Edelweiss

Switzerland! Country of chocolate, cheese, mountains, and lots of other great things. That’s where I was last weekend. I spent three days in Bern, with my mom’s best friend from college, Kim, and her family (her husband, Peter, is Swiss, which is how she ended up in Bern). The entire family proved to be terrific tour guides, including their 14 year old son Tommy, who is amazingly bilingual. A (bilingual) friend at NYU once told me that there’s a certain kind of conversation that bilingual people can have, referred to as “code-switching”, when they go back and forth between their two fluent languages without missing a beat. It’s pretty cool to watch.



Kim, Tommy, and Peter took me to a beautiful waterfall that was inside a mountain. They also took me to see two (or was it three?) castles, an adorable medieval city named Murten, a modern art museum, and toured me around Bern.





Plus, I ate my first pork roast. But one of the most momentous meals (alliteration!) I had was rosti, which is characteristic of the German-speaking part of Switzerland. This was basically a bunch of clogged arteries sitting on a plate. That is, shredded potatoes, bacon, and onions, cooked and topped with an egg and about twenty pounds of Swiss cheese. I left some bits of cheese on my plate to make myself feel better about the fact that I ate the whole thing. Notice that it’s plate-sized, and it’s also about two inches high. I’m actually surprised that I managed to get up from the table. (But notice that there are two small slices of pickle sitting on top of my rosti! My first dill pickle since January. It was terrific!)



When I told my Swiss friend Felix about this meal, he reminded me that he’s always said that Swiss food is barbaric. It’s true: he’s repeated this to me many times. In his words, after eating it, “you stink, you sweat, you can’t move, and all you can do is smoke”. Note that he’s giving up his beautiful skylight-filled Bolognese apartment so that he can complete his final semester of university at home, from Switzerland.



After Bern I went to Geneva to spend the night with my friend Talya, who’s working there. We grew up about five blocks from each other, and it was the first time we’ve ever explored a different country together. Actually, we’ve only seen each other one time out of Massachusetts, and that was in New York City for coffee. So a Geneva excursion was a big step for us! Talya was also a great guide, and, after pirating wireless internet at her apartment, I was sad to leave.

However, I really did have to leave, because this week I started a new job. Until the end of May I’ll be translating the website of a tourism marketing firm in Bologna. Despite the fact that it can be incredibly frustrating, I really enjoy the challenges of translating. So the work has been pretty interesting so far (after translating 12+ pages on Sardinia, you can ask me anything about the whole island – I can practically recite all of its main attractions from memory).

I did make the mistake of giving my boss this blog address, which he passed to the person (Andrea) whom I work with most directly. So I can’t reveal everything about them. But it is nice to work with young people – at Coop I was the youngest person by far in the entire building. So far so good.