If I don't blog it, will it still happen?

Here's something I haven't blogged. Bern is one of the host cities for the Euro2008 (that's the European Football [aka soccer] Championships). I can't begin to express the many ways in which this does not excite me, but I'll try:

1. I'm not a football fan. I didn't grow up playing it, I didn't grow up watching it, and I'm too old and too busy to get interested in a new sport now.
2. I don't like crowds. When I lived in Washington, DC, inauguration day was a nightmare. Protest times were a nightmare. Heck, high tourist season was a nightmare. People lost, taking up tables at my favorite restaurants, crowding the Metro, people standing still on the left-hand side of of escalators! Ack.
3. I don't like drunken crowds.
4. I hate lines.
5. The Old Town is being converted into a fan-zone.
6. I have to cut through the Old Town to get to several of my old stand-by playgrounds and other interesting Smal Boy places.
7. Plus, I just like to hang out in the Old Town.
8. The stadium is on the same tram line as Dr. Norwegian (our pediatrician).
9. The most convenient grocery store to shop in with two small children is directly next to the stadium.
10. There are, apparantly, fears of a Wurst shortage! (link via This Non-American Life)
11. The camp ground that has apparantly been booked out by the Dutch is on the same tram line as our Tagesmutter.
12. The camp ground that has apparantly been booked out by the Dutch is just upstream from one of my Small Boy hangouts.
13. Half of the games start at 8:45 pm and will end around 10:30; so the horn-honking car brigades will roll from 10:30 until....?
14. The Euro2008 will last for three weeks.
15. R will be gone for those exact three weeks: 1 week in Zurich (also a host city) and two weeks in the United States!
16. Could there be a worse overlap?

Seriously. If I ignore this, will it go away?

While he was sleeping

You have to look at the second to last one closely - check out the sign on that cluster of rocks on the right hand side.

A new favorite building

I found this building on a walk this afternoon. Boychen was being a crankypants so I didn't have a lot of time to stop and take pictures but I'll definitely be going back here with my camera.

Putting down roots, expat style

For the most part, our coming move is risk-free: we're staying in the same building, after all. I don't have to find new favorite places, new playgrounds, new routes to the train station, new good Small Boy walks; we're just going a few meters down the street. The one change the move will bring will be, of course, the actual apartment. We're going from a single floor layout to a two-floor unit, a change that will have its advantages (I won't hear R giving Small Boy breakfast anymore) and drawbacks (Small Boy is perfectly confident on stairs but it's been really nice not to have to worry about them in my daily life). We'll have the same number of rooms, but each room is a smidge smaller. We don't really need that extra smidge of space but I've grown used to the psychological openness of our spacious main room and I hope I won't miss it too much. You see, I couldn't agree more with what Mausi wrote here: "I think it's so important, especially as an expat, to have a peaceful oasis to come home to after a hard day of dealing with the natives." Especially if you are a non-employed expat, I think your home and environment is crucial to your well-being.

That's why I'm so pleased to have found a place with a little outdoor space in this neighborhood. I'm happy in this neighborhood, and so is R, and I'm not ready to leave here even if we are pretty much paying our maximum allowable rent. A more frugal couple would consider a different neighborhood, but moving to this neighborhood after four years in Small Village changed my life and I'm not ready to move on. The changes, taken one at a time, have been small but taken together they're far more than the sum of their parts. I didn't suddenly find a job - in fact I was employed (in the city, of course) when we lived in Small Village - but I feel closer to opportunities if I wanted them (and closer to child-care that would allow me to take advantage of them). I don't suddenly have more friends than I did two years ago - or, rather, I'm fairly certain I would have met most of these people anyway because I met them through pre-existing networks - but I have far more acquaintances and far more casual interactions with people than I used to. I think the few new opportunities that have come up, like writing for a local English-language magazine, could have been exploited anyway because they are language- and not place-dependent; I e-mail my contributions to the editor anyway. It's not as if moving to the city has solved all my problems. It's simply that I feel like I belong here in the city more than I ever belonged in Small Village.

I've grown terribly fond of this city; we're a good fit. Bern isn't for everyone - it's rather staid and slow to change even by Swiss standards and doesn't have much of a local "scene." Almost all of the exciting concerts or interesting art exhibits go to Zurich, the international organizations are located in Geneva, the bio-tech research firms (and the money they bring) to Basel. If you're a Manhattan kind of person, Bern would probably slowly bore you to death; if you think living in the national capital would be like living in Washington, DC, you'd be disappointed. But I'm happy here. It's a good fit. There's something about the city that has captured my heart. That makes me smile. That makes me feel, like Christina wrote here, grateful to have found this place.

A bend in the river

I spend part of almost every day in a city so lovely, so old and well-preserved, that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The streets of my city are 800 years old; they are paved in cobblestone and bisected by a culvert that carries away the water from the five fountains of the Old Town. The fountains are over 400 years old and on summer days people fill their bottles from their springs. The sidewalks are covered by arched arcades - the Lauben - so that on a rainy day one can walk the length of the Old Town without an umbrella. To the south of the main street lies the Münster, the old cathedral that was stripped bare duing the iconoclasm of the Reformation; to the north the Kornhaus and the French Church with its Huguenot past. I walk these streets almost daily, the compact and almost perfectly preserved streets of the Old Town of Bern, paying no attention to the fountains, the Zytglogge, the Münster, until I suddenly catch an inscription, a date, 1526, 1602, and then I stop and look at the bend in the river, the protective U of the Aare curling around the extended finger of the Old Town, the bend in the river that made this a good place to found a settlement, the defensive bend in the river that hugs the city on three sides, and I think: this place has been inhabited for 800 years. This city has nestled up to the river like a child in the protective curve of a mother's arm for 800 years. My feet walk streets that have been walked for 800 years. The river made this city possible, made it defensible, made it livable. The river makes this city beautiful, makes it joyful. From above, from the Rose Garden, the river tucks the city in to bed, wraps it like a ribbon.

From a bend in the river, a defensive bend in the river, came this city, this city that is my home.

Some days I can't believe I get to live here

Birthday balloons

Look at what the nice people at Microsoft organized for Small Boy's second birthday today!

20,000 balloons on a beautiful day!

Finally! Snow!

Snow has finallly come to the Bernese Oberland. It's not a massive storm but it's a good respectable snow and it's finally starting to look like proper winter around here. I walked around town with my camera this afternoon - this is something I'm really trying to do when Small Boy is at The Farm - but the low heavy sky and the grey light made for fairly flat pictures.



Close-ups of something colorful - berries on the holly bush, graffiti - worked better.




But there it is, actual snow.

The streets of my city: Christmas Market Monday edition

I'm not very happy with these pictures of the Christmas Market; they're very uninspired. In my defense, I have always thought that the Bernese Christmas Market itself was very uninspired. Lame, even. It's pretty much the regular market decorated with pine boughs.



I've never travelled to Germany for some of the more famous markets, but I have friends who have and they all agree that the German markets put our little Bernese market to shame. (With the possible exception, it seems, of J's Christmas Market - you'll remember that Christmas Market Monday was his idea.)



The market is actually divided into two sections, one on the Weisenhausplatz near the train station and the Bundeshaus, and a second part on the Münsterplatz. These pictures are from Weisenhausplatz section; I do think the stalls down at the Münsterplatz are a little more Christmas markety, but I didn't make it down there for pictures.



My favorite thing about Bern during Christmas time are the decorations of the lower Old Town, between the Zytglogge and the river; it's so lovely. I'll be posting some pictures throughout December to redeem my fair city in your eyes.

You can read about Christmas markets in Nürnberg, Schloss burg, Jena and Weimar, Munich, and Hannover and Dullsville, too. And a non-Christmas market in Chiang Mai (Thailand).

The streets of my city: Zibelemärit edition

The fourth Monday in November is the traditional Zibelemärit (onion market) in Bern. Local legend says the tradition dates back to the early 1400s. In May of 1405, the worst fire in the city's history burned more than 600 buildings of the Old Town to the ground; old stories say that citizens from the neighboring Kanton of Fribourg came to the aid of Bern. In return for this assistance, they are said to have earned the right to sell their wares in the Bernese market once a year. The Seeland region of Fribourg is known to this day for its vegetables, especially tomatoes, but it is said that back then they specialized in onions and so when they came to the markets they came above all with onions and the Zibelemärit was born. This is mostly legend though; the true story is more prosaic. As the city of Bern continued to expand, and especially with the construction of the Rathaus (city hall) and the Munster (cathedral), the existing markets no longer met the need and the city government instituted two additional markets, one beginning on the day of Saint Martin (November 11) and running the following 8 days, and a second in May. The so-called Martini Market was the forerunner of the Zibelemärit.

I must say, I prefer the legend.

Today the Zibelemärit has morphed into part market, part parade, part party, part excuse to take the day off but it remains an important onion market; according to the evening news the stalls sold approximately 42 tons of onions yesterday. I don't know if that figure includes all the Zibelechueche (onion tarts) and Zibelesuppe (onion soup) that is consumed, or if it's just the amount of raw onions sold. They are sold in bulk, of course, simply as onions, but also in traditional braids or wreaths.






You can also buy onion figurines.



And necklaces.



And ropes of peppermint candies (said to aide digestion) made to mimic the ropes of onions.



Or just a pretty little thing.



But be careful! Bands of youths roam the crowds bonking people on the head with little plastic hammers and throwing confetti in faces, all the better if somebody has an open mouth!



You can read more about the Zibelemärit (in German) here.

The fountains of my city: The Chindlifrässer

My decision to write a post about each of the main fountains of the Old Town has already led me to uncomfortable and disappointing historical discoveries. The Chindlifrässer Brunnen (Kinderfresser Brunnen in proper German, literally the children-eater fountain) is probably the most famous of all the fountains in Big City. If it is not the most famous (perhaps Justice is the most famous simply because she is Justice?), it is certainly the most unique.



It is a giant – ein Riesen – eating small, naked children. I love this fountain, it cracks me up. Who puts a giant eating small children on a fountain?

Like all the Brunnen in the Old Town it was erected in the 1540s (1545/46 to be precise) and replaced an older wooden Brunnen at the same site, but it does not seem to fit in the same mold as the other figures erected around the same time – Moses or Justice or a Schutzenfigur. Its intended meaning is clouded and mysterious, but there are two main theories. One theory, which is usually proposed in a sentence or two without a lot of background, is that it is a Fastnacht (carnival) figure. The other theory is that the child-eater atop the fountain is Jewish. And he’s eating small naked defenseless little children. Charming. Blood libel, right there in front of the public library!

Those who propose that the figure was originally designed to depict a Jew eating small children suggest that it illustrated an old (and eventually discredited) story of a Jewish man ritually murdering a boy in Bern in 1294 (a story, by the way, that was eventually used as an excuse to ban Jews from the city because of course it was not discredited until centuries later). They note that the hat calls to mind a Kippah or yarmulke and that the hat, belt and sleeves on the statue were originally yellow, a color Jews were often forced to wear. Then there are those who suggest that the original meaning behind the figure is lost to us but would have been perfectly clear to contemporaries much in the manner of a Heronimus Bosch painting. The statues were commissioned by the city; it’s hard to imagine that the city would spend so much money simply to portray a Fastnacht figure or to defame Jews. It’s possible that it carried some meaning we simply can’t decipher today; perhaps it was just whimsy. But knowing the history of Jews in middle Europe, the whiff of blood libel lingers. I take some comfort from the fact that today not a lot of average people on the street seem to suspect this about the possible origin of the Chindlifrässer; to them it’s just the Chindlifrässer (for example R had never heard this explanation before, but then again I know more about Big City than R does and have for some time now) but nevertheless it's not the sort of thing I like to learn about the place I call home.



You can read more about the Chindlifrässer here (in German).

The streets of my city

The streets of my city are bedecked with flowers. Especially in the Old Town, especially in the summer, window boxes overflow with above all geraniums. The first summer I visted Switzerland with R I jokingly asked him if it was a law that the buildings in the Old Town fill their window boxes with red geraniums. It's not a law, but there is a certain social pressure to have the right flowers in your windows at the right times. The geraniums can be hanging, like below



or upright



or both, but they are predominantly red, though the house below throws in some pink for good measure.



Other flowers, flowers in your garden or non-geraniums in your window boxes, can be any color you please so long as you take good care of them.




Dead or dying flowers in your window or garden is simply not done, unless they are sunflowers and then not only is it permissable to let them die a natural death, it is again almost an unwritten rule to let them do so. I think it's so that the birds can eat of the seeds as the flowers slowly die; the Swiss are great bird-lovers.



I personally love the slowly drying sunflowers and always left them standing until the bitter end in the garden back in Small Village. It's nice to see that even here in the shadow of the Bundeshaus people let the sunflowers fade into late summer.

This is why I've started carrying my camera around

I've started to make a conscious effort to carry my new camera (we went with a Nikon D80) with me more often. For one thing, it's just too nice of a camera - and too expensive - to use once a year on vacation; although our pictures from our Yellowstone trip are the best vacation pictures we have ever taken, they alone do not justify the expense. For another thing, I would hate to see something like this



and not have a camera with me.

How often do you see a horse dentist in the middle of the city? Frankly, I didn't even know there were horse dentists. I would have assumed horse dentistry would have come under the general rubric of Large Animal Veterinarian, but I guess I would have been wrong.

The fountains of my city: The Mosesbrunnen

Big City is a city of fountains - Brunnen, auf Deutsch. They line the main street through the Old Town and sit in important squares and in front of important buildings. These fountains scattered around the city are one of the highlights of the Old Town and the oldest among them date back to the mid-1500s. The statue of the Mosesbrunnen that stands on the Münsterplatz - the Cathedral square - dates to 1791. On a clear and sunny day the sunlight glints off the gilding and Moses' blue robes echo the sky above.



An older figure of Moses dating back to 1544 once decorated this Brunnen, but I haven't yet figured out if the old statue was destroyed, and if so, how; or simply replaced. The figure from 1544 showed Moses with a full beard and horns, which I believe was common in that time period, and the tablet he carried was engraved with the first two commandments in Hebrew. (The current statue holds tablets engraved with roman numerals I through X.) In the 1544 statue Moses was pointing particularly to the second commandment forbidding "graven images" - in the years immediately following the Reformation (which came to Big City in 1528 with a wave of iconoclasm that stripped the previously Catholic Münster of statues and frescos alike) this would have held especially weighty meaning.



The Brunnen of the city are a marvel and not simple because a good many of them are 450 years old. The statues that adorn them - Moses, Justice, the Chinderfresser (yes, the child-eater) - are works of art and their bases are intricate as well. Here's a detail from the base of the Mosesbrunnen.



Unless labeled otherwise the Brunnen water is potable; many's the hot day I have cupped my hands under a fountain like this and taken a cooling drink before continuing on my way, down the street to where another Brunnen waits to be admired.

The streets of my city

The butcher...



the baker...



sorry, no candlestick maker!

This extremely abbreviated version of my Streets posts brought to you by a non-napping Small Boy, an impending deadline, and a frazzled mother.

The streets of my city

Although we live in a lively city neighborhood, I’m continually surprised by how quiet it is here; Big City only has a population of 127,579 after all. Please, don’t ever think it’s as if we’re living in Chicago or Seoul. Think Cambridge, not Boston proper. The street we live on is a short (one block) one-way cross street so we get very little unnecessary traffic going past. There is a bus route on the main north-south street about 200 meters from our apartment and sometimes I can hear a bus, but the buses run on electricity or natural gas and they’re not very loud; nothing like the cranky old bus that rumbled up and down 16th Street back in D.C. Surprisingly, we hear less traffic here than we did back in Small Village, because in Small Village our house was right along the main road leading into Big City and here we’re on this quiet little-used side street.

Weekends are especially quiet, and on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings I hear the bells of the St. Paulus Kirche five blocks away pealing through the neighborhood.



During the week, if the radio is off and the window open, I can hear the church bells chime the hour. In the mornings, when R is taking care of Small Boy and I am writing in bed with a cup of coffee on the table beside me, I can guess at the weather by how muffled the seven o’clock chimes are. I can hear if they are carrying through crisp clear morning air or if they are pushing their way through rain or fog. Some winter mornings, with snow on the ground and fog in the air, I can only hear them if I listen for them.



On an early spring morning, the loudest thing about our city neighborhood, the thing that woke R and me at the crack of dawn throughout April and May, is the constant chattering of the birds in our courtyard. On a pleasant evening, it is the children of our apartment building playing on the playground out back. It’s easy to have a child in this neighborhood; there are nine children in this building alone and one of my neighbors is pregnant with her second. The bakery around the corner has children’s books and high-chairs and balloons; the butcher gives little slices of sausage to the kids when you shop there (they ask the parent if it’s okay first). I never feel as if I have to make the choice, City or suburb? It’s as if I have both at the same time, and it’s something I will miss keenly if we ever leave Switzerland.

The streets of my city

This is my favorite building in my Quartier (neighborhood).



It sits on a busy corner where there is plenty of car and foot traffic and a bus line. The upper floors are residential, but the ground floor is occupied by two local businesses - a cafe/bar and an Italian grocery. On weekends there might be a flower stand in front of the grocery, or sometimes fresh fruits and vegetables.



I think that this building is aesthetically pleasing, lovely really; but I think the reason I am so attached to it is because it has become iconic to me. The architecture of this building, the columns, the statue tucked away in its roof alcove, the colors and especially the two small businesses on the ground floor are a perfect image of what I always imagined life in a European city to look like. I even like that when I look at the building from across the streets the cables for the bus line - so very European - slice across my field of vision. Once upon a time I would mutter at those tram and bus cables for "ruining" my pictures; but they are the essence of European city living and I am learning to incorporate them into my pictures. To use them. To appreciate them. Their presence makes my life on foot, my life lived in close contact with the street, possible.



Much of my neighborhood is mixed-use; businesses on the ground floor and apartments above. I'm a big proponent of mixed-use zoning. As Jane Jacobs illustrated long ago, mixed-use neighborhood are lively and interesting; they have varied foot traffic at most hours of the day and night (thus providing not only interest but safety); and they're convenient for the residents. I live within a ten minute walk of a bakery, a grocery store, an organic food store, a butcher, two wine shops, multiple restaurants and cafes, an ATM, a post office, a papeterie (stationary and card store), an art supply store, two bookstores, two florists, two apotheks (drug stores), a branch library, a park, and the bus stop. Small Boy and I live our lives on foot, out on the streets of our neighborhood, strolling here, popping into this store and that, recognizing faces on the streets, contributing to this lively neighborhood. Our neighborhood is designed to be lived in, not merely inhabited.

I love the buildings, the businesses, the streets of my city.

Who let the authors out?

The streets of Bern have been taken over by authors!

They're in the Gasschens




they're on the fountains



they're in front of the Münster



and on the Münsterplatform overlooking the Aare.



They're reading literature in the streets of the city.



It's Literaturfest Bern.