Folks are starting to come back from vacation, which is a lovely thing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay long at coffee hour because I had to get back home for Veronika’s Epiphany party. Dreikönigstag has more of a tradition in Switzerland than it does in the states. Veronika had nine people over for fondue and a special cake with small king hidden inside. Whoever gets the piece with the king gets a crown on his head and I’m sure more happens but with a bunch of middle-aged single folks getting a paper crown is about as wild as it gets. I found the cake really delicious. It was a kind of cross between cake and whole wheat bread and biscuits. Yum.
I have much to learn before I’m a mother. Part of the afternoon’s entertainment was watching me freak out at how they handled fire. First I jumped out of my skin when a lay lit a match then held it directly downward to light the flame for the fondue. I saw the flame on her skin! Then people handled the pots in all manner of ways and I really got scared when one of the flames went wild and even after they managed to get the lid on it burned all around it to innumerable suggestions as to how to put it out. Eventually it died out and I didn’t die of a heart attack. Swiss German was not so bad this time.
After dinner we played another guessing contest and again I won second place (two of the three questions I answered exactly). Then we went for a walk and I spent some time talking with a young gal who told me all kinds of horror stories about Swiss schools. We spoke in English so she could practice, but she was very good. Her English teacher tells her she’s stupid and to shut up in class because it hurts his ears when she butchers English. Lovely. Sadly, that was the mild part of the tale. I suppose I could question my sources, but for ever success story (like my dear Stephan and his classmates) I hear an equal number of terrifying things about what goes on in school: rampant sex and pressure to participate, beatings where the victim is sent to a psychologist so she can learn to bear it, enormous pressure to conform, bright students being punished for not fitting in, etc. etc. Can anyone blame me for not wanting to send my kids to a place that produces such stories? Yeah, the bad stuff doesn’t happen to everyone, but why is it so important to take that risk? I didn’t have trouble in school – even before I homeschooled. I was the kid who looked out for the outcast and invited him in. So maybe life was grand for me, but I saw and identified with the pain of others. I didn’t see anything so terrible as a beating, but what I saw as bad enough and has stuck with me.
But on to lighter topics, I learned a few Swiss German phrases and perhaps the most usefully is “I need to speak better Swiss German.” I’m hoping it will give me an in with the locals so I can soon be well on my way to understanding them. Hindsight says I should have asked how to say “understand” instead of “speak” because when I tried out the phrase everyone said I speak well already. Anyway, it’s all the thrills of taking the first steps in a language all over again: trying to hear the sounds, trying to reproduce them in the mouth and tasting how they feel, and trying to remember what seems to be a random collection of utterances. Fun, fun!
