of hours so I had time to recover.

We had lunch at Bellagio – a really pretty town complete with requisite stone staircases up the hill, loads of restaurants, salumerias, gelato shops and souvenir stuff. Because the ferries back were few and far between, we didn’t hang around too long, and were rewarded for our punctuality by discovering a “rapido” ferry departing to Como (the town) at the same time as the one we were planning to catch back to Carate Urio. So we hopped on that and spent a few hours exploring Como as well, gelatos in hand. Headed back on a tiny ferry, which was lovely – stunning scenery all round. (Actually, a lot of the lakeside towns reminded me of Mosman Bay back in Sydney! Maybe Mosman is not quite so impressive…)

So it was a fantastic day that was only marred by the realisation when we got back to the apartment that we had lost Mimi, P’s favourite soft toy. Aaargh, not again!! This is the second Mimi we have lost since moving to Switzerland 😦 😦 But good news, the Ferry Company just wrote back to HI’s email to say they found her, so she will be returned… maybe not in time for Aust, but all good!

Heading back on Sunday, there was some confusion with the trains (an Italian rail strike? hard to tell) but once again, our luck was in and we caught a direct train to Zurich within half an hour of arriving at the main station in Como. Trip back with toddler was again somewhat trying but fine. It was interesting to arrive back at Zurich Hauptbahnhof (HB) and realise it’s starting to feel like “home” – or at the very least it’s very familiar and actually quite comforting. It is a nice station after all, quite large but fairly open and airy and SO EASY to walk right off the platform onto a tram home. I hope I still feel this way when we return from Aus, although not sure Zuri Flughaven is quite as lovable as the HB. (Then again, Tyler Brûlé is always raving about it in his FT column – hmm another local we’re still waiting to get an invite from. I wonder if he attended the Clooney nuptials?)

So that’s the mini-break… now for the maxi!

The Smell of September
Josefswiese Park, Hardbrucke

Josefswiese Park, Hardbrucke

The world has turned.

It’s a little bit darker in the mornings. I’m taking a jacket out with me again as standard.

I’m feeling the flutterings of new life in my belly.

Nothing has changed, but everything has changed.

Again.

P has gone from crawling into our bed each morning at 5am to sleeping through past 7 sometimes. He’s also gone from a few weeks of whining and “nup” to everything back to a lovely(mostly) kid again. It’s so hard to tell with these phases – is it us? Is it him? Something else? Even though I’ve done this parenting thing for nearly 3.5 years now, I always forget that each phase only lasts a couple of weeks. The good and the bad.

I’m in a new phase too. I feel different. Things are OK. Somehow I’ve clicked over from raging against my fate to accepting things and it’s so much better (for now!). I am cool with the boy thing too – so much so that I almost can’t fathom why I was so upset.

Even the language – somehow a shift there as well. From worrying if I “could” or “couldn’t” if I was “good” or “bad” at German to realising I just have to learn it. It’s just knowledge that’s there to be gained and I am taking the classes, doing the study. It’s hard but not insurmountable, it just takes work. Work I can do.

Some piece of myself has returned and I’m organising stuff! I’ve been teeing up a few social engagements and going out to things, buying household items and planning travel. It feels good.

I went to this Motherhood Support Group the other night. Only three people of a projected six showed (including the organiser) but it was good to have a small group so everyone could say lots. We talked for nearly 3 hours! The organiser, who is a psychologist, expat and mother herself, said some interesting things about moving cities/countries/continents that I hadn’t thought of before.

When you cut yourself out of the fabric of your life and try to re-establish those threads of familiarity in a completely new environment, you lose so much. The subconscious things I hadn’t realised were smells and geography.

Smell is such a primal sense, not something you think about so often. When you relocate to a completely new place, you lose all those familiar scents of home. Even of your own home. The streets, the odour of your local newsagent, the office, the Tube. It’s very disorienting to be without all these smells. I almost cried when she said this – it’s so true! When I was in the nasty throes of morning sickness, with the bloody churchbells reverberating through my new apartment, I would crawl into bed and think “I hate the smell in here”. It was a completely innofensive odour of clothes, sheets, dust (I guess) but it was different to “home” – different washing powder, different water, new trees, less pollution.

Feeling a chill in the air this week, I found my nose reaching for the familiar Autumn smell of Horse Chestnut trees and fox shit. A smell I actually didn’t like. But it signalled something: London/Autumn/Now. And drawing a blank on that scent was really odd – like walking into an unlit room in my brain. Early Autumn is one of my favourite times of year. What does it smell like in Zurich? I don’t quite know yet.

Geography too. Just knowing the patterns of your local area – the well-trod journey to the train station, the local park, your corner shop. They build reassurance in the brain: I have been here, I know this, I know what I’m doing, I know who I am. Losing that is tough, it takes time to re-build those familiar routes, make new connections to your local landscape. It’s fascinating, and sort of terryfying to think how lost I felt without this. Also explains why my homesickness often takes the form of small yearnings for odd places – a nondescript corner of Castlereagh Street, Sydney. The view of the sky above the railway tracks as you walk down Bedford Street, Newtown past the Hub. My bit of the Thames as I strode across London Bridge to work. The curve of the path through a crappy Tottenham estate where I weekly pushed my newborn child in his buggy…

This week, we also had a lovely afternoon at Josefswiese park at Hardbrucke, where I’ve actually spent enough time for it to feel like a familiar friend now. When we came to Zuri in Summer 2013, with the move still very much up in the air, I took my son to this park and had my first “This is good, we could live here” moment.

I love it there. I’ve fallen in love with Josefwiese! For me, to fall in love with a place is important. It means taking it into my heart, owning it, but also giving something away. It’s that thing of committing, admitting vulnerability…  I now own a piece of that park and it owns me, a tiny part of my heart will be left there if and when we leave Zurich. And I’ll miss it and yearn for it in odd moments. Like my bit of the Thames in London, or that chunk of sky in Newtown.

And soon I’m going home. To one of my homes. Home, home, home. Oh Sydney, I can’t wait. But I’m working hard to make sure I want to come back to Zurich too.

 

 

Feeling better
This place was opposite the Babyhaus store. S*x toys, tupperware, vitamins and everything else a new parent needs!

This place was opposite the Babyhaus store. S*x toys, tupperware, vitamins and everything else a new parent needs!

There’s been rather a  lot of doom and gloom on here so I’m trying to do some more cheerful posts! I had a good day on Friday. Maybe even… somewhat of a breakthrough?

First of all I had my “slacker” German class (it’s back on after 5 weeks’ holiday) and I’m enjoying seeing my fellow students again. Plus, since I’ve sneakily been doing the semi-intensive German course during the break, I am suddenly the dux of the class! (in my semi-intensive class I mostly feel like a dunce). Going back also made me realise that I have learnt lots of German in my six months here. There is tons more to learn of course, but it’s nice to be reminded of the progress I’ve made. From a standing start too!

In the afternoon I had a message from a friend saying she’s up at Bad Allenmoos outdoor swimming pool with her daughter. Her text came at that moment all parents of young children will recognise: mid-afternoon just when you’re wondering WTF are we going to do to get through the next few hours until dinner? So we packed our togs and went – it was not super hot but a lovely sunny afternoon and P adores the water. He’s pretty good with the “swimming” in his rubber ring too :). My friend’s husband also showed up and distracted the kids so we could have a decent natter. Win!

Then, on the way home, I ran into one of the few other people I know in Zurich and we had a nice chat. Amazing how a chance meeting can suddenly make you feel connected and like everything is right with the world. Hey, maybe this is gonna work out OK after all!? I reckon this is also a previously unthought-of benefit of moving to a small town – the more people I am friends with here, the more likely I am to see them. Watch this space for when I start to complain that I can’t go anywhere without running into someone I know. ha ha ha

On the weekend we headed out to the big baby/kids store Babyhaus Wehrli and I had the smug joy of givin’ it straight to some newbie, expectant parents who were buggy shopping: “Don’t worry about the second kid you might have down the track, just get the stroller you want now! You’ll probably get a different one once the kid turns six months anyway.” Ahhh they must have thought I was a know-all cow. But it’s nice to feel like a slight expert in sOMETHIng.

I’ve also been cooking and baking a bit, which is satisfying. Food, especially eating out and/or takeaway, is so pricey here, you really have to cook more often. I do quite enjoy it but I hate feeling like I HAVE to do it. Lately it hasn’t seemed like a chore though so I’ll chalk that up as another Good Thing.

A few more small Good Things About Switzerland that I may not have mentioned:

* When I was a few rappen short on my shopping a few weeks ago, the lady at the supermarket waved it off – bring it next time. That would never happen in London

* Yesterday when I ran for the tram, the driver waited and even opened the back door for me as I panted up to it!

* Every time HI takes P to the farmers market, stall owners give him freebies – an apple, a tiny bag of fresh pasta fur Kinder, etc. So nice.

* It is like the 1980s here – I love the fact that kids still walk to school and there’s not a load of OH&S signs on everything

* There’s two suburbs called Pfaffikon within coo-ee of Zurich as well as Dietikon and Dietlikon, both of the latter have an IKEA

 

Reasons to be Cautious…

Me in pre-Facebook days

Since moving here, I’ve joined an online English-Speaking Parents in Switzerland group that hosts some interesting discussions. Most stuff is child-related, obviously, but child-related is life-related after all.

There was a recent thread about posting pictures of your children online, kicked off by someone saying a childless friend had posted pictures of her kids online without permission, which generated much food for thought for me. I have a few different, conflicting issues with posting pics of my kids (and others posting, and posting pics of other’s kids) online. And because I had unexpectedly lots to say on the matter, I decided to turn it into a blog post.

Reasons to be cautious about posting pictures of children online:

1. Consent – the children have no say in it.

2. Safety – there’s a lot of whacky types online. I hate to check into paedo paranoia, but there are some sickos out there. I don’t know what they look for. Shudder to think. So you want to be careful. That said, however, I would also suggest that this falls into the “critical mass” category of safety. Eg: in UK you probably wouldn’t let your kids walk to school cos no one else does and so if the unthinkable were to happen, your one child walking alone would be an obvious target. Here in Switzerland, mostly all kids walk to school and there’s safety in numbers. Pics of kids online has reached critical mass IMO so you’d be unlucky (as opposed to shame on you) if something dodgy happened.

3. Privacy – a bit like consent, we grew up with pretty much just our close friends and family seeing a few select photos of us. How weird will it be for our kids and their friends to go online and see their whole lives documented? However,  I’m a bit torn here because with family and friends across the world, Facebook is an excellent way to share pics and info. However, I do have privacy settings on photos so they’re only seen by people I actually know well, eg: friends I’d invite to my house for cake.

4. Cyber bullying and identify theft are real and do happen. If I was an ID thief I reckon a great source would be all the “Belinda Mary Reynolds born 18.11.2013* mum and bub doing well” announcements!  I have no idea if my fears are valid and maybe I’m too paranoid. This is not just an online issue. When I edited my local NCT magazine in London, I would only put the month but not the actual date for birth announcements. Again, I have no idea if this was warranted, but it seemed better to err on the side of caution. Cyber bullying is more of an issue for tweens and teens where I think the 3. Privacy issues are relevant, plus see 6. Setting an Example, below.

5. Ownership – FB might own the crunched down version of pics on its site but if you hold the original, it’s still yours too, right? Is this a statutory rights thing? I’m not a lawyer… Also there’d be an uproar and lawsuits if people’s pics did start appearing in ads or unsolicited places so I don’t think one should panic. Then again, FB is a free service which means as users we don’t really have much power or any binding contract with the company re: our data, so that’s something to consider. Come to think of it, so is this blog… maybe I should start paying a bit of money to (hopefully) ensure I own some rights to my content here!

6. Setting an example – our kids are going to grow up in a very different world than we did in terms of social media and “connectedness”. I’d like to think that my online behaviour sets a reasonable example for what is appropriate for them to do. Of course, they will end up doing whatever the f&ck they want and/or what their silly friends are doing anyway – for a while… but eventually I’d hope they’d be sensible. I guess it’s a bit like drug taking. I hope they’d talk to me about the consequences and would take my experience (ahem) and advice on board. At least a little bit!

In conclusion, I don’t know what is right. I try to limit the amount of pics I put in the public domain and I have a bunch of privacy settings on my Facebook as I mentioned above. I may be overly cautious but I see this as a better safe than sorry situation. For the record, I should also state that all this is just my opinion. I don’t write this to preach to anyone or suggest you should do what I do. Then again, when I read stories like this one, I wonder if perhaps I am not careful enough! And then there’s this father making arty pics of his naked daughter. Hmm. What do you think?

*a made-up name and date – any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The pursuit of perfection

Hot wheels or hot heels… you get what you’re given

Last week, we found out we’re having another boy. I don’t plan on having any more children after this one, so right now I feel a bit disappointed. I was 90% sure it was a girl. Which would have made the perfect little family.

My disappointment in not “achieving” perfection here, and the headline of this blog, takes me back several years to when I used to edit a customer magazine for a semi-luxury car company, the tagline of which was The Pursuit of Perfection (er, not Lamborghini by the way!). The job made me unhappy for many reasons that I won’t detail now. Suffice to say, it was during my employment there that I first sought help for clinical depression. At that time, I was passed to a rather young, freshly qualified and enthusiastic NHS counsellor with pale pink hair who helped me in two valuable ways. One was putting me onto an online Cognative Behavioural Therapy programme (MoodGym) and the other was her “diagnosis” of me as a perfectionist.

Perfection – I scoffed at the time – was something I absolutely did not seek. I’d worked in publishing too long to be an adherent of ‘perfection’ – that way lies missed deadlines, endless do-overs and disappointment. Near enough is good enough: do it well, proof it, fix it, proof it again, sign it off, ship it to print and move on! Bear with me, she said, and take home this document, read it and see what you think. I did and she was right. Perfectionism in psychological terms is not always trying to be “perfect” per se, according to http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/ it is:

1. The relentless striving for extremely high standards (for yourself and/or others) that are
personally demanding, in the context of the individual. (Typically, to an outsider the standards are
considered to be unreasonable given the circumstances.)
2. Judging your self-worth based largely on your ability to strive for and achieve such
unrelenting standards.
3. Experiencing negative consequences of setting such demanding standards, yet continuing
to go for them despite the huge cost to you.

I am not going to comment on whether the car company I worked for achieved this goal but for myself, I was glad to recognise and acknowledge these traits and try to work on them. However, like depression, I’ve found perfectionism can rear its head at various times life and screw around with you. And I guess now is one of those times…

I have been thinking about the fact I’m carrying a boy for a few days now and I guess I can only describe it as thus: I feel like people will judge me as though it was a choice I made. “Oh, you wanted a 2-boy family.” When my choice would have been to have one of each. And I know that’s stupid, and selfish and anal and stuff but there you have it. Of course the main thing is he’s healthy and I’m healthy. There are people out there desperate to conceive, or with rafts of other baby- and child-related problems, and I truly am grateful we’re all healthy so I really should shut up. I will love the kid and I will get over this. But if you’ll indulge my wallowing and justifications for a moment or two?

So: I am a girl. And one who enjoys dressing up, shopping and vanity things. And it would have been so nice to have a female child to do this kind of  typical girl stuff with. Plus, in general, when they become adults, women are better at staying in touch, remembering birthdays, helping to tidy up after a dinner party, all that stupid stereotypical shit that perhaps shouldn’t matter but of course it does. (And I know I’m getting about 20 years ahead of myself, but these are some of the conclusions I jump to).

Also, it means I will never have a daughter who has a baby so I can go through the pregnancy with her and tell her what it was like for me, etc.  BUT – this is all a bit silly. Who’s to say that even if I did have a daughter that she would be any of those things? Or that I will “miss out” in any way? For example, I was at a 3 year old’s birthday party the other day and the mother-in-law (MiL) was just lovely and obviously very involved with the family of her son (her only child). In fact she reminded me of my own wonderful MiL (who I know reads this blog, hi Avril!), who has given me some fantastic motherly advice over the years and been very involved with P’s life as well as in the lives of the children of her other son (she also has a daughter, but her daughter has not had children so there’s no guarantees of that “shared motherhood” experience anyway!) . I would hope to do the same for my son’s partners one day. Assuming they have them. Because my son/s might be gay, or not have kids, or be perpetually single, or anything. And that is also fine.

So I guess it kinda comes back to this weird feeling of no choice, or the wrong choice somehow. It’s like – everything else in your life you basically get to decide on (if you’re a privileged WASP like me): where you live, your tertiary education and/or career, if/who you marry, what you wear, the stuff you have – from the car you’re driving to the handbag you carry to how you decorate your home. And while I might not love the fact, it all signifies stuff about you. And I guess I feel like the outside trappings of my life are all fairly well curated. I’m happy with them and the impression that I give off and, yes, I do think about it a fair bit (does that make me a pyscho?!)  But this, well, it’s not my choice – the way it will be reflected on me feels like it doesn’t quite fit. So I feel a bit sad and, if I’m brutally honest, slightly embarrassed? Like people will whisper: “oops, unfortunate, was that on purpose?!” God that’s awful. But that’s why I wanted to write about it – get it out there, see how ridiculous I’m being.

I went online and read a few forums and stuff about this topic. One commenter had a really nice suggestion which was: enjoy your sons and if you feel the urge, just go and buy that frilly dress and donate it to a child in need. I like this idea. Besides, many of my close friends have girls, and I have two nieces. Being “cool Aunty Claire” to them should surely be almost as satisfying! Plus I won’t get the growing-up girl tantrums (when I think how horrible I was to my mum at some points in my life, agh), I won’t have to deal as directly with all the horrid over-sexualisation that’s shoved in girls’ faces as they grow up (although I will make damn sure my boys respect women and join the feminist fight), and selfish, vain old me will never have to “compete” against a fresh, younger version.

I am glad we found out though. I wouldn’t want to deal with these feelings on top of the “baby blues” a few days after the birth. And I know I’ll get over it. But right now, I am a bit sad and, for a perfectionist like me, it’s tough to bid goodbye to what I thought my family “should” be.

Achtung

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I just wanted to write a quick blog to say I’m feeling a bit better and to thank everyone who got in touch to check in on me after the previous entry (and in relation to past entries too). I really appreciate it, thankyou. I am so lucky to have such awesome friends and family scattered across the globe 🙂

So, on a lighter note, here’s some photos of funny stuff I’ve seen around Zurich.

What’s My Scene

And another thing, I’ve been wondering lately

Am I crazy

To believe in ideals?

I’m a betting man, but it’s getting damn lonely

Oh honey, if only

I was sure what I feel…

 

I spent half of the afternoon putting away old, non-maternity clothes. They seem like outfits from another life. Much of it is office wear. I don’t know if I’ll ever put those things on again. Some of it is clothes I bought in Australia more than eight years ago. Is it time to let that stuff go too? For good?

Since coming back from London 2 days ago, I’ve felt unfortunately adrift. I don’t know what I’m doing here – I’ve got no connection to this country with its foreign language I might not ever properly learn. We are trying to potty-train P and I don’t even know how to have the conversation with his Swiss-German carers at the kinderkrippe. Then there’s the stupid heath insurance (don’t get me started), the crazy-expensive everything. The slightly different culture that, while it doesn’t exactly grate, just rubs, giving a slight feel of unease, creating sore spots in unexpected places.

I read an article about Peaches Geldof’s death from a heroin overdose and it was upsetting. Maybe it was an accidental OD. But if two little children and all the trappings of a “very nice life” could not keep her tethered to it, could not solve the emptiness inside, the destructive urge for Something to fill that hole in the soul… Poor Peaches. I sort of understand, you see? And that’s worrying.

There was a lot of talk among my friends in London about the demise of the goth/alternative scene. A festival got cancelled and it seems to have been the catalyst for several people to say ‘over and out’ on the whole shebang. I “retired” as a goth several years back now but it still makes me a bit sad. One less thing to return to, to be involved with, albeit marginally.

I also read about funding being cut for women’s refuges in the UK, and I know similar is happening back in Australia. Along with a raft of other benefits cuts, the way the First World is treating refugees etc, that’s more upsetting. These are people that really need help – people without anything like the resources of those such as myself and Peaches bloody Geldof. What is the world coming to when we are edging the most vulnerable people in our societies ever closer to misery, destitution and even, in extreme cases, death?

Before I moved here, I was very concerned about feeling lonely, isolated, and poor, with a lack of occupation. And all those things have come to pass. I thought I’d shored up some safeguards against it, mainly to do with indulging my creativity. But I’ve found I feel too empty to write much. And I still don’t have that One Great Idea to spark into a novel. So I’m stuck tapping out the occasional blog and spending too much time on Facebook. It doesn’t feel like there’s any place for me right now. What’s my scene?

 

 

 

Zurich on a Sunday

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It’s very quiet in central Zurich on a Sunday. Especially if you’re out early, as I was this weekend. Around the lake, there’s a bit of activity. A few tourist buses, people catching ferries, joggers, dog walkers and a few people fishing.

I had a wander around the top of the lake on the Enge side – the West side of the Zurichsee, also known as the Silver Coast. I haven’t really been over there before. It’s a bit quieter and more residential than the opposite bank – the Gold Coast. But there’s Seebads (lake swimming areas) and rowing clubs on both sides. And nice looking restaurants / sail club type places too.

I didn’t go very far though, because I had spotted something interesting to explore at the top of the lake. A little estuary that weaves its way through central Zurich. It’s called the Schanzengraben – and a quick bout of internet research tells me it’s actually an ancient moat – part of the city’s fortifications dating from 1642.

Nowadays it’s a very quiet spot – a clear green stream rushing smoothly through town. Walkways on both sides (mostly) that dip down to below water-level underneath some of the bridges, so you’re walking shoulder to shoulder with the flow. Some bits have a wooden boardwalk or smooth stone walkway that’s almost at the same level as the water. Because it’s Switzerland, there’s no fence or anything.

I didn’t see many other people – a few dog walkers and a couple of lost-looking Japanese toursists. All the shops in Zurich are closed on Sundays, which means Bahnhofstrasse goes from one of the most expensive retail strips in the world to a ghost town. As for foliage-clad 17th century moats nearby… they’re even emptier.

I didn’t really know where I was going but I knew the general direction. And I’ve seen the top of the river Sihl from the train so I guessed I’d come out somewhere familiar. And I did, one block away from the Hauptbahnhof.

A very pleasant morning’s walk.