Swissing Around

Adventures in Op-Shopping

2012-02-28T11:05:00.001+01:00

I've written before about the challenges of op-shopping in Switzerland. A lot of stuff in the second-hand stores is well and truly clapped-out or still quite expensive (case in point: we went to buy a replacement Nespresso machine last week and the second-hand one was going to cost more than a new one -- better model and all, but why would we do that?).

Yesterday I felt the urge to go and check one of the better purveyors of vintage fashion and came away with this baby.

A Chanel leather skirt. Just my size. A little bit pre-loved (so I won't feel too scared to wear it). And just what I need (I found myself thinking recently that I require more items of clothing that can be wiped down, thanks to Bas).

Ain't she a beauty?

A Quick Guide to Zürich -- Capital of Cool

2012-02-27T18:19:00.002+01:00

I love Zürich -- it feels like a mini-Berlin but also has a uniquely Swiss flavour. It is expensive, that's true, but you get high standards and good quality with those sky-high prices -- the museums, the food, the rough-and-ready nightlife in Züri-West -- all are a cut above.

This is a piece I recently wrote for a website all the way down in New Zealand. I shudder to think what the exchange rate is like for those poor Kiwis, but I hope as many as possible start thinking of Zürich as a suitable starting point for a big European O.E.

Noma Two Times

2012-02-26T20:56:00.002+01:00

Yes, I'm that lucky. I've been twice to eat at Noma in Copenhagen. The most recent trip was to celebrate Denis's 40th birthday, a couple of weeks ago.

The pic of him with the New Nordic-eating grin? That's his surprise birthday cake, which was a seabuckthorn cheesecake.

It's been a bitterly cold Winter here at times, and I was pleasantly surprised to feel slightly (but only slightly) warmer in CPH than in Lausanne.

One things for sure, the service at Noma was a hell of a lot warmer than anything Lausanne could serve up. It's so friendly there you could almost swear you were in your local Melbourne cafe, shooting the breeze with over a plate of bacon and eggs.

Which is about the only thing missing from Rene Redzepi's menu...

Our Creative Spaces--Baby Hat Finito!

2012-02-23T21:22:00.004+01:00

Long overdue, but completed. And on its way to little Sam in time for the Southern Hemisphere's Winter, although I doubt he'll really need it.

It's a nice feeling to finish off some knitting after a long break. It's the first time this year I've done any and I stitched this bad boy up in bed as Bas had his nap today. I could have done some housework, or work, but I just didn't feel like it. I'm like that right now -- happy to shirk a few chores and hang onto my sanity. This Winter has not been kind and I can't wait for it to end.

Off Again...

2012-02-06T15:32:00.007+01:00

...to Copenhagen. To Noma. My second time. I feel guilty typing that, but not really sure why.

I found these photos from last year's trip to Noma.

Now I just have to figure out who I should pitch this story to. Ugh, pitching.

Little Penguin

2012-01-31T23:22:00.002+01:00

Perhaps it's because I'm Australian and never got to see this growing up, but there's somthing about little kids in snow gear that gets me so warm and fuzzy. Here's my little penguin in Zuoz, near St Moritz. I was taking a chairlift up the mountain to do some snowboarding when I looked down and saw Denis and Bas waving up to me. What a heartwarming sight.

Two

2012-01-27T21:35:00.004+01:00

How did that happen? I go away to work in Innsbruck for two weeks and when I get back my little guy's about to turn two. These are photos taken this month.

Today was the big day, although it was a quiet affair. Papa was at work in St Moritz and it was raining, but there was cake, one set of grandparents and a play date with Efthymis. Happy Birthday sweet Bas.

And as I say to you every night as I put you to bed: 'Thank you for being you'.

Austria

2012-01-06T23:05:00.004+01:00

I've lost count of the number of times I start typing 'Austria' and it ends up as 'Australia'. I'm sure Freud, the greatest Austrian EVER, would say shitloads about that, plus the fact that I just used the word 'shitloads' in relation to the motherland.

As of tomorrow I'm working in beautiful Innsbruck, a place I haven't been to in almost exactly 25 years. I'll be jobbing as a reporter (I have no idea how I became one either) at the Youth Olympic Games. A plum gig, apart from the fact that I will be away from Denis and Bas for a whole 17 days.

My heart is aching already, but I am also itching to do some events work again -- it's been a long time, and I like those gigs.

My night-before ritual is full of the usual checklists and delayed packing, plus a lot of gazing at photos of little Bas. I had a weep when I put him to bed tonight, because that's one of my favourite things to do (the tucking in of said child, not weeping). Bas goes to bed smiling, and the idea of not seeing that little face at 8pm every night is already breaking my heart.

Add my slightly bonkers fear that my iPad will not be up to the task of the next fortnight (I've no reason to believe this, I just like to think that technology is out to get me) and hours spent having an interior monologue about whether I should also pack my six-year-old craptus laptop which takes 10 minutes to so much as open a document and weighs 25kg, and I feel spent.

Thanks be to Whomever that I will have a long train trip tomorrow, where I can get my shit together and look at photos of Bas and Denis on said iPad. Photos like the one above.

I doubt I'll be posting before the end of January, in which case, have yourselves a wonderful first month of 2012, and save me some cake.

Flying into 2012

2011-12-29T20:46:00.006+01:00

How did that happen? How can we be a few days form 2012? I usually eschew New Year's Resolutions, but hey, sometimes I like to walk on the wild side. I'm sticking with three, because those good intentions aren't going to screw themselves, and if I pick more than three how will I know when I've forgotten them?

Be able to run 5km by the end of 2012. I'm cheating a little bit here, as I started the Couch to 5K app earlier this month and am already into week 4. All I need to do is keep the faith, Bon Jovi style, for another month or so.
Visit a new country. I've been stuck in a travel rut for a while now and I want to go somewhere new. Somewhere with a scary language that I have no clue about. I'm thinking Vietnam or Finland.
Be a better listener, even when it's in French. Sadly, I think this is the one that will present the most problems.

Wish me luck! And feel free to let me know if you're doing any resolving for 2012.

You've Changed...

2011-12-22T23:15:00.003+01:00

Honestly, over the years I have (changed), but if you hadn't seen me since oh, say, 1991, and then you bumped into me last night, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that I was no better or no different from then, right down to the stripey top and the devotion to pinball played with beer.

Best Date Night ever! Thank you Basel, despite your non-tongue-in-cheek devotion to bars where smokers' rights reign supreme.

Our Creative Spaces--Baby Hat

2011-12-08T12:23:00.004+01:00

Well, if people keep having babies, I'm going to keep knitting baby hats!

This is a favourite pattern for me -- the finished product lasts a long time and has lots of stretch (thanks to it being mostly in Moss Stitch), despite that pattern stating that it's for a three- to six-month-old. I've made a few of these little hats and they generally last well into the baby's second year (Bas still wears his). Good wool always helps. I wish I could find better yarns here in Lausanne -- most of the knitting shops stock a hell of a lot of acrylic and not much else.

This one's in chocolate brown and fire-engine red, and it's for Samuel. Look away Samuel!

Haircut

2011-12-06T12:05:00.003+01:00

Bas had his first haircut while we were in Australia. We took him to a straight-up no-appointment-necessary joint in Katoomba, so my Mum could get a keepsake of his fallen locks. Bas can be quite a mover and shaker, so I was a little worried that he would crack it in the chair, and at first he did, but the very capable Lee worked like lightning and soon managed to appeal to his vanity. I wish my own haircuts were so quick (and cheap).

Three Generations in the Cathedral of Ferns

2011-12-05T21:38:00.003+01:00

We've been back in Switzerland a whole week and I've only just started to look at the hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of photos that D took while we were in Australia. I think this one may be a favourite.

The little chap's jetlag is starting to ease up, but the routine is taking some time to rediscover. We have a doctor's appointment tomorrow and I'm dreading finding out what Bas weighs. He is so thin, and travelling for a month didn't help. He still hates his high chair and his appetite seems to come and go. What happened to the glory days of this?

A New Day

2011-12-01T07:39:00.002+01:00

We've been away for what seems like ages and getting back into the daily rhythm of life in Lausanne has been difficult. Bas's jetlag is insane. Yesterday morning he woke up at 3.30am, had a nap from 11.30am until 3pm, then fell back asleep at 5.30pm. Which sounds fine, doesn't it? But he woke up last night at 12.30am, ready to rumble, and because Denis had to leave for work in Geneva at 6am today I decided to be nice to him and look after Bas, who couldn't understand why everything was so dark and quiet and Mama was so flat. I've made it to almost 8am, having put him down for a nap at 6.30am. I have no idea how long to let him sleep for, or how today will unfold. I have a hotel review to do in Lausanne for a big client I've never worked for before, so I won't be home tonight. I am in two minds about letting Bas stay with his (very helpful) grandparents, in case he goes haywire again. Has anyone else been through toddler jetlag, and if so, do you have any tips?

His whole routine/way of life has been terribly disrupted in the last five weeks (waking three times a night for a bottle, sleeping with us, not eating from his high chair) that I am afraid all the good we did in his first 21 months has been eroded permanently -- or is that my jetlag talking and taunting? Anyway, if there's one thing I DO love about the dreaded 'lag it's getting to see the sunrise. The above was today's.

Our Creative Spaces--Stripey Cardi ad infinitum

2011-10-27T14:18:00.005+02:00

Back into it, after at least six months of pretending not to see it, shoved in a bag at the back of a cupboard. Knitting patterns leave me a little bamboozled sometimes, and I am not great at undoing mistakes. I usually have to rip out so many stitches that I end up just starting over again. The back panel is complete. The fronts? Started again? Tried a sleeve and had to start again.

We're off on holidays for a full month soon. I am not sure whether I should take this with me or not. Should I? Can a holiday be relaxing with a tricky (for me) knitting job getting all manky and tangled in the bottom of a suitcase?

Again & Again

2011-10-24T08:24:00.010+02:00

I'm clearing space on the bookshelves again. It's something I do every few years. I used to have a lot of books and spent a lot of money moving them around to all the various houses I used to live in. What a chore.

I suspect a part of my need to hang onto so many books was because I used to like hearing stuff like 'Wow! What a lot of books. Have you read all these?'.

Thing is though, I'm not the kind of person who reads books more than once. So there's not much need for me to hold on to about 95% of my books. About 10 years ago I started really culling my shelves. And you know what? I don't feel any dumber than I did 15 years ago, when my bookshelves were at their chock-a-blockest. I still feel just as dumb!

However, there are a few books I can't let go of. Lovely coffee table books about the sort of residences I'll never live in (all bought when I used to work in a fancy bookshop and received a 40% discount). Style guides and dictionaries. Cherished presents. There are even a few books that I re-read every few years.

The above is one of them. I first borrowed this very edition back in 1986, from a friend's house in the Southern Highlands. I can remember reading it on the train back to Sydney and just being mesmerized by the first-person oral history format. It was like being there, in the 1960s, in Warhol's silver-papered factory. I'm pretty sure that Jean Stein, who gathered all these interviews together and (with George Plimpton) edited them so well (by which I mean, ordered them in such a way that the book just flows), was the reason why I fell in love with non-fiction and why I still hold a secret desire to become as good a researcher, as good a writer as she is. And if you can call someone a good writer when their book doesn't really consist of them writing much at all, then hell, they're good. Damned good even, given that that people that feature in the book come off as mighty unlikeable for the most part.

So in the last 26 years I think I've read this book about five times. Friends of mine have read it, but I make sure I hang onto it. I'm pretty easygoing with lending books out. I make sure I return books, but I accept that people might not always return books.

This one is different. I've never really bothered trying to return it to its rightful owner--I'm not sure exactly whose book it was, or how I'd track them down after all this time. But who am I kidding? I simply don't want to hand this back. This is one of a handful of books that are my 'keepers'. I need to marvel at how this was done, so I need to keep it close. Because heaven knows I still don't like many of the people who feature in this book. I just love the way they're all been brought together.

The Sound of Silence

2011-10-15T09:30:00.005+02:00

The Sound of Silence was released two weeks ago, but tomorrow is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, so I wanted to write about a topic that is so often greeted by an uncomfortable silence--miscarriage.

I miscarried in 2008. I've been lucky enough to fall pregnant and give birth to a strapping young bub since then, and for that I am truly grateful. I haven't talked about my miscarriage much, because it took place before we'd told many people. I didn't want to 'bother' them, or make them feel uncomfortable. I didn't want to endure an awkward pause, or worse still, be on the receiving end of a hastily uttered platitude, meant to alleviate the pain but often just leading to more awkwardness.

When I saw a call for submissions in a writers-centre newsletter last year I felt the need to finally express what it was that we experienced with that awful loss. My story is one of 22 in the anthology, and those 22 are but a ripple on the lake -- some 55,000 women go through miscarriage each year in Australia. It can be a lonely experience, but it doesn't have to be. Talk about it. Reach out to those who've gone through it. Remember those babies and their parents. Because we're all part of the same family.

You can read more about it here, here and here, just for starters.

Italians Shoe It Better

2011-10-12T13:04:00.003+02:00

I was in Turin, one of my favourite places in the world, last weekend. I went to some great exhibitions and restaurants, some charming cafes and generally had a lovely time. There are so many things to love about Italy, but one of the things that always sticks with me is how Italians put their outfits together. Lately I've been staring at their shoes, quite possibly because Switzerland is not giving me much in the way of shoe-candy moments (unless you count hiking boots and trekking sandals, which I don't). I felt like a bit of a perve at the opening of the big Arte Povera exhibition at the fantastic Castello di Rivoli, but then I realised that if anyone saw what I was doing they would just put it down to the fact that I'm an Australian living in Switzerland and probably don't get to see great shoes much.

Goodbye Indian Summer

2011-10-06T14:45:00.003+02:00

It seems only logical that the end of the Indian Summer should be marked by the elephants from Circus Knie having a bath in Lac Léman. I'm not a fan of circuses that keep animals, but I couldn't keep away from checking this out. How it avoids taking a tragic turn I'll never know--strollers and young kids, slightly ticked-off elephants and their handlers, little in the way of crowd control and a tendency for people to push for either a better view or to get out of the way of said elephants, What could possibly go wrong? I think the local tourism office needs to discuss the idea of turning this into Switzerland's version of the Running of the Bulls.

Juvenile Crime Spree--Swiss Style

2011-10-04T15:55:00.004+02:00

We've been having an Indian Summer here in Lausanne, so the world and his wife are making the most of it by getting outdoors. We ran into some of our neighbours on our way out and mentioned that we were heading to the park later that day. Ella, who is about five years old, had a bucket of chalk with her, as she was heading to the park at that very moment. We missed seeing Ella and her Mum, but there was a nice souvenir of the missed connection.

I still struggle with feelings of not really belonging here, but moments like this make me really happy.

Baby You Can Drive My Car

2011-09-25T19:55:00.003+02:00

Bas took his old lady for a spin last weekend. The fête des vendanges (wine harvest festival) was on in nearby Lutry, so this smallish lakeside village was packed with brass bands, squealing kids, take-away sausage and raclette stalls, grown-ups getting steadily smashed and helium balloons. Bas had his first go on an amusement ride -- and didn't he experience the gamut of emotions from A to batshit? There were tears, giggles, waves and bemused stares all in a matter of minutes. I am beginning to see the light with camera phones--how many years after everyone else, I'm not sure. But that's how I roll.

Our Creative Spaces--Baby Blanket! About Bloody Time!

2011-09-22T11:46:00.003+02:00

It's done! And not only is it done, it's in the post and on its way to Georgette as I type. Hope it's not too late. It's a tiny little coverlet for when she's in a pram, but I suspect the arrival of warmer weather in Australia will mean she may not get much use out of it. Anyways, snuggle up baby G -- every stitch comes with a hug and kiss.

Our Creative Spaces -- Baby Blanket Halfway Done

2011-08-25T11:33:00.001+02:00

Sigh. Taking a bit longer than expected, unlike the baby that this blanket is for. She's been out for almost two weeks now. Time to get a wriggle on Sal...

Poolside

2011-08-20T12:20:00.003+02:00

I managed the (recently) rare feat of finding the time to swim and man, was it ever good. Because I was in a city, not my own, and completely alone. No bub and all my work done. The gods were smiling on me, because the weather was great and I had my swimmers with me.

Bern has a lovely outdoor pool down by the river. It's 50m long and free. I was beside myself. After swimming 20 laps I plonked myself on the grass and did nothing for a full half an hour. It felt like the best holiday ever.

Then I got dressed, went to the train station, caught a train to Lausanne and almost cried when my little guy ran into my arms after over 24 hours apart.

Whacky Swiss

2011-08-05T14:01:00.004+02:00

I was in Bern this week, researching stuff for Lonely Planet. These statues always make me smile, partly because I like to imagine that whoever created them had eaten moldy rye bread and was tripping off their nut on ergot.

Seems to be a Theme

2011-07-31T19:41:00.004+02:00

Lately many photos of Bas have a certain 'don't look back' quality to them. He's too fast for me. Thank heavens Denis is home from the Tour de France and he can sprint.

On The Road Again

2011-07-15T20:04:00.006+02:00

This time I went to Neuchâtel (the city and the canton), which were lovely under the sun. Usually when I go it's cold, grey and rainy, which doesn't make me care much for a place. The day after I went to La-Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle. It was miserably damp and dark in both places, and from what I've heard that's the default setting in them thar hills. Le Locle was voted Switzerland's most depressing town a few years back. Sad to say I can see why. So why did I have to cover it for Lonely Planet you ask? Because it is the fancy watch-making epicentre of the world and there are quite a few folks who love that stuff. As I texted a friend not long after pounding the pavements in those towns: 'I think we can safely add watch and clock museums to my list of things I don't give a shit about.' Harsh? It's my middle name, when it's raining.

On a brighter note, just outside Neuchâtel I stayed at a lovely former abbey -- all creaky wooden floors, thick stone walls and no noise after 9pm. I had the best night's sleep I've had in years after a post-dinner stroll through the grounds, which have bio-dynamic gardens, bunnies and views over the lake.

Our Creative Spaces -- Baby Blanket Continued

2011-07-14T08:19:00.004+02:00

Slowly but surely. I can usually only manage one square being sewed on each night, as I am spent at the end of a day's solo baby wrangling and writing. But it should be done in a couple of weeks. I like to do it just before I settle down to watch an episode of Forbrydelsen. What a nanna I am turning into. Thankfully, Bas has stopped his 5.23am wake ups and has pushed through to 6.15am, which makes a hell of a difference. But still, it will be great to have Denis back in the fold. Hurry home!

On The Road

2011-07-09T20:54:00.005+02:00

I've been exploring some of the pockets of Switzerland that I'm not familiar with. Last week I spent the night in this beautiful village: Murten. The town is bilingual, so maybe you know it as Morat if you're a French speaker. Whatever you call it, nothing beats having the ramparts that enclose the Old Town to yourself at sunset.

It's situated on a lake, reputed to be Switzerland's warmest. If I were working in their tourism office I'd be making a big deal about that!

Our Creative Spaces -- Baby Blanket

2011-07-09T11:47:00.009+02:00

When I look at the things that are posted on this site my heart manages to soar and deflate at the same time -- so much talent out there! So many makers who can do extraordinary things! And me still faffing about with the beginners' patterns in a Debbie Bliss book... Oh well, this blanket, which I blushingly admit to starting in 2008(!!!) is going to find a good home in 2011.

I've done a couple of other small baby things in the past couple of weeks, but have forgotten to take photos, so I hope I remember to record this one for posterity when it's finished. The thing about finishing is this: it's never quite as much fun as the knitting. All the little squares were done long ago (like I said -- 2008) but I have really suffered from a case of the 'gonnas' (ie, 'gonna do it later') when it comes to sewing this baby up. Maybe now is the time, while Denis is away covering the Tour de France and I am on the couch most evenings, totally hooked by series one of Forbrydelsen, the most fantastic Danish crime drama. I love you DVD boxed sets, especially now that we have no TV subscription.

Honestly, all this knitting and watching of rain-soaked murder investigations in Copenhagen is almost making me wish it wasn't summer. It's the secret Scandinavian in me. Or the bog Irish.

Tour de Farce

2011-06-29T12:57:00.007+02:00

I'm solo mummying it for the next month, as Denis is covering the Tour de France. As tired as I'll be by the end of it (because I'm also working on the next Lonely Planet guide to Switzerland and writing an app for Sutro Media -- more on that later), I don't envy Denis, stuck on the back of a motorcycle in insane heat trying to get exciting shots of drug-crazed, Lycra-clad guys with shaved legs sweating up a storm. Seriously, I'd just go to Sydney's Mardi Gras for that sort of thing -- there are less French officials poking about and you only have to cover the area around Oxford St.

Bas is pretty much obsessed by anything yellow and related to a work site, so it's all plastic dump-trucks and spades right now. I am thinking of buying him a doll just to take the machismo down a notch. I'll definitely try to write at least four posts in July, but I may be kidding myself. Time will tell...

Grubby

2011-06-16T10:32:00.003+02:00

Someone received a pot of 'My First Vegemite' from a dear friend visiting from Australia. He is loving it sick. Even managed to get a smear on the camera lens.

Waking Dream

2011-06-10T20:22:00.006+02:00

We returned from our holiday in Portugal this week to clouds and rain, but I still feel a certain buzz when I think back to this moment. This is me after a surf on our last day. I don't get to surf much anymore and to be honest I seem to be getting worse with each session, but to come out of those choppy Atlantic Ocean waves and find a smiling Denis and beaming Bas in his arms was like a dream come true. Oh for a life where Mummy could surf every morning and return to the shore for such a greeting, followed by pasteis de nata and coffee.

On Going Outside

2011-05-30T11:13:00.005+02:00

We live in the centre of town, with a beautiful park almost directly across the road from us, so it's easy for me to be a little lazy when it comes to taking Bas into the great outdoors. Hell, it's easy for me to be a little lazy full stop. Anyhow, yesterday the afternoon was stretching out before me and I had run out of ideas for minimizing the destruction of our apartment. I decided to take Bas for a long walk/stroller ride through Lavaux, the Unesco World Heritage site that's a mere nine-minute train ride from our nearest train station. It's stunningly beautiful, and criss-crossed with easy walking paths (although the one we did yesterday, which involved skirting the lakefront part of the way, proved a challenge with a stroller). Words don't really do Lavaux justice -- and even photos don't quite capture the whole breathtaking pinch-yourself-that-you-live-here nature of the place. We're off on holiday for a week or so -- surfing and eating sardines in Portugal. Wherever you are, I hope you're doing OK.

Fictionalized

2011-05-26T12:55:00.008+02:00

Things have been quiet here because we've had lots of work on and Bas is really ramping up the toddlerdom, plus he only has one nap a day, which means I either do work or housework while he sleeps. Bugger that for exciting blog post topics. I've been so absent-minded that I actually forgot that my first short story was published last week, back in the old country.
I'd like to say I can't believe how long it's taken me to have a short story published, but the truth is, I can believe it all too easily.
You see, I've been writing a long time, but when it comes to 'my' work I am not what you'd call a good finisher. Anyone else's work, or deadline, is respected. My own? Not so much. I tend to focus on the destination rather than the journey. I launch pre-emptive strikes by rejecting my own work and judging it harshly when it's at its most vulnerable -- halfway done, or barely started. When it comes to writing fiction, I am hopeless at enjoying the ride, which is pretty lame for a travel writer who loves nothing more than a long train or bus trip and often feels a little deflated when I actually get somewhere.
So I got tough with myself -- being pregnant and realizing that you'll be 40 years old sooner rather than later can do that. I dared myself to sit down and write every day, and I did. I banged out the first draft of a novel. I started and finished a short story done -- and when I say done I mean DONE. First draft. Second draft. I had it read by someone I trust who gave me a solid critique of it. And then I rewrote it and I let it go out into the big bad world, entering it in a competition. It was rejected, but I didn't care. I had kept up my end of the bargain with myself.
After a few months I sent it to a small publisher in Melbourne and after some more rounds of editing it's been published. And I'll even be paid for it!
See? That wasn't so hard she says, banging her head against a wall for taking so long to get 'round to it.

Our Creative Spaces

2011-05-12T09:46:00.000+02:00

As you can see, my craft-related promises aren't always kept. I have finished knitting the pieces for this baby jumper, but have not really had the time to stitch them all together. So what have I done to remedy this? Grabbed a spare 10 minutes while Bas slept and started on another project. Pffffft.
Anyway, next week I SWEAR I will have this jumper done and dusted. Even if it means putting aside my real-life paid workload for a couple of hours. The commitment to finished craft is just as important to me right now as any persecutory deadline. And I reckon I might just get a non-knitting post done too.

My Creative Space -- Baby's Raglan Sweater

2011-05-05T08:45:00.003+02:00

Feeling a bit more advernturous after a few bumps in the road with my knitting and wanted to make something other than a beanie. So here it is, half a raglan-sleeved sweater. I should have it finished by next week's episode, fingers (and needles) crossed.

My Creative Space -- Bubba Hats

2011-04-28T11:52:00.002+02:00

The stripey cardi has taken a turn for the bad. I made a silly mistake and had to rip out stitches of one whole panel and I've lost heart with projects that require more concentration than I can really give at the moment. There's been too much work on, and not much time for semi-complicated kntting projects, so I've soothed my knitting pangs with some no-brainers -- hats for babies. There are a few bubs due over the coming months, and I want them to be warm.

Vicious Stack

2011-04-25T17:40:00.006+02:00

I've had a fair bit of work in the last couple of months, which means my usual slavish devotion to magazine reading has suffered. The pile of Vanity Fair, Oprah, Dwell, Australian Book Review and Monocle is starting to taunt me, as I imagine hidden depths of knowledge lurking between glossy pages that I never quite get around to reading.
Magazines cost a small fortune here in Switzerland, so a few years ago I started subscribing to some of the ones I really enjoy reading regularly. I've been a Vanity Fair subscriber for years and wasn't prepared to give it up, but then I decided to try British Vogue, which only managed to leave me feeling frumpy every month, and Conde Naste Traveller, which just left me feeling mighty landlocked and envious. So I kept VF and let the other subscriptions slide.
Then the Australian dollar (which I still use to pay for a number of things by credit card) began to go right off, and I was drawn back into the world of mag subscriptions -- particularly US mags, which were always so ludicrously expensive when I lived in Australia but which I could now arrange to have posted to me for a pittance. I started with the mighty juggernaut that is Oprah, then moved onto a fantastic architecture and design magazine called Dwell, and then I got sucked back into Vogue (US this time, and about a third of the price of British Vogue right now). Then I thought, to hell with it, I really need to subscribe to Monocle and the Australian Book Review for work, so I signed on for them, and now I have way too many magazines and not enough brain to go around. I'm going to let US Vogue quietly fade away -- it's a phonebook of silly ads and impossibly airbrushed images with only a couple of decent articles every month but I'm having trouble deciding which other ones need to go.
As for 'serious' reading, don't get me started on the novels. I opened Dark Palace (the second novel in Frank Moorhouse's Grand Days trilogy and set in Geneva -- I demolished Grand Days while I was in hospital having Bas last year) last week and suffered from not being able to get into it within a few pages (I used to give book 100 pages to hook me in before I let myself get distracted), so I've put it to one side for now and have returned to Norman Rush's Mating, which is one of the most incredible novels of the last 20-odd years and causing major problems with my nightly resolution to start making headway with my magazine stack.
I've spent a large part of my adult life feeling 'persecuted' by reading stacks, which is ridiculous, given what a luxury it is to have a pile of good things to read at arm's length. I think I need to turn that frown upside down and be grateful for such a 'headache'.

Stop! Hammock Time...

2011-04-25T09:53:00.001+02:00

Lloyd Cole!!!

2011-04-17T20:00:00.001+02:00

If you've known me a while, or my record collection, you know I love Lloyd Cole. As a high-schooler I penned a series of filthy short stories about him that may still be my finest works of fiction. I've only seen LC live once before, back in 2003. I flew up from Melbourne to Sydney to go with a great mate, Marie-Claire, who I once spent a pleasantly pissed evening with on Plaza 2 de Mayo in Madrid discussing our mutual love of LC. It had been a long wait to see him -- almost 18 years of fandom and bugger me if I can't remember much of that night, thanks to beers at the Forest Lodge and living in Melbourne too long and forgetting how much more beer a schooner contains than a pot. Years later MC told me that she had seen LC again and he seemed like a sour old bastard and she was swearing off him in concert. But a few weeks ago Denis and I found out that not only was he playing in Switzerland but that he was playing at the cafe just up the road from us. So we left baby Bas in the grandparents' care for the night and savoured the bittersweet taste of freedom and the rather dispiriting realisation that LC fans are, ahem, getting older. But hey, after over 25 years of loving Lloyd it was about time he came to play a show a mere 200 metres from my home and afforded me the opportunity to go to said home during the intermission to use my own loo. Very civilised that. For some reason it made me feel really VIP. Anyway, he was just great -- sang lovely new songs and songs so etched into my memory that I could practically conjure up entire nights spent with old and absent friends held long ago as LC records played in the background. He still looks gorgeous, by the way. After the show, I bought his most recent CD and he signed it for Bas. He seemed pleasantly suprised to hear that his was one of the first records I ever bought. I'd do it all again Lloyd...

Copenhagen On My Mind

2011-04-14T07:56:00.004+02:00

It's funny how a person or a place pops into your heard and then suddenly that person or place is all around you -- opportunities arising, articles in magazines appearing about them, friends bringing up the topic. Copenhagen has been like that for me lately. I first went there back in 2004 for Lonely Planet, and wrote a guidebook about the city. It's always been one of my favourite jobs, for a number of reasons, including the fact that everyone there is as charismatic and oddly sexy as Mads Mikkelsen and they love homewares and rye bread almost as much as I do. Anyway, there have been a few pieces about CPH on this great site (read it here) and a couple of months back, a good friend, who visited me in CPH during that first trip all those years ago, scored a table at Noma, the 'World's Best Restaurant' and there's a place for me at it! It's happening in June. I almost don't want to eat beforehand so I can savour it all the more. Last month I was asked to write about Denmark for a book that's coming out later this year and a couple of days ago I got a commission to write about CPH. My article, which I submitted yesterday is already up -- talk about instant gratification. I love it when this sort of thing happens -- when thoughts seem to create their own momentum.

Aux Yeux de Tous

2011-04-09T20:46:00.007+02:00

We've been busier that a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest lately, so I've been too frazzled to post anything but I wanted to share these pictures we took last weekend at Parc Mon Repos, where there's an open-air sculpture exhibition taking place until the 2nd of October. The weather's been glorious lately, which has put a spring in my step even as various pressures build up around me (lots of work on lately, my Dad's been in hospital and is about to have an operation, our home looks like a tip and Bas has not only learned how to walk but also how to climb -- we're waiting to find him on top of the wardrobe about to dive off). Anyhooooo -- every day I head over to this park and let Bas frolic barefoot after this ridiculously long cold spell. These sculptures reveal something new to me with each visit. There's even a portable minaret, which keeps getting moved around the park and which attracted a lot of comments on the exhibition's opening day, when I almost thoughtI was in West Brunswick for all of five minutes, given the high tattooed hipster parent and groovy kidlets quota. Where all these people are hiding the rest of the time, I've no idea...

Head to: Parc Mon Repos, Lausanne

When: 2 April to 2 October, 24 hours a day, seven days a week

Dinnertime!

2011-03-30T10:25:00.007+02:00

Basile Time Lapse Dinner from Denis Balibouse on Vimeo.

This is what it's like at our place at around 5 o'clock.

Brogues Gallery

2011-03-26T15:02:00.004+01:00

I don't find a lot in Lausanne's second-hand shops, but when I strike gold, it's with a capital G!

Barely worn, a narrow last and for a pittance. I've been hoping for ages that something like these would turn up. Thank-you, God of Op-shopping.

Eat, Drink, See -- Naples x 3

2011-03-24T11:30:00.005+01:00

Eat
Old
One great local dish that I rediscovered and that I’m now craving is anything with friarielli – a local bitter green not unlike sprouting broccoli and used as a side dish (contorni) or with pasta, particularly when combined with salsiccia (sausage). A warming bowl of penne with friarielli and salsiccia on a bitingly cold day at Trattoria Nennella in the Quartieri Spagnoli is a great thing. The atmosphere at this place is boisterous, harried and slightly surreal (fruit handed around in a plastic toilet bowl – above) but it was hard to argue with the simple quality of the dishes or the rock-bottom prices.
Vico Lungo Teatro Nuovo 103

New
Ristorante Radici is a breath of fresh air, albeit a slightly more formal one than you may be used to when dining in Naples. Situated on Via Rivieria di Chiaia, Radici is modern and downright experimental compared to the usual Neapolitan fare, which is a good thing -- because the food combines tried-and-true local ingredients with inventive execution. It’s hard to go past the seafood offerings -- dishes such as a tartare antipasto are a perfect shared starter, but the tender spigola (European seabass), folded into small, melt-in-the-mouth patties, topped with tomatoes and in a delicate broth are stellar.
www.ristoranteradici.it, Via Riviera di Chiaia 268

Timeless
I never quite feel that I’m really on Italian soil until I’ve taken a stroll (passeggiata) with a gelato in hand. This time I got my gelato hit from Gay Odin, in Spaccanapoli. It’s a lovely old-fashioned place, with pretty packets of gift chocolates wrapped up and waiting to go and sweet, almost courtly, service (we were thanked for asking the opinion of the woman serving us). As for the gelato, the chocolate with ginger is a definite winner – all creamy goodness with a kick.
Via Benedetto Croce 61, with other branches throughout the city.

Drink
Old
I know that plenty of people are travelling on tight budgets, but I am thoroughly over the sort of ‘advice’ that drills into people that they are somehow being ripped off should they choose to sit down for their coffee. Yes, you will pay more for your coffee if you sit down to drink it than you will if you stand at the bar. Often double. So in Naples you may end up paying around €2, sometimes €3. I’ve paid more than that for crap coffee in a number of countries, and I didn’t get the pleasure of sitting on Piazza Trieste e Trento with the sun on my face and Neapolitan street scenes playing out before me. For a shot of old-world charm and (admittedly just OK) espresso, park yourself at the venerable Gran Caffé Gambrinus on a blue-sky day and watch the world go by.
Via Chiaia 1

New
Walking through the old neighbourhoods in Italy gets tiring -- all those cobblestones make it just that little bit tougher on the feet and the sense of balance. Naples is even more tiring due to the constant street-level performances that unfold around you. After a hard day’s pavement pounding, this modern, design-centric bar called La Stanza del Gusto (below) is a haven. It has excellent nibbles and a nicely edited beer menu (you can even combine the two and enjoy a ‘birramisù), plus what might just be Naples’ nicest loos.
www.lastanzadelgusto.com, Via Costantinopoli 100

Timeless
OK, now you can stand up for your coffee. And give it a round of applause while you’re at it, because Caffè Mexico may well crank out the world’s greatest coffee. Plus there’s bright orange décor from the 1960s, locals giving you the eye because it’s obvious you’re not from these parts and dreamy morning pastries.
Piazza Dante 86

See
Old
I had a spare half-hour before catching up with friends and I wanted to see something art-related, but didn’t fancy traipsing through a large museum in a limited time. So I popped in to see the Martirio di sant’Orsola (Martyrdom of St Ursula), Caravaggio’s final painting. It’s in an old, rather lavish palace that now serves as bank and the small gallery holds this masterpiece and other small exhibitions. For a paltry €4 I pretty much had the whole painting to myself, and was able to learn some really interesting facts about the painting’s provenance and restoration.
Galeria di Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Via Toledo 185

New
Italy does the past better than almost anyone – and so they should – they have a glorious one, filled with art and architecture that have inspired millions. Sadly, revelling in past glories has meant that contemporary art and architecture have often been ignored or sacrificed, particularly in Italy’s south, where the dusty yesterday seems to have a death grip on today and tomorrow never quite seems to arrive. MADRE (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina Napoli – below) opened in 2005 in the historic heart of Naples and has made great strides in setting a contemporary agenda, despite the inevitable funding cuts and bureaucratic nightmares. There are glorious site-specific installations from artists such as Francesco Clemente, Jannis Kounellis and Anish Kapoor and a solid roster of temporary exhibitions. If you’re in town with limited time, skip the umpteenth ‘Madonna with Child’ depiction and visit this place instead.

http://www.museomadre.it/

Timeless
It’s hard to underestimate the role that the brooding behemoth Mt Vesuvius plays in the city’s collective psyche. The volcano is immense, and the effects it has had on the city’s past are of an equally grand proportion: the destruction of Pompeii and the fact that it’s the only mainland European volcano to erupt in the last 200 years never fail to provide sharp perspective. It’s easy to catch sight of Mt Vesuvius (a mere 9km away) from numerous vantage points throughout the city, such as Piazza del Plebiscito, the Giardini Pubblici, the various waterfront paths and Parco di Capodimonte. If you want to get closer, incredible views of the Bay of Naples can be had from the volcano’s summit (1281m) -- a short train ride, bus trip and hike away.

One Last Thing
Naples’s tony Chiaia quarter plays host to isi, a recently opened gem of a contemporary art space with exhibitions, quirky things to buy and a smart little bistro where you can eat local food for a measly €3-6. As neat and shiny as a new pin, but also a friendly, relaxed place and a much-needed addition to the local art scene (below).
www.isiartiassociate.com, Via Vittoria Colonna 4

Hotels We Love

2011-03-17T14:27:00.005+01:00

I grew up in Sydney, but none of my family are there now, so when I go back, which I try to do every year, I either have to stay with old friends or, shock horror, actually book accommodation. I've checked out literally hundreds of places to stay in Sydney over the last decade and I think I have a pretty good nose for accommodation now, especially in the city that I still consider my first love. Last time we were out there we stayed in this place and it raced straight to the top of my favourite Sydney sleeping options. So I did what any self-respecting travel writer would do and raved about it and wrote about it. Which means we'll probably have to go back to staying with old mates (hi Jen and Dave!), because this place deserves to be booked out every day of the year.
And another thing -- the Hotels We Love site is great if you're ever looking for a place to stay that has a bit more character than the usual three-star, floral-bedspread, could-be-anywhere chain hotel. And it's independent, so you can actually believe what they say about a place.

My Creative Space -- Bas's Stripey Cardi

2011-03-17T08:46:00.004+01:00

The back is finished and I've started on one of the front panels. Am really enjoying watching DVDs from home as I knit, late at night, on the couch.

No Words, Just Naples

2011-03-12T19:28:00.006+01:00

Boarding Pass

2011-03-05T18:35:00.004+01:00

The first, and probably last, time I've been snowboarding this season. I ache all over but I'm happy as a clam. Hope your weekend has been just as satisfying.

My Creative Space -- Bas's Stripey Cardi

2011-03-03T08:11:00.003+01:00

Here it is, coming along nicely after a few days of light swearing, ripping out the work and starting all over again (twice!). I'd dropped a stitch and am not skilled enough to remedy the situation and then when I cast on again I had too few stitches. Cue the sound of me doubting my abilities. Then I realised that getting in a tizz about this was simply not necessary. So I stopped listening to myself and continued and now I'm up to the part where I'm shaping the armholes on the back piece. Dare I say it – I'm feeling good about it.

Snoop My Stuff

2011-03-02T09:07:00.005+01:00

This great blog is hosting a bit of a sticky beak, so I decided to join in, partly because I'm currently writing a short story titled Snoop, so I'm grabbing any 'synchro' where I can. These are the shelves that are just behind me in our office. You can see a good amount of dictionaries, style manuals and some of the books I've authored and co-authored. And there are boxes full of 'stuff'. The one on the bottom shelf, furthest to the left, holds receipts for tax. The checkered one just to the right of it holds supplies for a long-avoided craft project. At least I can boast that I made and covered the box myself, if that counts for anything. The orange box is one I found in the rubbish outside the local Hermès store a few years back. There are also archive boxes of all the pages I write in the morning and am really not sure what to do with. There's a phrenology head, which I bought in London a few years back at a little market, and a lovely photo of the artist John Olsen. And the globe? It's a money box that Denis and I use as a swear box, with all the proceeds going to Bas. We often joke that he'll have a really great Vespa by the time he starts high school.

Pressed for Time

2011-02-25T13:52:00.008+01:00

It's an old art, but it's come back in a big way and I love finding practitioners of it. I'm talking about letterpress (relief printing with movable type), which I kind of always knew existed but hadn't really thought about until my friend Emily showed me her calling card about seven years ago. It had been done for her by her best friend, the talented Carolyn Fraser, ie the girl behind girlprinter. A few years ago, in the midst of packing up my life to move from Australia to Switzerland I decided to celebrate such an adventure/commitment by having some business cards printed. And lo and behold, I met Carolyn for the first time and decided that she was the person to make my cards. They're beautiful things -- every time I hand one out the recipient makes cooing noises and then strokes the surface of the card, savouring the feel of the Italian paper and the indentation of the words. I'm glad I had 500 of them printed.

Recently I bought some general birthday/greetings/thanks/condolences cards from this printer. They're so lovely that I often find myself debating in my head whether I can bear to write in the cards and send them away. This place also does some nice designs, which I often find on sale in our local department store.

A few years back I was helping out at an atelier that happened to have the necessary equipment but I was too shy to pester the owner into let me try it out. Maybe I'll work up the courage this year...

My Creative Space -- Bas's Stripey Cardi

2011-02-17T07:58:00.004+01:00

I started this cardigan in London in December and then forgot about it. When I rediscovered it the other day I realised I had used the wrong size needles and had to start all over again, but I don't mind, because I am really enjoying making this and have given myself plenty of time to finish. It's for Bas for next winter. Never let it be said that I don't plan ahead. Or know how long it takes to finish a knitting project...

It's the first time I'm taking part in this. I hope they don't get sick of seeing the same cardigan every week!

Urban Decay

2011-02-16T13:15:00.007+01:00

This book arrived in the post today. I've spent the best part of the day flicking through it, mesmerised by the images of decay. It's hard to believe that the city we know as Detroit, which a mere 100 years ago was thriving, is now in partial ruins. When we think of the word 'ruins' we tend to think of the ancient world, not of buildings abandoned and left to the elements and scavengers only a generation ago.

It's been a long time since I splashed out and bought a coffee-table book, but this was one I needed to see for myself, at my leisure. There's a great slide show, which was published in the Guardian that you can see here. It's what made me want to buy the book in the first place.

The Long Haul

2011-02-10T20:53:00.019+01:00

First off, apologies for the formatting on this one. Blogger is driving me around the bend today...

Honestly, even though I’ve been writing about travel for over a decade I have rarely given much thought to the ‘Travel With Children’ issue. I’ve had to research child-friendly places before but Iwhen I was writing full-time I had little investment in the topic. My bad. To all the people who on my recommendation went to places marked as child-friendly because I saw a swimming pool (but never looked for a fence or gate around said pool, change facilities, high chairs or padded cells), I’m sorry.

Like every other overly opinionated woman with too much time on her hands who was blessed the world with the fruit of her loins, Jesus (sorry, Catholic education), I started thinking more about the issue of how I could escape the den of plush-toy madness that has become our home. Endless column inches are devoted to ‘What about the children? The precious children!’ yet very few practical aspects of getting your children around seem to dominate the thinking of town planners, infrastructure bigwigs or architects. I’m looking at you, Italy. And no, crapping on about ‘enormous’ prams that are taking over the inner city does not count for discussion of this matter.

So in October last year Denis and I flew all the way from Geneva to Australia with our baby, Bas, who was nine months’ old at the time. That’s 24 hours in transit and without your own bathroom, which is about decade in childless years. It was every emotion in one day -- highs, lows, life flashing before your eyes and incontinence (not an emotion, but it feels like one now) at altitude. I’ve condensed the two flights (yes, that’s 48 hours of travel time) into one easy-to-digest whinge.

Time to play!

The Good

Believe it or not, most people don’t give you the death stare for bringing your baby on a long-haul flight. In the weeks leading up to our trip, I was seriously worried that someone would just start shouting at me when they saw that they would be sharing airspace with me and my succubus.
Cabin crew are paid to pretend that they’ve never seen a finer specimen of babyhood.
The bassinets. Your arms, shoulders and neck will love them (but only if your baby is less than 10kg -- ie, under a year old -- and can actually fit into them).
Jennifer Aniston films. Seriously, where else can you watch such crap without being tarred and feathered by earnest hipsters? It’s a parallel universe at 30,000 feet and no one cares if you read Dostoyevsky or watch the collected works of Drew Barrymore.
Gorgeous Lebanese families whose kids all sport rosary beads and think nothing of cuddling your baby so you can go to the loo in peace.
The guy who could have had one of those chairs with heaps of legroom but gave it up so that my husband (in the squishy middle row) could sit next to me and the baby when we were allocated seats far apart from each other. He was tall too.
My sense of smell goes AWOL on planes. I was blissfully unaware that Bas had done a crap that resembled a feedlot for a good 12 hours or so. I called it a mini-break.
The free strollers at Abu Dhabi airport. Even when they’re stained.

The Bad

The airplane’s toilets. The sound of the flushing sent Bas into meltdown. He screamed for 10 minutes straight, which is a new record. All while I tried to keep him on the pathetic excuse for a change table (the meals come on bigger surfaces), grab stuff out of the bag (with no hook to hang it on) and not lose the plot.
Did I mention this took place over 24 hours?
If you’re not prepared to play peek-a-boo with my kid, then don’t make eye contact in the first place. Having to do the whole ‘he’s just not that into you’ talk with a baby is not cool.
Waiting for baby food to come around, an hour after you asked for it. There are no ‘baby meals’ on planes, just jars of mush, which is fine, as my baby loves a jar of mush, but the woman next to me was under the impression that a separate tray laden with infant-specific organic treats made especially for her baby would be appearing within seconds of him becoming hungry. So she complained. A lot. To me and three members of the cabin crew. And then she wanted to speak to the pilot, or ‘whoever’s in charge’.
Headphones. Babies don’t want you wearing them. They look too delicious.
You know how your feet swell up when you travel? Now put them on your chest and call them your boobs. Actually, just one of them. The other one’s gone on strike. And then you decide to ease the pain and breastfeed and can’t remember what the deal is with airlines based in Islamic countries and tit flashing. They allow alcohol on the plane, but there's no pork on the menu...is public nudity cool because we're in international airspace?
24-frackin’-hours.
Babies don’t let you watch craptacular Jennifer Aniston films. They want to watch the flight path map. All. The. Time.

The Ugly

The drunken, unreconstructed ex-Soviet winner who insisted on sleeping on the floor, called the flight attendant a stupid bitch and a whore when she (twice) tried to wake him up gently and have him go back to his seat and then threatened to fight the male flight attendant, who was brought in to do the heavy lifting. Then he went back to sleep on the floor again, until he was threatened with arrest once we touched down in Abu Dhabi. At least the fool could think straight enough to realise that trying his luck in a Middle Eastern prison whilst shitfaced might not be the highlight of his holiday. He then decided to get his groove on by singing in his seat and kicking the back of the chair of the guy in front, which caused another row, with Russian-accented “Fuck you”s flying back and forth. So relaxing, having to think of how you’ll shield your infant from a punch-up between a tracksuit-wearing pisshead and a guy with a mullet who looks like he just won a cage-fighting comp.
Mirrors. That said, at least I won’t be shocked by my appearance when I actually turn 60. I think I make my dowager's hump work for me.
I did the return trip solo. I’m not ready to talk about it. But I will say this to the woman who I saw doing it alone with three kids: ‘Shine on you crazy diamond’.
Australians who think their filthy, scaly feet look good in thongs. Yes, feet swell during flights, but that doesn’t mean you get to inflict what looks like a pair of roughed-up dugongs with yellow toenails on the rest of us. I’m looking at you, slovenly Wesley College boy whose parents manage to find AUD$20,000 for your education but can’t get you into proper footwear.

This is definitely not The Ugly...

Nuclear Family

2011-02-10T15:59:00.008+01:00

We don't always get the chance to go somewhere as a family, so I was pretty excited (actually, ridiculously so) that we were able to get places for a guided tour for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). I've been keen to go for ages, especially since reading this article about the Large Hadron Collider (no need for anyone to scratch their heads thinking up a title if there's a particle physics-themed porno being made) in Vanity Fair last year. I'm far from being a science nerd, but the older I get, the more I realise that it's a very cool subject. When I went back to university five years ago and had to spend every waking hour trying to come to grips with Analytical Chemistry something really shifted for me and I realised how much I had missed out on by not going past Year 10 science.

This post is just a few snaps of our trip there, as despite my copious nerdy note-taking there's no way I could provide a halfway decent recap about what's going on at CERN. Let's just say they're building a time machine.

The place is jam-packed with bearded boffins who are hard-pressed to explain what it is they are doing to the layman. The middle picture, above, is actually used as a sort of learning aid when describing what goes on with the ATLAS experiment. The guy who was leading our tour was clearly grateful to have a giant mural to hand, as I get the feeling that conversation with the general public is not a strong point for the men and women of CERN. But still, the short film at the beginning of the tour was really inspiring, showing that men and women, from all around the world, regardless of race, religion and class can come together and make something so incredible. I think this used to be the job of the Olympics, but those evil geniuses at CERN have obviously taken over.

Oh, and did you know that CERN gave the world the World Wide Interwebs? Worth it just for that I think you'll agree.

Old

2011-02-05T11:06:00.005+01:00

I love checking out retro typography and design, as it can be so evocative and charming. I found my birth card recently when going through some old files and wanted to share it, because I love how old-fashioned it looks, right down to the pink-for-girls colour and the recommendation for a nappy-washing service. It makes me feel quite old though, like I was born during the Mad Men era...which I wasn't. But it does look like something Betty Draper would have had handed to her, doesn't it?

Cushioning the Blow

2011-02-03T13:57:00.018+01:00

There's something both inspiring and dispiriting about people who can just make stuff. Because they can usually make stuff happen too, thanks to their superior abilities at finishing what they start. I recently bought some cushion covers from one of my favourite bloggers, the delightful chunkychooky, who makes all sorts of beautiful things under the name of My Bearded Pigeon. I also bought a cushion cover from a seller on Etsy known as Vintage Jaime.

All of these purchases were fueled by a certain wistful nostalgia. The cushion cover above left is the map of the Seoul metro network. The one above right is a vintage map of Sydney. I grew up in both of these cities.

And then there's this beauty, which is of Melbourne, the last city I lived in Australia and where I was born.

And just to keep the door open to possibilities, I bought a cushion for a place I've never lived: New York. Honestly, it's highly unlikely we will ever live there, but I like the idea of being surprised (pleasantly, one hopes) by the future and chunkychooky didn't have a map cushion of Jakarta. Which is a good thing.

And if you're curious about the fabric for the cushion above left, it was made from an antique Burmese longyi (a sheet of cloth worn by almost everyone in Burma). My great-aunt lived there a long time ago and kept this fabric for many years until it was passed down to my Mum, who gave it to me. It spent over a decade folded up in a cupboard until I decided it was too beautiful to keep hidden in such a state. I was nervous about damaging it though, so I took it to my friend Marion, who sews like a dream, and in a matter of minutes it was a cushion cover. And so it comes full circle...people who can make stuff are so inspiring. It almost makes me want to buy a sewing machine, but I'm terrified that it will sit on the dining table, taunting me silently, because I'm too scared to start making something and stuff it up.

Winter

2011-02-01T13:59:00.006+01:00

Living in winter is different to visiting a place in winter. Obviously. I just wish I'd known that before I moved to Europe to live.

It's around this time of year, if I'm unable to get up past the cloud line and see the sun and do a bit of snowboarding, that my shoulders slump. Grey is just so...grey. And why on earth do I keep buying grey clothes?

Bas handles it better than I do. He's a cheery little guy and doesn't seem to be suffering from the lack of time spent across the road at the park, feet on the grass and hands in the dirt. Our walks are perfunctory affairs these days. If the sun is shining it often means that the vile wind known as 'la bise' is up, which kills my curiosity about heading outside for some fresh air (if by fresh air you mean a face full of frosted influenza). If it's mild but grey then I find myself wondering if I can really be bothered.

It's a pensive, quiet time of year -- all the excitement of Christmas and New Year's is well and truly over, and the rush of crafting resolutions has diminished somewhat. Some people very dear to me are going through unimaginably hard times at the moment, and while it makes you realise that small good strokes of fortune and minor details are all you often need to be coming up roses, it also makes you wish there were better ways to reach out to people across oceans. Words seem so inadequate when people you love are facing the hardest parts of their lives and you're not where they are.

So I'm counting small blessings, such as a lovely walk in the woods on a sunny day and the fact that Bas seems to like the hat and scarf I made him when I was pregnant. And good books. Where would we be without good books and warm bedding on cold nights? And people to share them with. And the right footwear when you finally do make it outside, although Bas is still letting his Australian side win our daily shoe battle and refusing to wear anything but socks, which he generally shakes off after five minutes.

Beach & Bush

2011-01-14T13:03:00.004+01:00

It already feels like ages ago that we were in Australia, introducing Bas to my parents (a huge success, albeit one that makes me more and more homesick every time I think about it) and to some of my favourite aspects of Australian life. Here he is at Clovelly Beach, close to where I grew up.

And in the bush near my Mum's place in the Blue Mountains, with the beautiful Cara.

My mum calls him Little Bosker, which I'd never heard of but according to a quick google means this:

'Australian Slang:
very good; excellent.'

2010 -- I Hardly Knew You

2011-01-05T13:35:00.004+01:00

Time flies, huh? Or maybe it just never was into commitment much, because I already feel a bit abandoned by 2010 and sorta 'not that into you' about 2011. For a start, I feel asleep with the baby on my chest midway through our New Year's Eve dinner. Then a day or so later I came down with a mean case of gastro. Then Bas went through some kind of devil's-own teething eruption. And I have a deadline about a city close to here, which I quite like and that I want to do a good job on, but damn if I can really find the discipline or ability to actually sit down for more than five minutes in a row before I'm distracted by the shiny, glittering baubles of the interwebs. Colour me useless.

At least there's some decent stuff on the 'net again. Not like over Christmas, when it was like sitting down to glance at Australian TV in the non-ratings period. I let myself get carried away by this great article by my good friend George. It's got me wanderlusting (and thinking about the fine art of budgeting) something severe. Despite the fact that I should be thinking about getting paid to write about the city that's a mere 60km away. And then maybe I'd have a sum of money to budget for a big trip, or even a middling one.

And on that note: what's your favourite budgeting tip? Your favourite way to waste time that should be spent working? I find that writing down what I spend is a big help, although I frequently forget to do it, even though I have a little notepad just for such a thing. And as for killing time, does anything really beat writing lists of the housework you need to do, even though you managed to avoid doing it before you had a deadline?

Joyeux Noël!

2010-12-21T14:16:00.009+01:00

How is it that only one year ago I was heavily pregnant and now I have a 10-month-old who is about to eat the apartment we live in? And I STILL haven't managed to sort out the 'pile of shame' that sits cluttering one corner of the bedroom and which was supposed to be dealt with before the baby arrived?

Or that our building's annual Christmas crêche is up and running (albeit without the controversial political theme of last year)? Seriously, I still feel as though last Christmas was about three months ago, although I was kind of counting on the building's kids to explain the Wikileaks scandal to me with the help of some handy old egg cartons and a little glitter for this year's extravaganza. I feel as though I have missed out on a lot of news and current affairs lately.

2010's festive effort was constructed last Friday night thanks to Lego and Bas, who was more than happy to show the other kids how it's done. As you can see, he got stuck right in. Not bad for a first timer. And I'm pleased to say I managed to stop him from eating any of it, although a lot of slobber was spilled.

The final result, I'm sure you'll agree, is magnificent. Well done kids!

Happy Christmas everyone, and I hope 2011 (still feels like a typo when I write that) is a pearler for you and yours.

London Calling

2010-12-07T15:49:00.008+01:00

Where do people get the time to blog and do the stuff they actually blog about?

In recent weeks we've travelled a fair bit. All the way back home to Australia and last weekend to London. I can't even face the idea of wading through all the Australian photos, or casting my mind back to write about it -- not yet, anyway. Next time, I promise.

The London part of the equation, I can face. For a long time I had an ambivalent relationship with the city. I didn't feel the urge to go and do the working holiday visa thing when I was in my twenties, partly because I was a little chicken (I'm not sure why, but I'll think about it and get back to you) and partly because I was really turned off by the idea of slaving away in some office job all Winter long for something like ₤12,000 a year and the chance to share a place with no water pressure and ugly carpet in Tooting Bec with a bunch of other Australians. In recent years, I've loved the place -- the palpable energy, the fact that I can now afford to eat there, the mix of people and the sense of possibility. All weekend I felt a tinge of regret that I didn't give London a shot when I was young enough to handle the pace, like the young chap below.

Anyway, London is as crowded, as cold and as crazy as ever, but my worst nightmare, of tube-induced pram trauma, never came true and we had a wonderful time, especially as our flight home was cancelled and we scored a little extra time in the city. We travelled over there to celebrate the wedding of two good friends, Rachael and Laurence. They live in a place in North London with a view of the Arsenal stadium. We drank a lot of champagne and danced until the wee hours (well, almost midnight). It was the first time we had left Bas with a babysitter and he handled it like the trooper he is. It felt like such a long time since we had gone out to do something other than buy nappies that I bought a really tizzy frock for the occasion and wore a painfully high pair of heels.

The next day, we indulged in my favourite of all London pastimes, the fry-up, and I went to check out what may well be the cutest shop in London: Loop, a place that I have only visited online but have ordered many lovely packages from.

God bless you bacon, black pudding and baked beans...

Autumn

2010-10-11T21:24:00.006+02:00

It's been ages, and that's because of a number of things. One of which is a big fat case of ennui. It's been hard enough to even summon the energy for me to even read a blog, let alone write one and I've seriously debated ending this one, as I seem to have run out of things to say (and I didn't start with much to say either). Swissing Around is not a mummy blog. It's not a travel blog. It's not a literary blog. It's not much of a blog at all. It's seriously lacking in the purpose department, a lot like me right now. I'm pretty much content these days to hang out with Bas and Denis and write lists about imaginary storage solutions, imaginary garden ideas, imaginary knitting projects and synopses for short stories and novels that aren't about to write themselves. Lists are about all that I can write these days. Anything else, like guidebooks or freelance articles and we have a problem. I've had some editing work on as well, and while it feels kind of good to exercise the brain again, I also feel a big old selfish streak coming on, about to roar its way up my back and hammer my tensed-up shoulders and neck into submission, meaning I want to spend more time working on the stuff I'm passionate about -- and that's fiction right now. Add to this general meh-ness the fact that Folie Volaire, my summer escape across the road, will close for the year soon and you can colour me just a tad melancholy. Autumn always does that to me, even when it's a beautiful as it looks in this picture. Good thing we'll be in Spring again soon – thanks to a trip back home.

A Berry Good Afternoon

2010-09-08T13:38:00.003+02:00

When I first moved to Lausanne, I was a bit disappointed by the size of the place. I've always been a city slicker, and I tend to love the really big ones, like Tokyo, New York and Beijing. So a place with only 125,000 or so people was always going to feel more like a 'town' to me.

But every cloud has a silver lining and one of Lausanne's is that you can feel as though you're in the countryside after a quick car or train ride. Yesterday we all went off for a walk in the woods and did a spot of blackberry picking (mingled with nettle rustling -- my fingers are still itching!). Bas was strapped into the Baby Björn and seemed to really love traipsing through the woods, looking for fat juicy blackberries. We were 10 minutes from the centre of town and 1000 miles from care, nettles and all. The berries were served with homemade strawberry gelato a few hours later.

Bum First

2010-08-10T13:22:00.004+02:00

Bas is off to the paediatrician this week to receive his six-month vaccine. He handles such things like many other babies -- goes red in the face, wails like Charlie Parker and then lets his sleep patterns go batshit-crazy for at least a week. Fun! Luckily, he doesn’t seem to suffer from any other side effects, such as fever or pain at the puncture site. Luckily for me, that is. Because when the good doctor asked me if I had anything to reduce a potential fever or discomfort in Bas I shook my head (I am famous for having the crappest medicine cabinet in Christendom -- I spent about 10 years with an old bottle of tea-tree oil and a couple of Naprogesic for a first-aid kit before I had a baby). She then wrote me a script for a paracetamol-based medicine called Dafalgan. Dafalgan suppositories. Here’s our exchange:

Me: I see. Is it possible to get Dafalgan in tablet form?

Dr Jequier: Yes, but this is better for a baby.

Uncomfortable pause.

Me: I’d really prefer tablets or drops or something. I’ve never used suppositories.

Dr Jequier looks at me as though I’m nuts.

Dr Jequier: Ah, of course, You’re Anglo-Saxon. Yes, that's one of the cultural differences I'd forgotten about...

So, I have a box of Dafalgan suppositories for babies in our medicine cabinet, in case you’re interested, plus a new-found awareness of the differing attitudes to bum medicine between Anglo-Saxon countries and the French-speaking world. And you thought it was mainly a tea/coffee, beer/wine thing...

Yes, that's what I want -- TABLETS!

Mamamia

2010-07-17T16:28:00.002+02:00

I answered some questions about my life as an expat in Switzerland for Mia Freedman's fantastic Mamamia blog. It came out yesterday and I've been really touched by the response.

Here it is, in case you're interested: http://www.mamamia.com.au/weblog/2010/07/expat-files-lausanne.html

Have a great weekend -- wherever you are!

May I Borrow Your Language?

2010-07-05T08:51:00.006+02:00

I'm interested in the way the English language, like a magpie, takes little snippets from other languages when we don't feel we have quite the right word or phrase to cover the situation. I like the way we say 'Je ne sais quoi' to make 'I don't know what' sound so much fancier. Or 'crème de la crème'. Denis and I had a funny exchange about that one once, when he asked me what we say in English for just that very phrase.

'Crème de la crème.'

'Exactly. How do you say it in English?'

'Crème de la crème.'

'Oui, but in English. What do you say for that?'

And on it went.

The French language can be notoriously chauvinist -- preferring to have a proper French word for something than borrow an English one. For example, instead of saying computer the French decided to come up with the word 'ordinateur'. One of my little faves is 'talkie walkie' instead of 'walkie talkie'. I think you'll agree the latter lacks a certain je ne sais quoi...

Yesterday, when I was out on our morning walk (or should that be promenade?), I saw this newspaper headline. I noticed that they had taken an English word lock, stock and barrel to describe this particular situation, as though there could not possibly be a French word to describe a situation so crude and base.

I can't tell you how proud I am...

English, what a gift you are to the world.

Book Lovers

2010-06-26T19:33:00.002+02:00

How good an idea is THIS? I haven't lived in Melbourne for a few years now, and I'm happily married, but this is making me giggly with excitement. I want to hear what happens at this thing! And it's also made me play a lovely five-minute game of 'hypotheticals' (where's Geoffrey Robertson when you need him?) with myself about which book I would take to this night if I were still footloose and fancy free... Pynchon's V? Harpo Speaks (the ghostwritten autobiography of Harpo Marx)? The Secret History? Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow? Anna Karenina?

I desperately want to find outwhat books other people bring to this event. Georgie Fame, I expect a full report...

Another Year, Another Fête!

2010-05-26T18:55:00.006+02:00

One year ago I did my first blog, about the Fête des Voisins, which happens every year and allows neighbours to get together and just celebrate the fact that they're neighbours (the Swiss, being a stable, courteous folk, make especially good ones).

My first FdeV was two years ago, when I was still waiting for my resident's permit and was just back from working in Berlin. I was tired and not all that keen to go, but ended up having a lovely, wine-fuelled time and feeling much more at home in the apartment block where we live.

Last year's FdeV was held in the bunker downstairs (the laundry-cum-bomb shelter), due to rain and I piked out early because I felt tired due to being in the early stages of pregnancy, so I was really looking forward to getting back into the swing of things with this year's bash.

So, Bas had his first FdeV and seemed so excited about the whole thing that he missed his cue to fall asleep and rocked out until way past 9pm. Perhaps my stirring rendition of the Neighbours theme song (the Barry Crocker years) overexcited him, but it was lovely to see him smiling at his neighbours, who I hope will play an important role in giving him a sense of where he's from. I had fantastic neighbours when I was growing up in Randwick and I've had some great ones since (especially the Merton Court crew) -- they really do play a huge role in your life when they're people you admire and respect.

The thing I like most about the FdeV is how we get together without much fuss (under the trees and near the aviary in the beautiful park across the road) to share nibbles and wine and talk a little bit more than we usually do when we all bump into each other in the foyer and we're getting the mail.

Hopefully, this idea will travel to Australia one day...

Park it right here...

2010-05-24T17:40:00.005+02:00

I don't know anyone who doesn't have a list as long as an arm of things they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO DO or life as we know it will cease.

Which is why I love the public holidays so much here -- pretty much everything shuts down and there's no way you can really tackle half the stuff on that ridiculous list you so carefully constructed late at night in order to make yourself feel... what exactly? Guilt? Importance? A sense of control? I've never quite figured it out.

Today is Pentecost, and as a good ex-Catholic schoolgirl I had to look it up on Wikipedia. The canton of Vaud has declared it a public holiday, and someone special up there really turned on the magic weather-wise.

We've had a spate of public holidays lately and they are a lovely way of easing into late Spring/early Summer. We took Bas off to our local park -- Parc Mon Repos, which also goes by the nickname 'the most beautiful park in the world' according to one graffiti writer.

We ate ice cream, we lay on the grass and cuddled and we watched the world go by. I couldn't think of a single thing I had to do...

In Your Face, Procrastination!

2010-05-10T14:59:00.007+02:00

Life in Switzerland can get to me sometimes -- not in a particularly bad way, but it can highlight a few qualities of mine that are less than stellar, such as my tendency to procrastinate.

Like a true chicken, I’m generally very good with deadlines imposed by other people. I can edit chapters despite nasty turn-around times, submit written work ahead of schedule and I generally pay bills bang on time. Even at uni, despite the siren's song of Manning Bar, I never submitted an essay late after my first excuse-filled year of studies.

But if it’s just me who’s cracking the whip it’s a different story, which makes me think I need to spend a few more years on the couch with Dr Freud. What does it say about a person when they can keep their promises to other people but not to themselves? (That’s a rhetorical question, although if you have a nice answer, do let me know.)

And this is where the whole Swiss thing gets me down, because the Swiss do as they say and say as they do. When they start something, they tend to finish it. They don’t sign on for things that they can’t possibly come good on, such as knitting a pullover for a three-month old baby, or joining the European Union. You generally don't find half-arsed DIY projects littering Swiss houses or cars up on block in front yards. My father-in-law is coming over this week to finish off our 'kitchen hole' -- a cupboard that needs a little TLC and a kick up the bum because he can't stand looking at it anymore.

I managed to knit Bas a blanket, hat and scarf before he made his appearance, but the jumper I wanted to have finished in time for his first Winter just sat on the windowsill for months. The actual knitting was finished -- all I had to do was sew up the components, slip it over his head and then wait for him to start cracking the sads because it was itchy or he didn’t like the way it clashed with his eyes or something. It sat on the windowsill, silently taunting me until early last week when I could face it no more.

Bas is over three months’ old now and it’s Spring. I was afraid that the pullover would no longer fit him or would be useless with the warmer weather, which only added a new dose of guilt to the mix. So I started sewing up the different parts of the garment and forced myself not to think about it too much, because I suspect that a large part of why I put things like this off is that I don’t want to devote time to something in case I make a mistake and it doesn’t turn out ‘right’. The more I simply looked at the work, without bringing emotion into it, the more I worked on it, held it up to better light and unpicked little mistakes without making a drama out of it, the more I was able to just enjoy the act of sewing up a pullover for my baby and the more I realised just how utterly stupid procrastination can be -- it’s little more than a mutation of that nasty old perfectionism ‘flu (which I used to doubt afflicted me, but now I’m not so sure). To combat Perfectionism, I’m going to keep this wonderful quote from Julia Cameron in mind:

‘Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again.

No. We Should not.’

And here’s the result of turning off that ridiculous inner voice and just picking up the needle and thread and having a go. I quite like the fact that I managed to finish this damn pullover on Mother’s Day. I hope it’s as soft and cuddly as you are Bas. Now, dribble away...

One Out of Three Ain't Bad

2010-04-25T18:55:00.007+02:00

There are a lot of blogs out there where nice women go into loving detail about recipes, knitting patterns, how they manage to raise adorable kids and also run a successful business from home, all whilst sleeping 15 minutes every 24 hours.

Not me! I have pretty much avoided cooking since I had a baby three months ago, partly because my husband is a hell of a lot better at it and partly because my brain can think of little more than pasta recipes involving a tin of tomatoes and some garlic. I also have unfinished knitting on the window sill and my only business is keeping Bas happy, which I'm pleased to say is fairly easy at this stage.

Anyway, we were invited to an ANZAC Day BBQ and in true Australian style it was a bring-your-own-meat affair. Denis had found a recipe in a local women's mag (by accident, I'm sure) named Femina for a trio of lamb brochette marinades and we figured we'd give them a try. Like many ladies' mags, Femina (I know, it sounds like a line of sanitary pads) likes to keep abreast of the trends and so featured two 'Asian-style' marinades for its readers to try.

Big mistake. If there's one thing I've learned while here it's that Europeans probably shouldn't attempt their own 'Asian-style' anything. Hell, they don't even know that when you eat in a Chinese restaurant, you order dishes to share. Der...

And then they make conversation that revolves around how little you know of the world as an Australian, because you grew up at the arse end of it, with no culture, history or even architecture to speak of.

But where was I? That's right -- the marinades, which I decided to do myself because I was in a mood to cook.

I quickly nixed Marinade No 1, the 'satay-style' affair, which featured absolutely NO mention of peanuts. Not even peanut butter, for lazy satay. It's a bit like a recipe for duck à l'orange that calls for no duck. Or orange.

So I went with marinade No 2, which was a citrus-y affair. The recipe called for 200ml of orange juice, three tablespoons of lime juice, one tablespoon of orange and lime zest each, one tablespoon of turmeric, one tablespoon of crushed lemongrass, one tablespoon of crushed ginger and one bouquet of finely chopped coriander. Sounds OK doesn't it?

Reader, it was the single most vile thing I have EVER made. So bad, that I made Denis taste it to check that it wasn't a figment of post-partum psychosis and then I photographed it before chucking it away. It was that bad it was worth snapping. Like orange juice spiced with dirt and old socks. Why on earth would I want expensive lamb (and all lamb is expensive here, but hey, it was for ANZAC Day...) to take a bath in a foul brew like that?

So I stuck with the only Euro-seeming recipe on the page, which called for the old stand-bys such as red-wine vinegar, honey, oil, thyme, coriander, cardamom, Dijon mustard mixed with an acceptable level of 'Asian-style' in the form of soy sauce and curry powder. It worked, which is a good thing, because otherwise we would have been know as the ring-ins who sullied the ANZAC Day BBQ with the filthiest lamb kebabs ever. Un-Australian...

So in keeping with the general 'lifestyle' tone of this post, here's a pic of the world's wrongest marinade. I styled it myself.

Don't tell me, don't tell me! It's on the tip of my tongue. Unfortunately.

Happy Sunday

2010-04-19T13:26:00.007+02:00

There’s something about Sundays in Lausanne that reminds me of growing up in the 1970s, mostly because I remember what a quiet day it was in Sydney at that time. Shops didn’t open, and if you ate out it usually meant that your parents had decided you’d been good enough to warrant a trip to McDonald’s in your pyjamas after your bath. I haven’t seen kids with combed wet hair and pyjamas in a McDonald’s queue for a long time...

But I digress! Lausanne’s shops remain closed on Sunday and so do a lot of places to eat, which means that people go out and do stuff instead, like hang out in the park, go skiing, hiking or swimming, go away to their chalet or have friends around for brunch.

Yesterday’s weather was glorious -- sunshine, blue skies and gentle breezes. It was T-shirt weather, without a doubt. You’d never guess a volcano had created havoc throughout Europe.

I took Bas out for a walk and headed to an open-atelier thing that was organised by these people. It was a chance to see behind the scenes of some of Lausanne's artists,who had kindly opened their studio spaces for sticky-beakers like me. I love checking out where other people work -- it can be more illuminating than their living space. I love seeing how they’ve organised their desk, whether they’re a tidy desk type or a 'paper hurricane' type. I love seeing whether they use tools for their job (whether it be a bone folder or an iMac), whether they need reference books to do their job, whether they work with music in the background, whether they need a lot of light or have had to collect ancient equipment that’s no longer in use but they need in order to keep certain techniques alive.

After a few years of freelancing from home I got really sick of staring at the same four walls and missed the social life and camaraderie of office work, so I rented a little space in an office full of film makers. It worked well for quite a while (although film types do tend to talk a lot on the phone, which doesn't always help when editing maps or other fiddly work). After that, I shared a space with another writer (the brilliant Rach Antony) and a whole bunch of men who were architects. It was pretty cool -- they had brilliant taste in music and despite their lack of interest in doing the washing up, they had made the space (an old warehouse on Brunswick St, Fitzroy) look great.

Now I share a desk with Denis in our office at home, and I really miss the whole 'get out of the house' thing for work. True, at the moment my work involves looking after Bas, so I really don't need a desk or an office (more a pram and some handy spit-up cloths), let alone an office outside the home, but if reality TV has taught us nothing it's that you've got to have a semi-impractical, ever-so-slightly deluded dream! And there was that whole Virginia Woolf thing too...

I took this photo (above) of the work bench of a local bookbinder, and then I took this snap (below) of one of the artists hanging out in the doorway of her show, not quite prepared to spend all her time indoors on such a lovely Spring day.

To be honest, it was hard to visit as many ateliers as I would have liked -- artists’ studios are often in old factories and warehouses, often not on the ground floor and usually without elevators. A couple defeated me, either due to the number of stairs or the teeny-tiny dimensions of the elevators (room for me, but no room for Bas as he slept in his pram).

But a lovely arvo out of the house, nonetheless...

Too Legit To Quit!

2010-04-16T09:38:00.004+02:00

Look who's all Swiss now, with his spunky ID card and wistful mountain-ward gaze!

In a typical burst of Swiss efficiency, Bas was taken to the documents office on Tuesday, where we handed over our papers, he was placed in a little photo booth and snapped and we were told his card would arrive in the mail sometime in the next 10 days. It arrived three days later.

On the Aussie bureaucracy front, Denis has to drive into Geneva to get 'certified copies' of my birth certificate, Bas's birth certificate (a special international edition, no less) and my passport. All so Bas can apply to be an Australian citizen by descent. Which requires that the relevant papers be sent to London. So we can then apply, in a few weeks (with any luck) for an Australian passport for Bas, so we can then take Bas back to the 'relaxed and comfortable' mother country to meet his other grandparents.

Lausanne/Lucerne -- The Difference

2010-04-15T19:41:00.013+02:00

People often ask me what the difference is between Lausanne and Lucerne (Luzern). The similarity in names throws a lot of people who are unfamiliar with Switzerland (which is, funnily enough, not Sweden and not a member of the E.U.). I once had someone from Australia ready to catch a train to Lucerne to visit me, which would have made our rendez-vous a little disappointing...

Having lived only in Lausanne and visiting Lucerne just the once (in 1986 no less) I can usually offer only the sketchiest details, along the lines of: Lausanne is in the French-speaking part, Lucerne in the German. And Lausanne doesn't have a Lion Monument.

Shame... I like a Lion Monument.

I reckon Lucerne pulls in more visitors than Lausanne because of the aforementioned Lion and also its lovely wooden bridges, but I think I've found a way for Lausanne to pull ahead in the allure stakes:

Lausanne doesn't traumatise its children!

I wouldn't say I was coulrophobic, but I find clowns pretty unattractive at the best of times (and I guess birthdays fall under that while 'best of times' category). I think my lack of love for clowns comes from an evening watching a hideously violent clown-filled horror film at Dome nightclub (remember that place?) in Sydney many years ago while in a state best described as, ahem, chemically altered.

All I can say is, this story has made me happier than ever to live in Lausanne rather then Lucerne. And Bas need never worry about what I'll come up with to help him celebrate his birthday...

Project French Letters

2010-04-15T17:25:00.006+02:00

Okay, it's been just over three years since I moved here and started to learn French and I am embarrassed to say that I have read a grand total of one book in French (I'm not counting BDs -- bandes dessinées -- and I don't want any postmodern jive about them being literature or anything -- they're fancy French comics is all).

The book I read was by Paul Bowles (above) the American writer who spent most of his life in Tangier, Morocco. It was 17, Quai Voltaire and I can tell you only that it was about Paris in the early 1930s. That's how much I remember of it, mostly because I was so new to French that I spent the whole time just trying to get the meaning of the words and not actually connecting them in terms of plot or narrative sense.

But now I realise I need to put in a bit more effort with my French, and that watching TV doesn't really count. So a few weeks ago I started reading L'étranger by Albert Camus (below) and I'm doing OK. Getting through it with little need to consult the dictionary and feeling as though I can offer an opinion, albeit entirely subjective and not based on any desire to shed light on Camus's oeuvre or the book's place in 20th-century literature. Namely, I want to know what happens in the end (which despite being a sort of unfashionable idea adds enormously to the pleasure of reading) but when Merseult (the protagonist) seems to care so little, I often struggle to give a shit. How many cigarettes can a man smoke with people he doesn't seem to like before a reader wants to make a cup of tea?

I felt the same way about classics like The Catcher in the Rye. I know ennui sounds all glamorous in French, but in a novel it makes for hard going. And I get to read for about five minutes a day now, so I want something to send a few volts into my poor sleep-deprived brain.

Because I secretly love lists, I've started putting a few French books down on one. These are the things I want to read, in French, by year's end.

Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) -- Simone de Beauvoir
Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) -- Choderlos de Laclos
Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) -- Françoise Sagan

It's a very modest start, but a start nonetheless. I've read the first two in English and loved them so much I want to read them as they were written. The third one is because I love the title and people generally mention it as a good place to start (not too long, not too complicated).

Any tips about what to add to the list are gratefully received.

Citizen Bas

2010-04-13T13:52:00.004+02:00

Do you reckon they'll let him in?

I'll keep this short as we've already spent the morning getting Bas his Carte d'Identité for Switzerland and I'm in the middle of doing the paperwork for Bas to become a full-blown Aussie. After that, he'll need an Australian passport. If you know me at all you'll know that endless rounds of government paperwork do my head in. The only thing worse is getting a small baby to lie still and look at the camera without going bananas for an ID shot. I'd like to thank the nice young man at the photo place near Place St-François for getting Bas to lie still on the floor for a whole three seconds. You more than earned your CHF35.

Watching the Feathers Fly

2010-04-04T16:11:00.006+02:00

Yesterday there was one of those ‘happenings’ at Place St-François, in the centre of town. A whole lot of people got together and at 3 o’clock (on the DOT!) began bashing the crap out of each other with pillows for about 10 minutes. It looked like pretty good fun, but I had to content myself with staying on the fringes, making sure the baby wasn’t spooked by all the noise and the feathers and taking the occasional photo. Denis was there too, right in the thick of it, covering the event for work, and we met up afterwards to survey the wreckage (a lot of pillows died for the cause). There was feathers and stuffing everywhere.

‘Who’s going to clean up all that mess?’, I asked.

‘They will. They’re doing it now.’

And lo and behold, the young folk were indeed cleaning up after themselves.

I couldn’t help but wonder how this sort of thing would have gone down back in Australia. Would the kids turn up pissed? Take a harmless pillow fight and turn it into a full-scale teenage riot? I would bet money on them not sweeping up their mess afterwards, which saddened me no end.

Egging Me On

2010-03-26T14:30:00.004+01:00

Our block of flats has a pretty decent number of kids living here and I'm glad we managed to add such a nice one to the collection. Sadly, when our lovely neighbour Sandra recently organised an afternoon of 'bricolage' (or crafternoon) for the little ones to paint their Easter eggs for the foyer, our baby decided to have a big date with my udders followed by a session in his cot. Shame, but next year I'm sure he'll have a go painting an egg and scoffing a lot of chocolate with the other kids.

I love how the children in this building make displays for the foyer depending on the time of year -- sadly there are no sneaky protests about the ban on minarets in this year's Easter extravaganza (OK, eggstravaganza -- 'tis the season for crap puns), but I'm sure the lovable rascals of Avenue Mon Repos will come up with something very controversial and topical in time for Christmas. Perhaps a statement about the financial meltdown in Greece and its effects on the EU?

Second Time Around

2010-03-21T16:43:00.004+01:00

One of the things I’ve missed most about life in Australia was the fact that I could dress myself in second-hand clothes much of the time and still feel pleased with the result. I found great dresses for the cost of a sandwich on a regular basis, swapped hilarious tops and cool jackets with friends over the years and felt perfectly happy in pre-loved jeans without forking out a weekly wage for the privilege of wearing ‘distressed’ denim.

Switzerland, it’s no great surprise, doesn’t have the same op-shop culture as places such as the UK, USA and Australia. No one speaks lovingly of trawling through the racks at the Swiss version of ‘Vinnies’ (St Vincent de Paul) for something to wear to a party that night. People don’t drive to country towns and daggy suburban boltholes to rifle through charity shops untouched by city-slickers on the prowl for the best of the ’70s and ’80s, as though they wanted to be dressed by a ‘hits and memories’ radio station. Sure, Lausanne has some designer consignment stores that offer barely-worn examples of expensive labels, but they tend to be heavy on the 'rich old lady' labels like Escada and Jaeger and way too light on the laughs and the camaraderie of proper vintage shopping. In Switzerland, perusing the aisles of a real charity shop generally means one thing and one thing only: you are well and truly skint.

I love the whole process of searching for treasure in someone else’s trash, of seeing the possibilities in a garment or object that someone else deemed past its prime. Back home, it’s not unusual to find people’s apartments or businesses furnished via hard-rubbish night. It’s the nicest sort of recycling I can think of. On hard-rubbish night here in Lausanne, people scurry surreptitiously to check on the piles of stuff dumped (in an orderly manner, mind) out the front of people’s residences, as though embarrassed to be picking through the leftovers.

In Melbourne, I knew people who would proudly comb the suburbs, looking for velvet-covered couches and orange lampshades, and who knew the schedule by which neighbourhoods purged and binged on hard rubbish. It always puts me in mind of a Sicilian girl I once met in Siracusa, who had spent time in Australia and thought it was quaint that so many people liked finding their furniture on the nature strip outside someone else's home rather than in a shop. The best bit was that she had forgotten what we called it and referred to it as tough garbage night.

When stuff gets turfed out onto the street here it really is dead and worth burying, rather than full of potential for a second (or third, or even fourth) chance at life. The Swiss tend to keep stuff until it has been officially declared useless and even then, they may just put it in the cellar, just in case (I’m looking at you, father in law).

On Saturday I went to a ‘destockage’ at a café called La Couronne d’Or, where a local TV presenter named Anne Carrard had a sort of garage sale (without the garage) of the clothes she no longer wanted (apparently she has recently moved in with her boyfriend and there was no room for her six wardrobes worth of fashion). I arrived quite a bit after the first flush of sales and found only three racks remaining and a lone pair of too-small ankle boots. That said, Anne’s cast-offs were more numerous than my cast-ons. How is it that people end up with so many clothes? It never fails to amaze me that women routinely admit in magazines to owning over 100 pairs of shoes, or a week’s worth of jeans, or handbags that have never left the house. How is it that people can amass literally dozens of garments that they no longer want and yet there are so few op shops here?

I pounced on a natty camel-coloured overcoat and then went back to shopping at the local markets for a few tonnes of cheese and my husband’s usual allotment of pork-related essentials (no fear about any of those goodies going to waste). I felt a bit of a thrill as I made my way home -- it’s been a long time since I rescued a garment from the unloved pile. With a bit of luck, there might just be some tough garbage on the horizon.

A Spring in My Step

2010-03-20T10:06:00.004+01:00

How good are these sneakers? Perhaps I'm a bit over-excited because it feels as though it's been Winter for about five years, but when I saw these the other day in the window of a little shop called Walpurgis (nothing like naming a shop after a Pagan festival) they made me feel that Spring was just around the corner, and it was. They gave me the hope that I would once again wear fancy little sneakers instead of those fake-fur-lined clod-hopper boots I bought in Moscow after the Trans-Siberian Railway

Last week I pushed Bas (and myself) to my final French lesson (I was dreading learning the results of the final test -- but I passed! Huzzah! If you need help with 'le sobjonctif' or 'le plus-que-parfait', I'm your woman) in temperatures of minus 5 degrees. The wind was nasty and I wondered if Bas would ever know what it was like to leave the house looking like a dumpling and without about five layers of fleece surrounding him. We didn't exit the flat for about two weeks after he was born because the weather was so brutal.

But all that shifted this week! Yesterday, as I pushed Bas's pram through Parc Mon-Repos it was sunny and 18 degrees. Bliss. The world feels as though it has come back to life -- there are crocuses pushing through the earth, trees look a little more green and the flowerbeds are showing signs of activity. There were teens in the park, draped in T-shirts and members of the opposite sex, letting their hormones do the talking. Poncy little dogs had shucked off their poncy little winter coats and were parading around like nobody's business, instead of the usual winter routine of 'get out, do your business and then let your owner know you're ready to go back inside'.

I laugh now when I think back about my complaints of winter in Australia. Seriously -- how can I ever have whinged about 12 degree temperatures (except in Melbourne's Summer -- I can still whinge about that surely?). I think what I love most is the fact that after all those grey skies and biting winds ('La Bise', which is what they call the wind from the north here, is like something you only read about in Russian novels) is that sense of life being renewed, of the world being reborn. No wonder Easter is all about little chicks hatching and bunny rabbits and chocolate for so many people -- it's a Pagan thing. A celebration of getting out of the house because you WANT TO, not because you HAVE TO.

A Big Tick

2010-03-04T13:00:00.004+01:00

We had a baby five weeks ago, and many of you will understand what that (ie, the endless fatigue mixed with overwhelming cuteness) does to your brain. Which explains how I forgot that this was coming out in this month's Qantas magazine. So if anyone is flying with them this month, can they please snaffle a copy for me? I have a feeling I won't be flying anywhere anytime soon...

Basically, the article is about Basel -- one of my favourite places in Switzerland, mainly because it gets that mix between the country's French and German influences right. Plus the museums are awesome. And the locals don't mind if you can't speak their dialect, because they all seem to speak about five languages each. Fluently. I can't tell you how inadequate that makes me feel, especially after I spent Tuesday night sitting a French exam while breastfeeding and the teacher took pity on me and took the baby from my arms in order to burp him so I could get back to failing my exam...

Carnies!

2010-02-11T11:58:00.003+01:00

It's holiday time here. Well, sort of. If you live in one of the Catholic cantons (the Protestant cantons don't go to as much trouble -- something to do with their work ethic no doubt), you get to rock out with Fasnacht, the pre-Lent celebration where locals go nuts in the street wearing disguises (to obliterate the social hierarchy) and listening to pipes and drums. And eating stuff like Clag panckaes or something. Or was it sugared fritters?

Lausanne doesn't go in for this kind of thing (Basel sounds like the best place for it), but this week is as good as any to unwind. It's the 'Relâches' (my translation: Relax Holiday, but really I think it means 'day off') as Denis informed me, when school kids get a week off school. 'For what?', I asked. 'For skiing. It's the best time for skiing,' he said, without missing a beat.

I could ask this man questions for the rest of my life and be pretty sure I will love every answer.

And that got me thinking. We're always banging on in Australia about how laid-back we are, how we appreciate our lifestyle and enjoy the important things more than the material or the commercial. Apparently we don't love to work, we work to live, but I'm not so sure about that anymore. The fact that we feel the need to fake illness in order to score a day off speaks volumes.

But do we? Do we give our kids a week off school for no other reason than that the surf's pumping? And why not?

A Proud Tradition

2010-01-25T12:02:00.004+01:00

Tomorrow, ready or not, my baby will be induced (he's 'late' here, which the Swiss, as everyone knows, don't take kindly to). There's a part of me that really wants him to just take his own sweet time getting out when he's good and ready and another part of me that desperately wants to see him so we can start playing. It will make his birthday fall on Australia Day, which means nothing in these parts, but appeals to me, as it guarantees our son a public holiday and at least one BBQ on his birthday, should he ever spend it back in 'the old country'. That's a lot of sausages.

And then there's this:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/aussies-set-record-for-sickies-20100125-mtyg.html

Because I want him to know where he comes from and what his local traditions are...

Magic Morning

2009-12-18T10:42:00.002+01:00

Look what I woke up to! The first snow of the season.

It was so quiet and peaceful. I just hope it lasts another week so we can have a white Christmas...

2009-12-17T12:36:00.004+01:00

I often ask Denis about things that might or might not happen here, mostly because I can't be bothered doing too much in the way of detailed research at the library or the multilingual governent websites, but also because I love how he cuts to the chase on most topics, with a sexy foreign accent. Sometimes I ask him stuff I already know the answer to, just to listen to him tell it like it is, French-Swiss style.

I've been thinking about strikes lately -- British Airways is probably doing it, Australia Post almost got in on the act and now I've just read that the buses in Sydney won't be running tomorrow. I asked Denis if the trains or the post ever went on strike in Switzerland...

'No. Never. You're not allowed to do that. It just doesn't happen.' Apparently it's not in the Constitution that you can strike, and some cantons forbid it outright. Hmmm. I've never actually been on strike (another quirk of freelancing), but I don't like the sound of that. Perhaps people just don't get exploited by 'the Man' here?

The other day we got to talking about quasi-strike action in Swiss public hospitals. 'They will never stop showing up for work and treating people, but they might put the paperwork in late.' Which in Switzerland is tantamount to armed rioting in the streets. Man the barricades!

We went to the hospital the other day. I had my first appointment there, as it's where I'll be giving birth in about a month. We sauntered into the reception area at the polyclinic (well, I sauntered, Denis looked worried because we only made it there with a minute to spare before we were officially on time), had a chat to one of the nurses, filled out some forms, tinkled in a cup, made a booking for a private room and then sat down to wait about 15 minutes to see a doctor, a nurse and a sage-femme (all at the same time -- talk about streamlining).

Fifteen minutes! I know what you're thinking. Perfectly fine for a busy public hosiptal, eh? Some might even suggest 'best practice'. Except in Switzerland, it's not. I have never seen a doctor so apologetic, short of medical malpractice. This place and its time-keeping blows my mind. No wonder they make such excellent clocks.

Hosts with the Most

2009-12-16T15:20:00.013+01:00

Perhaps it's because I'm eight months' pregnant and not sure I'll ever leave the house again, but I'm in the mood to list my favourite hotels. In the last 10 years I've had a sticky beak at literally thousands of them -- the good, the bad and those verging on holding cells for trafficked people. I've visited places on foot, by bicycle, by limo, by train and by ferry. I've shown shown up looking like someone's filthy laundry bag or sometimes in my Sunday best. I've been been a guest of a few weeks or sometimes just a few minutes. I've been ignored, treated like a long-lost family member or even regarded with great suspicion (hostels in Sydney and Auckland being the worst offenders in that department).

But I'm in a good mood, so here's a list of the five loveliest places I've scoped out (and yes, I have stayed at all of them):

1. La Canna -- Filicudi, the Aeolian Islands, Italy

It's only a modest three-star joint and you have to get there via a long flight of stairs, but really, the 'end-of-the-world' (with half-board) feeling here is hard to beat. The rooms are simple but very comfortable and cool in Sicily's relentless summer heat. The dining area is the veranda just outside and the food is straightforward Sicilian fare -- some pasta, seafood, the ubiquitous (and excellent)caponata (the local ratatouille). I'll never forget one dinner I had here, watching a blood-orange moon take its place in the night sky as the volcano on Stromboli staged a nocturnal eruption. It's been way too long since I was there last (let's put it this way -- the photos I took were on slides), and I promised myself I'd return, with someone special in tow. Pack your bags Denis...

2. The Ritz-Carlton -- Moscow, Russia

I'm not going to pretend I get to stay at places like this often. My friend and fellow traveller Flip Byrnes pulled this one out of the hat after we'd spent almost three weeks travelling the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian Railways from Beijing to Moscow, after working at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Let me set the scene for you: we had just finished the Tomsk-to-Moscow leg of the voyage (56 straight hours) and had not had a proper shower in days. We were wearing grotty jeans, down-filled puffas and sporting greasy hair. The hotel sent a Mercedes and driver to the train station to collect us and we felt too grotty to sully the car, but the driver insisted that we couldn't ride in the boot. As we checked in at the hotel's Carlton Club, the receptionist insisted we celebrate our arrival with a glass of champagne. What can you say when people are so insistently gracious and polite despite the fact that you're carrying a Chinese checked plastic bag full of bootleg DVDs and smell like an open drain? And the rooms! Goodness me I didn't know that sheets and carpets like this were still being used outside of royal palaces. But the real killer was the marble bathroom with fancy walnut cabinets. Flip and I literally fought over who would get first go in scraping off a few kilos of accumulated grime, doing the knickers-in-the-sink wash (old habits -- hard to break) and dousing oneself in Bulgari white-tea-scented disinfectant. Then we star-spotted Macy Gray (she's hard to miss) in the hotel bar and drank Moscow Mules whilst overlooking the Kremlin. Unforgettable.

Pic 1: This is what happens when you don't shower for a long time or you've just been in Siberia. You take photos of bathrooms.

Pic 2: Please note the dodgy laundry bag on the far left. It adds to the symmetry and charm.

3. Connells Bay -- Waiheke Island, New Zealand

This was the most delicious escape in a long work-related trip to the Land of the Long White (Rainy) Cloud back in 2005. Waiheke Island itself is a charming spot, with lovely long beaches, good places to eat and plenty of decent vineyards, but this place was the stand-out. After a guided tour of the site-specific sculptures that the owners had commissioned I was taken to my home for the night, a cosy weatherboard cottage with a view out over the bay and enough serenity for me to start thinking that I might just offer my services as a groundskeeper in order to stay for the rest of my days.

4. Heritage Av Liberdade -- Lisbon, Portugal

We try to get to Portugal every year, mostly to surf at a little place about 100km north of Lisbon. We stay in the spare room of a private house located on a tiny isthmus, eat a lot of sardines and custard tarts and drink cheap beer. But before our last surfing holiday we decided to stay somewhere with a little more 'fancy' on display. Located in a historic 18th-century building on busy-but-beautiful Av Liberdade, this place is in the historic centre and within spitting distance of one of the city's ridiculously appealing funiculars and what might just be my favourite bar in the world. The only trouble with really attractive (stylish, but not pretentious, comfortable and nicely proportioned) hotel rooms is that they can be hard to get out of, especially if you made the mistake of bringing a good book with you (handy for transport, bad for exploring). At least the indoor pool wasn't really worth troubling (small and in the 'why bother?' league), so we made it out eventually.

5. Medusa -- Sydney, Australia

This is kind of how I imagine a boutique hotel in Los Angeles to operate and while it's a bit of a '90s throwback, I have very happy memories here of trips made for both business and pleasure (and you'd be amazed how few places can truly accommodate the two) in the noughties. A lot of thought has gone into the spaces here, from the teeny-tiny bathrooms to the restful inner courtyard and the chic rooms. The staff do the slick service thing very well, but they also know when to relax and let your mates who just checked out of the room next to yours hang out at yours and order pizza till their plane leaves. And best of all, you're in staggering distance of all the good bars that will get you in such a state that there's nothing left to do the next day but watch one of the Charlie's Angels flicks on cable TV and order pizza and hair-of-the-dog remedies.

Happy Days

2009-12-13T11:07:00.005+01:00

If you live in Melbourne, you know all about it. Until about three years ago I lived on the Sandringham Line, and even though in theory there were times it would have been quicker for me to catch the train from Elsternwick Station, it rarely worked out that way, especially when I was heading to classes at Melbourne Uni. Invariably scheduled services would simply disappear, replaced by some glorified filthy sardine can packed with pissed-off commuters and running about 25 minutes late. Of course, I could have taken the tram, but it would have been faster to walk to Carlton.

This sort of thing never happens here. And I want to know why. I don't even live in Melbourne anymore but I STILL want to know why. Why is it so hard to get a decent rail service working in Melbourne? Why do I have to insist to Denis when we go to Melbourne that it's probably faster for us to sit in a traffic jam on Punt Rd than to have taken the tram from St Kilda. Probably. It depends. Because it changes from day to day. Being at your tram or train stop at 7.45am without fail doesn't guarantee that you'll arrive at work or school or just in town at any predictable time, unlike in Switzerland.

I laugh about the newspapers here and their lack of 'big' stories, but then I have to stop and realise that the front page of the Age online seems to devote itself almost exclusively to detailing the latest Connex/Myki/tram fuck-ups. If I have to look on the bright side, Melbourne's near-useless transport network was the impetus behind my going to get my driving licence all over again (after a gap of 12 years), and then buying my first car, just so I could get to work (about 5km away) in under an hour. So, thanks. I guess, from me and the environment.

Brrrrrrrrr

2009-12-12T13:12:00.003+01:00

It's absolutely freezing here today. The wind is up, the clouds are out and after a brief foray into the local market I've decided to stay put until it passes (perhaps another five months or so).

On my way back up the hill, hugging a giant papaya (carbon neutral or not, I can't get by without the odd dose of tropical fruit), I was asked to donate money to a cause that sends temporary shelter to those in need, with a gas stove included and some basic furnishings. Given how this winter's started, I definitely agreed that now was no time for people to be living rough (not that there's any good time to be living rough) and asked which countries these shelters were going to. One of them was England. Has it come to this?

Then the guy collecting donations asked me if I wanted a tea or coffee, or perhaps a glass a hot wine? What, no hot chocolate?

The Best Revenge...

2009-12-07T14:04:00.005+01:00

The building we live in has a small foyer that gets the make-over treatment on a regular basis, thanks to the kids who live here and various holidays and festivals (Easter, Halloween). This last weekend, a little working bee was established by some parents to create the annual Christmas Nativity Scene, and this year's is a pearler. Baby Jesus? Check. Three Wise Men? You betcha. Cattle lowing? Of course. Gold minaret and a woman in full chador? Why yes! These last two items may be about 700 years too early, but no one ever stipulated that our annual Christmas extravaganza had to be historically accurate.

There's been a lot of talk here and in the media abroad about Switzerland's recent vote to ban the construction of minarets, and I think this is the best response (see pic) to the situation. Generally, I like my political protest on the subtle side. Kind of like an art installation, but with little chocolates given away.

We had three friends visiting us over the weekend, all the way from Oz and the UK, and it certainly made us all smile (and think). The idea that the well-mannered nippers who reside in our apartment block would deliberately flout Swiss law and construct a minaret is just too cool for school. No need for ugly protests, angry slogans, online rants or effigy burning.

I can't wait to see what they'll do next Easter!

Best Job

2009-12-02T14:27:00.002+01:00

I’ve been freelance since 2001, so in a way, every job since then is a new one for me, although really, the work I do is generally a continuation on a very familiar theme. Since 2001 I’ve written travel guides and freelance articles about travel, covered international sporting events for official news services and edited everything from textbooks to marketing proposals. Before that, I was a full-time editor and before that I worked in a bookshop.

When I did full-time travel writing I heard the line ‘but that’s my dream job!
a lot. And for a good while, it was my dream job too. But when I think about the job where I was consistently happiest -- and I mean ‘can’t wait to get there and see what happens today’ happy -- it was my job as the Sunday casual sales assistant at Lesley McKay’s Bookshop in Woollahra, Sydney.

Why? Well, it kind of killed multiple birds with one stone. I got to basically work alone (I was the only staff member for Sundays), yet still have plenty of contact with interesting people. I got to force my taste on innocent members of the public, who often trusted my advice about one of life’s biggest decisions (ie, what to read next). I got to flick through fabulous coffee table books that I had no intention of buying at my leisure and also all the photo sections in various biographies and autobiographies, because that’s what biographies are for, right? I got to listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as much as I wanted to -- is there a lovelier piece of music to hear when you’re pottering around a quiet place on your own and its raining outside and you’re waiting on a coffee to be brought to you from the café across the courtyard? And I got to borrow books to read, as though I worked in a really high-class private library. If I bought them, then the discount was reason enough to just keep showing up every week.

It’s been over 11 years since I left that job (I quit because I got a full-time job with Lonely Planet and moved to Melbourne) but I still entertain nostalgic fantasies that that I could jump right back into that gig, dusting cloth and New York Review of Books at the ready and act like nothing had changed. No Amazon, no parallel importation of books, no GST, no Kindles. Just me and the books, plus a few loyal customers.

What about you? Is there a job from your past that you’d happily go back to?

Table Talk

2009-12-01T14:29:00.003+01:00

The Swiss love going to dinner parties. I have never had to sit through so many in such a short space of time (less than three years). Back in the old country, I remember that most dinner parties that I went to consisted of getting as sloshed as possible (minimum one bottle of wine per person, no need to say cheers to anyone) and then talking about real estate, sex, drunken scandals, gifted children (if anyone had decided to invite parents), dietary restrictions and ridiculous workplace demands ('Bet I can work longer unpaid hours than you!').

Here though, it's a different story. For a start you have to show up on time and then kiss everyone three times on the cheek (EXHAUSTING, I tell you -- Denis once invited 13 people over to eat and I needed a lie down and some antibiotics before we even got round to the nibbles). What's more, you don't really get to medicate your social anxiety like you do in Australia. For a dinner party of about six people, you'd be pushing it to get through three bottles of wine. And you don't just crack open a bottle and start pouring, you have to wait till everyone's ready, then you have to look in everyone's eyes and say 'Santé!' ('To your health!'). And then it's all about polite conversation, meaning no thinly veiled insults, no passive-aggressive observations about decor, no sarcastic interjections, no slagging off the ones who couldn't make it or had to leave early and no stories about vomiting or loss of bowel control. Jesus wept.

When I first got here and everyone made a big effort to make me feel at home (sadly, they didn't know that they would need to import things such as Melbourne Bitter, day-long brunches and soy flat whites in order to do that) I would sit at tables for hours on end and not have a clue what anyone was talking about (thanks to my then-non-existent French). So I would basically eat more than everyone else (an impressive cheese gut within three months) and then inevitably drink more than everyone else, making myself all but useless when someone would eventually try to include me in the conversation and instigate an English-language chat. Anyone who says they enjoy the first year of living in a foreign place and learning a foreign language is a dirty liar.

Anyway, now I can understand what everyone's talking about at the table (unless they come from Valais) and I STILL am stumped for how they manage to talk so much without ever resorting to these tried-and-true Aussie dinner party staples:

1. what they earn or what other people earn
2. their mortage (two-thirds of people rent, often for their ENTIRE lives -- no wonder weekend newspapers are so thin and real-estate agent jokes non-existent)
3. private schools (so exxy they're beyond even Swiss budgets -- there's one half-way between here and Geneva that will set you back a tidy AUD$100,000 or so a year -- ski season included -- so everyone just concentrates on public education and making sure it's actually half-decent. Mad I tell you!)
4. lactose intolerance, or FASCINATING dietary restrictions in general
5. Ford v Holden
6. Religion
7. Politics
8. Donna Hay and her sausagey fingers
9. the parlous state of the Australian Film Industry/publishing scene/journalism/public service/healthcare
10. reality TV alpha-male bogans

Sigh...

Any news?

2009-11-30T11:16:00.003+01:00

You may or may not know that Switzerland loves a referendum. They seem to vote on something every other weekend, and this past weekend was spent deciding whether to ban minarets or not.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/switzerland-bans-mosque-minarets-20091130-jzcx.html

The minarets lost. There's a grand total of four minarets in Switzerland. Denis is not feeling too proud of Switzerland at the moment, but at least he can say that his county (Vaud) voted against the inititaive (ie, Vaud has no problem with minarets).

He's been covering the issue for Reuters for some time now (the storm started brewing a few years ago) and has always been horrified that the right-wing party thinks that such initiatives have any place in a country with a supposedly neutral stance.

Me? I feel yuck about the whole thing. But I don't get a vote yet.

Wonders Will Never Cease

2009-11-17T10:05:00.003+01:00

I found out the other day that even though I have only been a legal resident *cough* of Switzerland for just over a year and that I am self-employed I am entitled to 15 weeks of maternity leave pay at 80% of my usual income.

Eh?

I had resigned myself to saving my pennies this year in order to spend 2010 not earning money but looking after the little prawn full-time.

How does a country of 7 million people, who pay less tax than we do in Australia (both direct and indirect), manage to find this kind of cash in the kitty?

How is it that we are still only at the stage of discussing this kind of thing in Australia?

On another note, I can't figure out how to alter the fonts on my blog anymore, so it's back to serif for now...

Time Travel

2009-11-07T20:40:00.012+01:00

I can't claim to have thought of this topic myself -- a friend of mine did this on a blog a few years back and I thought it was a great idea. From time to time, when I feel stuck, I pull out some paper and write about what I thought I was supposed to be going on in my life right now, or what I was doing a while ago, and it really helps put a lot of things in perspective. Here's what I mean...

Ten Years Ago

November 1999. In Italy, on holiday, getting rained on a hell of a lot and wasting way too much time on thinking about someone who really didn't warrant it. Physically, I knew where I was -- mentally, not so sure. I was happy to be wandering (Rome, Florence, Siena, Genoa, Bologna, Ravenna, Napoli, Palermo, Siracusa, Taormina), as I was big on 'exiling' myself back then. I was working full-time as an editor, and it was on this holiday that I decided to write a sample chapter for Lonely Planet about Siracusa, in Sicily. Lesson learned? If you don't put your hand up, it's unlikely anyone's going to grab it.

Five Years Ago

November 2004. In Italy again. This time a month in Turin, writing a guidebook about a place I hadn't been too enthusiastic about visiting but which I ended up falling head over heels in love with. I'm still very grateful for taking this strange little path in life, because being in Turin made me a little bolder and a little more daring than usual. I sort of gatecrashed a dinner party at a very swanky restaurant and met some people who were working for the 2006 Winter Olympics. I was so enchanted by the city that I decided to see if there was some way I could come back and still be paid for it, so I asked them if there was any chance of work at the Games. Come February 2006 I was working as a reporter at Cross-Country Skiing and I met my husband, Denis, in the staff canteen. Lesson learned? Sometimes it really pays to try something different and just see where it takes you...without expectation.

One Year Ago

November 2008. In Lausanne, married one year and spending way too much time watching Barack Obama on CNN. Hoping to get pregnant. Hoping to feel the urge to write again after a frustrating fallow period and wondering what it is I want to do when I grow up (for the umpteenth time in my life). Trying to write three pages of A4 every day, in long hand, first thing in the morning and failing miserably. Lesson learned? This too shall pass.

Yesterday

Saturday, 7 November 2009. Thirty-nine years old plus one week. Thirty weeks' pregnant. An afternoon at some friends' chalet in the mountains. Good food, lots of laughs and very cute kids (see pics). A proper weekend excursion, with fresh, bracing air (it was 2 degrees). Lesson learned? If you want to say with slang that you farted in French it's 'J'ai fait une Louise.'

Today

Sunday, 8 November 2009. A swim at the pool across the road. Finishing off the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. Working on a short story for a competition I stand no chance in, but feeling that I have to at least try. Lesson learned? It's often the small, incremental steps that make for a good journey.

Tomorrow

Three pages, longhand, A4, in bed, as soon as I wake up. Probably a lot of time frittered away on various blogs, emails, websites and the like when I finally get to my computer. Then writing, for as long as it takes to get what I want done. Maybe a swim. Probably a walk. Lesson learned? If you're looking too closely at something, perspective is often impossible.

Nostalgia

2009-11-06T13:17:00.006+01:00

It's been a few years since I worked full-time as a travel writer, and there's a lot about it that I don't miss at all (I'll save that post for a particularly crabby day), but I heard this today in the New York Times and it brought back my favourite part of the job -- the simple act of walking around a city.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html?hp&hp#/maggie_nesciur

When I was doing that job I would spend whole days at a time exploring cities, some of them very familiar to me (Sydney, Melbourne), some of them complete discoveries (Turin, Copenhagen). I never needed to do any additional exercise back then, because I would cover miles and miles in a single day. This piece about Maggie Nesciur has really put me in the mood to go for a big stomp...and also made me want to live in a really big city again (you can walk about 15 minutes and be out of Lausanne, which makes it hard to discover crazy little neighbourhoods you never knew existed).

The last really big place I worked in that gave me these opportunites was Berlin, one of my all-time favourites (although a little too spread-out for some walkers). The only drawback to these day-long stroll fests is when mapping duties interrupt and you have to stop the momentum to mark a certain spot on a page or check out some transport details. Coffee stops, however, are generally a pleasure...especially on a cold day.

Anyway, here's my top five cities to walk around, in no particular order:

Copenhagen -- small but perfectly formed and full of the world's best-looking cyclists
Turin -- easy on the feet and with plenty of beautiful old-fashioned cafés
Sydney -- all those hills and the potential for a heartstopping view when you reach the top of one
Palermo -- crazy sights, sounds and smells and a sense of real mystery in some quarters
Madrid -- such markedly different and cool neighbourhoods, most of them within easy reach of the city centre and plenty of mojito opportunites at the end of the day

Pushing the Boat Out

2009-11-02T17:38:00.007+01:00

A rare activity for me.

In my years as a full-time travel writer I ate alone a hell of a lot (literally hundreds of times) and it left me with a love of eating lunch alone (you can read, doodle in your Moleskine, concoct inane fantasies about swarthy waiters) and a love of eating dinner at home. I lived alone in Melbourne and people would often ask me about good takeaway outlets in my neighbourhood and I would often be lost for ideas, mainly because years of eating out for a living had left me with the desire to stay cocooned chez moi with a couple of trusted cookbooks and make simple, inexpensive food for myself.

And now I live in a city with a dearth of good Chinese, Indian and Thai takeaways, so there hardly seems to be any point in ordering out. Going to a restaurant is always pretty nice here, but it adds up in a frightening way, even if you just feel like pizza (simply typing the word makes me want pizza, so I try to avoid it).

It was my birthday on the weekend and Denis and went for it, given that this could be our last slap-up meal as a twosome. So we went to this place: Anne-Sophie Pic at the Beau Rivage Palace. Apparently, Madame Pic is the only woman to win three Michelin stars (not that I would EVER have harboured a suspicion that haute cuisine is an inherently sexist profession!). That's right, they found a woman who can cook!

Heavens it was amazing, even if I had to be content with the greatest fruit cocktail of my life and sparkling water in terms of liquid refreshment. Here's what we ate:

an amuse bouche of seasonal tidbits. Quite possibly the only way to consume foie gras and not feel guilt afterwards.

a delicate little basket of jellied crab and caviar with a whispery saffron foam.

a gratin of crayfish tails and truffles. Words fail me on this one --I wanted to have it all over again. Maybe if I'd complained I could have swung it, but they would probably see the deceit in my greedy eyes.

line-caught sea bass with -- yes! -- more caviar and a champagne mousse/foam.

poularde (a type of chicken) from Bresse with a citron marmalade.

the sexiest cheese cart you have ever seen in your life. There were over twenty different cheeses on offer. I almost wept. Denis fell silent and gave a prayer of thanks.

a 'pre-dessert' palate cleanser of silky, light rice pudding and apple.

a Grand Marnier soufflé that left me wondering if I have ever really gotten over the thrill of watching waitstaff lighting stuff next to the table. It's the only real way to justify pyromania. It was so light yet rich that it may be the closest I have come to being drunk this entire pregnancy. The baby has forgiven me.

So now I remember, this is what going out for dinner can be like Incredible food and having your loved one next to you and then getting a cab home on a cold autumn night and making plans to do it all over again next year.

Here's one I made earlier...

2009-10-30T16:11:00.004+01:00

Almost two years ago, Denis and I spent part of our honeymoon in South Australia. Not an obvious choice, I know, but we also didn't have to spend our entire honeymoon with other honeymooners, à la Club Med. It was great, partly because it gave me a chance to see a part of my country that I was completely unfamiliar with (Denis, a Swiss, has seen far more of Australia than I have, but I've travelled far more throughout Europe than he has -- go figure).

Today the Sydney Morning Herald is running a piece about our trip there: you can read it here. Good thing I always take a notebook with me when I travel, even if it does look a little unromantic.