A completely subjective list of the top 10 books of 2021

Oh hey, this year went by very fast. And oh hey, the last time I wrote in this blog was to share my ten best books of 2019, along with a resolution to blog more. Very much my bad!

As we go into our third pandemic year, I’m absolutely not trying to resolve to do anything except wear pajamas and cuddle my dog. But I did go into this year with the goal of reading 52 books (one for each week, get it?) and with one day to go, I’ve made it to 54! So along with sharing my goal (not resolution) to read a full 60 books in 2022, I also want to share with you some of my favorite reads from this past bonkers year. 

I chose the number 10 because it’s as good a number as any, and without boundaries, how would I know when to stop? I was lucky enough to like most of what I read this year because I have good instincts, get good recommendations, and read good lists. 

This list is presented in the order I read the books, no hierarchy. So without further ado, my 10 best books of 2021 (plus one honourable mention)!

 1.     Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

This was the first book I read as part of the Lausanne Book Club, which fulfilled my years-long dream of joining a book club, plus has helped me meet some good new friends in the area. At a time, January 2021, when I wasn’t traveling anywhere, wasn’t going to the office, was only leaving the house to get groceries and yarn for my budding knitting habit, this book immersed me in a totally different world. That world happened to be 1980s Glasgow, during the Thatcher years, and involved a lot of poverty and alcoholism, but apparently it was just the escape I needed. Definitely a heavy book, but also absolutely engrossing – it’s over 400 pages and I finished it in two days

2.     Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

This is a doozy of a story, about a trans woman Reese whose ex, Amy/Ames, a trans woman who recently detransitioned, tells her that he recently impregnated his cis female boss and wants the three of them to co-parent the future child. It’s a lot, but in the hands of this excellent trans author, it’s not at all soapy. The characters are all absolutely flawed and completely lovable. Plus it takes place in New York!

3.     The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

This book is called A Girl is a Body of Water in the U.S. and The First Woman in the U.K, which is the version I got, being a European and all. Kirabo is a young girl growing up in a small Ugandan village trying to learn what it means to be a woman without conforming to the expectations of everyone around her. It’s a book full of strong women and folklore mixed with Ugandan politics in the time of Idi Amin. Makumbi is an amazing writer who also wrote Kintu, described as an African “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which was one of my favorite books of 2020.

4.     Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

This is kind of a 2-for-1, since I read this and then Parable of the Talents directly after. I did prefer this first book to the second, but they were both good, and need to be read as a pair. I don’t think I have anything to say about Butler and her very prescient vision of the future (climate change, societal breakdown, violence, extreme inequality) that hasn’t been said. Just that this book is a classic for a reason.

5.     Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi

Emezi is one of my absolute favorite authors. Their first book, Freshwater, came out in 2018 and since then, they’ve published three others with a couple more coming out in 2022. Dear Senthuran is their memoir of sorts, in the form of letters they wrote to people, real and imagined. These letters discuss suicide attempts, difficult relationships, their identity as a god, and their experiences as a writer and with the world of publishing. I hate calling books “inspiring”, because it makes it sound like a self-help book or something, but this was really inspiring to me. I read this one especially slowly, so as to savor every detail. 

6.     Segu by Maryse Condé, transl. from French by Barbara Bray

This book originally came out in 1984, and is an epic story starting in 1797 about the African kingdom of Segu, the arrival of Islam, and the slave trade. This is one of those books where it’s impossible to understand how the author wrote such a detailed account of the past without actually having experienced it. It is truly a book to get lost in, an escape, albeit a sometimes disturbing one.

7.     The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

This book was so lovely that it kind of put me in a bad mood afterwards because I had to return to the real world. Heart-warming but never corny, this is the story of a rule-following social worker who goes to an orphanage full of magical children (one of whom might be the anti-Christ) deemed too “dangerous” for society, and the love he finds there. A beautiful queer read.

8.     One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

Another lovely, fantastical queer love story, this one involving time travel. August is 23-years-old and has just moved to Brooklyn where she meets Jane on the Q train. She quickly falls for this beautiful girl in the black leather jacket, but learns that Jane is from the 1970s and is stuck on the subway. It’s a mystery, it’s sci-fi, it’s a romance, plus it’s just a big, beautiful queer time with an excellent cast of characters in 2019 New York – the book ends in the summer of 2020 and there’s no Covid!

9.     There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, transl. from Japanese by Polly Barton

After experiencing burnout at her long-time job, an unnamed narrator goes to an employment agency and asks for jobs that don’t require much mental energy or engagement. The jobs she ends up with are quite strange: watching a man on a hidden camera feed, coming up with trivia for cracker packets, sitting in a cabin in a city forest. At each, she learns that it is harder to disengage from work than she thought. An extremely creative and inventive book that looks at the ways we have allowed work to take over our lives. 

10.     Matrix by Lauren Groff

I’ve never wanted to be a nun until I read this book. I probably still don’t, especially since this book takes place in the 12th century. It’s hard to explain what is so wonderful about this book, which made many of the best-of lists this year. It’s the story of Marie de France, an abbess at a poor, struggling monastery, who transforms it into a wealthy and powerful place controlled and populated only by women. This book made me want to learn herbalism and how to make my own clothes and to sit in quiet contemplation in candlelight. Will that actually happen? Probably not. But this is still the perfect book for going into our third Covid winter of hunkering down and maybe getting crafty (and hopefully getting way offline). 

Honourable mention: Le Consentement by Vanessa Springora

This is a mention honoring me, because I read a full book in French! It’s also an honourable mention because Le Consentement is a really good book. Springora was abused by a very famous, much older French author at just 14 years old, when he began a “relationship” with her. An honest and brutal account of what took place, I found the writing to be direct and powerful, plus I was able to understand it.  

And then since I’m a cheater, and who’s gonna stop me, just a few more that I’d really recommend:

• The Firestarter’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

• The Lying Lives of Adults by Elena Ferrante

• Behold the Dreamers by Imoblo Mbue

• A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

• Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, transl. from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Next up: Currently, I’m reading The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, which is another “list” book, including the New York Times’s 10 best of 2021. This is actually a trilogy of short memoirs that were put together into one volume. Ditlevsen was a famous Danish poet and published these books between 1967 and 1971. So far it is really living up to the hype. I love memoirs that are so detailed, so inside the author’s head, so vivid, that I forget that I’m not reading fiction.

I’m also reading Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe, which looks at the way many workers are exploited due to the relatively recent idea that our jobs should be our passions and if so, then we should be happy to work as hard as necessary at them, even without adequate compensation. It’s anti-capitalist and questions the idea of the nuclear family that so many of us just accept, and so far I’m really enjoying it.

I’m planning to read The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, which has been recommended by numerous people, and Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune, author of The House in the Cerulean Sea. So clearly, I’m going for a little escapism into other worlds. 

I definitely want to try and read more non-fiction books in 2022. Not because they are somehow more “serious” than fiction, but because I keep buying these non-fiction books that look so interesting and that I’m so excited about, but then I just end up still reading and buying fiction books. We’ll see how it goes.

I’d love to hear what you think of my little list. Did you read any of these books? Did you like them too? Hate them? Have recommendations for me to read in 2022 that you think I’ll love? Want me to recommend a book to you? Give me a holler!

2019: A Year in Books

This was supposed to be posted as en end to 2019 more than a beginning to 2020, but alas, I did not have the time to finish it before I went and worked an 11-hour shift waitressing at a New Year’s Eve dinner-turned DJ party. Still, it seems as good a time as any to reflect on the year gone by. A more introspective person might have some deeper thoughts than this, but for now, in part as a way to get back into a blogging habit (2020 resolutions anyone?), I’ve decided that a good way for me to wrap up the year would be to look back at the books I’ve read.

Starting in January, I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read and finished. I was hoping to get at least 52 for the number of weeks in a year, but alas, I only made it to 45. Of course, in addition to those I read a lot of great journalism, essays, and got about a third of the way through Jill Lepore’s massive tome on American history, These Truths. Perhaps I’ll finish it in 2020 and let you all know how American ends!

Of the 45 books I read this year, 37 were written by women or non-binary people and 19 by people of color (16 of those in both categories). This was definitely a conscious decision, although less because it felt like some kind of a good challenge or the “right” thing to do and more because those were the books that just genuinely seemed more interesting to me. Books by white men, on average, just don’t call out to me in the same way (although there are obviously still some white men on my list. #notallwhitemen or whatever).

There weren’t any books this year that I read and really did not enjoy - I guess I did a good enough job off the bat of picking the right ones. I chose books based on personal recommendations, best-of lists, Twitter, and topics that interested me.

Obviously I’m not going to go through 45 books at this time. Instead, like every journalistic outlet has done this month, here are my 10 best books I read in 2019 (some were published before this year). They are listed in chronological order based on when I read them:

1. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

   I tend to be drawn to the kind of books and stories I could likely never write (which might be all of them!). I am generally not big on short stories, but this collection is just completely unique and dystopic and creative. The stories are commentaries on race, capitalism, and violence, but more than anything are just really good reads.

2. The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

   Again, the kind of out-there fiction I could never think up. Mackintosh’s books focuses on three sisters living with their mother and father, whom they call King, on a deserted island, away from men who are literally toxic. It brings the idea of toxic masculinity to life and is also descriptive, original, creepy, and sad.

3. The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

   So this is kind of a cheat because these are three books, and I counted them as three books as part of my reading list, but now I’m smooshing them into one book for the sake of this list, because I wouldn’t recommend reading just one. Jemisin won the Hugo Award, which is a sci-fi book award, for each book in this trilogy. It’s hard to sum up in a few sentences what these books contain, but if you are at all interested in fantasy, science fiction, geology, magic, and just really good storytelling featuring flawed but ultimately heroic characters, this is a great series.

4. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makai

   I actually read this book for the first time back when it came out in 2018, but I read it again this year because I enjoyed it so much the first time. Makai jumps between the 1980s and 2015 to tell the story of how the AIDS crisis impacted a group of mostly young men and also some women in Chicago. All of her characters are three-dimensional and knowable and Makai does a great job of taking readers through an unfolding terror.

5. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Wang

   Now we enter my non-fiction period. I am generally a reader of fiction, but every once in a while I get into a non-fiction jag, usually spurred on by a couple of great books, like this essay collection. Wang has schizoaffective disorder and her essays looking at her diagnosis, illness, and periods of relief are both informative and extremely compelling. This book is personal but also sheds light on the larger issues of mental health care in the United States.

6. Heavy by Kiese Laymon

   Another one of those books that I could never write. It is impossible for me to imagine being able to write about one’s life so openly and honestly. Laymon’s memoir is about growing up a heavy child in Mississippi to a single mother and eventually becoming a writing professor. But it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about the impacts of racism and poverty, not just emotionally but physically as well.

7. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

   Another author where I’m just like “how does your brain work and how do I make my brain do that?” Lockwood is a poet, perhaps most famous for her poem “Rape Joke,” but Priestdaddy is her memoir, the true story of somehow being one of the children of a married Catholic priest in the midwest. Although her upbringing probably wouldn’t be described as average, and her father is the kind of Trump-supporting alpha male you want to throw out a window, she treats her family and the church with honesty and scrutiny but also grace.

8. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

   This book is just fun! It’s neither a long nor challenging read - I finished it within 24 hours, mostly on a plane from Switzerland to the U.S. - but it’s just so well-written and creative. It’s not really a murder mystery; we already know who the murderer is, right there in the title. Instead, the mystery is whether or not the sister will got caught, and who will end up suffering the consequences and taking the blame. Plus, it’s set in Nigeria by a young Nigerian author.

9. Severance by Ling Ma

   As a review by Maris Kreizman on the back cover says, “it might just be the first and only coming-of-age, immigrant experience, anti-capitalist zombie novel you’ll ever need.” Again, another great book that takes on the perils of capitalism and our success-oriented culture. This novel also examines the pitfalls of nostalgia along with the dangers of living a life lacking human connection. And it’s also an exciting story and page-turner!

10. Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

    Emezi is an amazing author whose brain is clearly on another level or planet. Their debut novel, Freshwater, was one of my favorites from 2018 and this follow-up, which is YA, is just as incredible. This short book takes us to a perhaps not-so-distant future where all the ‘monsters’ have been vanquished, i.e. racists, homophobes, transphobes, abusers, etc. Jam is a teenage trans girl who is mostly non-verbal and is visited by Pet, who tells her he has come to her world because there is at least one monster still in hiding. The story itself is engrossing, but what I love is that Emezi creates this world that could totally exist now if we let it, where we just let people be and function in whatever manner they feel most comfortable.

Anyway that was (some) of my year in books! The whole list is somewhere on my twitter, @sparkersays, in thread format (I’m not great at the medium). And now that it’s officially 2020, the book I’m currently reading, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, will kick off my new list once I finish it! I chose this book in one of the best ways - by thinking I didn’t have enough books while traveling for a few days in Amsterdam, finding a random bookstore, picking from the small selection of English books, and then actually having enough books during my trip and saving it for now!

Happy New Year and happy reading if that’s your thing!

A very artfully styled photo of my top books of 2019 on our couch (which is covered by a sheet because of dog), minus My Sister, the Serial Killer because I left that at my parent’s house for my dad to read. Always pay a good book forward!

Beshert

I have a problem of wanderlust. I know I’m not at all alone or unique in this, and that it obviously isn’t really a problem, except that I experience it no matter where I am, like the opposite of living in the moment. I can be somewhere new and exciting, like Honduras, thinking about how I want to go to Vietnam (still never been). A small thing in terms of actual life problems, but maybe also some kind of comment on my inability to truly enjoy myself or be where I am. Oh well.

I mention that only because I started watching “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” today on Netflix as a way to give myself more places that I need to go, even though I’m in Switzerland, about to go to America next week, planning with Kasey her trip here and if we’ll go to Innsbruck and/or Munich and/or Strasbourg. As in, maybe I could focus up on what I’m doing. The first episode, Fat, is in Italy and pretty much just made me realize that I need to visit Italy more often. It also has falsely convinced me that I can learn Italian through pure osmosis. The second episode, Salt, takes place mostly in Japan, which has recently been high on my list of places to go. This list is ever-changing. There was a point in time where I was obsessed with Mongolia. Australia has been inching its way up, even though a few years ago it was way down at the bottom. Namibia was up there for a while, but now I’m more interested in South Africa. Vietnam and Laos have always had strong showings but now, since Sam went to South Korea for the Olympics last year plus reading Pachinko, South Korea is way up.

But I digress. Anyway, as I was watching the host of the show, Samin Nosrat, learn about miso and soy sauce in Japan, my brain did this thing where it tried to listen to a language that it has absolutely no understanding of. I’ve always had this dream/secret belief that my brain, that way it did when I was a toddler, will be able to hear a language and if I listen to it long enough, will be able to learn that new language purely by hearing it. It was something I believed when I was in Argentina just starting to date Sam and he would speak German with other classmates, that if I just listened to them, it would take. It did not, not really anyway.

So as I tried to absorb the Japanese through Netflix while simultaneously thinking about how much I want to go to Japan and who might want to come with me, I thought back, as one does, to seventh grade. In seventh grade, we started a third language (English being the first, French being the second. My French is terrible FYI). I chose Chinese because, and this is true, in fifth grade we watched a documentary about people in China who lived on houseboats and I thought that might be something I’d like to do one day, in which case, Chinese would definitely be super helpful (I would’ve been learning Mandarin – I have no idea if that’s what the people on the houseboat were speaking). After a week however, they cancelled the class due to lack of interest and gave us the option to join another language class: Italian, Japanese, or Spanish.  

I don’t really know I chose Spanish. I guess because it seemed the most useful and after my week of Chinese, I decided to return to a Latin alphabet. Italian just didn’t seem that useful - ironic, since now everyone where I live speaks German or Italian. This seemingly small decision comes up in my brain now and again. Obviously it did today because I was trying my darndest to understand Japanese and failing. And sometimes I think about it because it would indeed be very useful to speak Italian right about now. But of course, had I taken Italian, or Japanese, I might not even be here, in Silvaplana, Switzerland, because I only met Sam because we were in Spanish school together in Argentina, and I don’t think I would have gone to Spanish school in Argentina to improve my Spanish if I didn’t have any Spanish in the first place.

To be clear, even though I named this blogpost Beshert, which is Yiddish for “meant to be” or “pre-ordained,” I don’t really believe that things are meant to be. I don’t believe that if I had studied Italian and gone to Italy instead that I would have met Sam there. Maybe I would’ve met a nice Italian, or in another case of meeting someone from the wrong country, someone from Bulgaria or something. Or no one. But it is weird to think that something so small, a class decision I made in seventh grade, actually kind of changed my life. 

Clearly this extra-long winter has taken my brain to some fun places. Really, the winter here has stretched on far too long and the novelty of skiing-on-demand and walking across a frozen lake has worn off. We had about a week of warmer weather so I settled into the idea of spring, just to be jolted back into winter with heavy snowfalls and grey skies. To make matters more fun, on top of moving, Sam and I have gone through a variety of non-life-threatening illnesses: flus, fevers, stomach viruses, and scratchy throats. All in all, I think we’re both more than ready for a little time away from Silvaplana. 

Which is good news, because in a week, we’re gonna get it! We’re going back to the USA! For Sam, it’ll be the first time since he moved away in August 2017. First time he’ll get to flash his fancy blue passport at the border! We’ll be visiting Boston to see friends, then New York for a wedding, and then North Carolina to see my parents. Then he’ll fly back here, home, and I’ll spend an extra week in North Carolina and Washington, DC. 

For all of you in any of these places, we’re excited to see you! And if you’re not in those places, I guess you’ll just have to come visit us here in Switzerland! We just moved to a new apartment which has bunkbeds behind this weird wall panel in our living room with your (whoever you are) name on it. And despite the depressing weather we’re experiencing now, summer, fall, and winter are quite lovely here (just don’t come in November. It’s garbage).  

A rare ray of sunshine in a cloudy and snowy couple of weeks

Shameless plug for the Engadin!

So today’s post is maybe less of a blog post and more of a travel ad for the Engadin Valley area! (The Engadin Valley area is where I/we live in case you were wondering.)

There are currently flights available from NYC and DC to Zürich (then from Zürich, just a quick, 3.5 hour train ride to St. Moritz!) for under $500 round trip on quality carriers such as United Basic Economy, Delta Basic Economy, and TAP Portugal among others (I’d go with Delta if you have a choice). Basic Economy just means you can’t bring a carry-on bag and sometimes you don’t get your seat assignment until you’re at the gate. But small prices to pay for such, well, small prices! These excellent deals are showing winter and summer, so I’m going to tell you about all the fun things you can do here in hopes that you’ll come visit us!

WINTER

Winter is kind of the thing here. St. Moritz, the tourist capital of this area, is famous for being an amazing ski area for fancy Russians with private planes and fur coats. St. Moritz the town does have that winter wonderland feel. It has cobblestone streets and narrow alleys, good-smelling bakeries and outdoor bars with mulled wine and hot chocolate. It also has a ton of shopping, appealing or not depends on your budget and interests. Stores represented in St. Moritz include Prada and Gucci and you could also buy a Maserati if you were so inclined. But the Engadin is more than just St. Moritz. For example, we live in Silvaplana, which is just a five-minute drive from St. Moritz and while also over-priced, does maintain a little more “normal person” vibe. So, why should you visit us in winter?

Skiing

This one is pretty obvious. If you like downhill skiing, you’ve probably heard of St. Moritz, but even if not, you would figure out pretty quickly that this area is A+ for skiing. St. Moritz itself has the Corviglia resort with 24 lifts. There’s also Corvatsch/Furtschellas, which is a literal five-minute drive from our house, Diavolezza-Lagalb, Zuoz, plus some baby beginner slopes for all the newbies. All those names are in Romansh, the cool local language here that you definitely don’t have to ever learn to speak but does add that extra flair of culture.

Just a boring old ski day at Corviglia in St. Moritz

Cross-country skiing

If sliding on skis down a mountain doesn’t appeal to you, perhaps sliding horizontally on flat-ish snowy ground does. Just as a disclaimer, while cross-country skiing does sound and seem more benign than hurling yourself downhill, I have sustained many more falls and bruises cross-country skiing than I have downhill skiing. But it is a great workout and we have many many kilometers of cross-country trails here, including some that go across frozen lakes.

Cross-country skiing with Sam’s family in Val Roseg last year - I only fell down a million times on the way back down

Sledding

If you’d rather leave it all to gravity, sledding is a good way to go. Beyond just walking up little hills and sledding down, we have two long trails specifically for sledding where you can get some serious speed (disclaimer: I have not done these yet but they look cool). 

When Zara and I found a hill for sledding and got way too much exercise

Après-Ski

You don’t even have to ski to get into the apres-ski spirit (spoiler alert: it’s just drinking!). There are countless apres-ski options here, but my favorite so far might be the cross-country bar near our house. It’s a yurt that pop-ups in the winter owned by an Italian with an excellent music selection and is kept surprisingly warm given that it’s a yurt in the middle of a bunch of snow.

Our nearby cross-country ski bar

Walking around

Our taxes are high here, but we get our money’s worth with snow plowing and grooming. Trails around the lake, across the lakes, and just here, there, and everywhere are groomed so you can take nice long winter walks.

Events and Culture

So this isn’t something I’m super familiar with because Sam and I are cheap and lazy, but there are a ton of sports and cultural events around here. We get ski races, polo on a frozen lake, concerts, and a gourmet festival. Also there’s gonna be a crypto-finance conference here in a couple weeks.

SPRING

Spring (and fall) are shoulder seasons. They’re short and there isn’t a lot going on. Skiing here ends at the beginning of May, so spring is really just about two months long. It’s not really an ideal to come here because there isn’t a lot open, but on the bright side, not a lot of tourists. A good time to explore surrounding areas, like one of the nearby valleys where they speak some kind of Italian but it’s not the better-known canton of Ticino.

Silvaplana last May - not too shabby

SUMMER

Summer here is really beautiful. It’s not as long as I would like it to be, but it is really pleasant. Not very humid, lots of sunshine, and it doesn’t ever get too hot, staying steady at a nice 70-75F. The area gets touristy again for summer so pretty much everything is open.

Hiking and Walking

I mean, you can’t talk about Switzerland without talking about hiking right. So don’t even try! We live in a valley of lakes surrounded by beautiful mountains, so there is no shortage of beautiful walks and hikes of all levels, single day stuff and overnight stuff where you can stay at SAC (Swiss Alpine Club) huts along the way.

Monty and I on a little summer hike behind our apartment

Kite Surfing

Silvaplana, our town, is probably most famous for kite surfing. Lake Silvaplana is the beneficiary to something called the Maloja Wind, which is a wind that comes from Maloja, and on a good weather/good wind day, there are over 100 people kiting around the lake. I’ve never tried it, because I feel like it would take me so many hours to stand up on the board for just a few seconds that I’d rather spend my time elsewhere, but it looks really fun and is entertaining just to watch.

 Mountain Biking

We also have a ton of mountain biking trails. The ski resorts run their gondolas in the summer so you can take your bike up and then ride down, but if you’re like Sam and believe that that’s a bullshit way to bike, then you are welcome to bike up and down under your own steam. You can also rent e-bikes which make the whole process a lot easier. Or you can do what I do and use a 15-year-old bike to huff and puff up trails that are barely at an incline.

 Swimming, Stand Up Paddleboard, Kayak, Sailing

Our local lake stays too cold for summer swimming (unless you like being uncomfortably cold, in which case, go for it, some people do), but there are a couple of smaller lakes like Lej da Staz and Lej Marsh that get warm enough in summer for a pleasant swim and picnic. Meanwhile our lake has kayak and SUP rentals, things you can do without actually going into the water. There are also sailing classes for those who want to really do a thing.

Swimming at Lej Marsh

FALL

Fall is also a shoulder season time like spring, but fall is also really beautiful and worth a visit if you like hiking and biking but don’t care as much about the other stuff. The temperature drops to below sweater weather really quickly, but without snow, the trails are all open for hiking, skies are generally blue, and the leaves are beautifully golden. And there aren’t too many tourists! Win-win.

Fall in Silvaplana

TRAINS!

Switzerland is known for its excellent public transportation and the reputation is well-earned. Beyond the ability to get around without needing a car, some of the routes are really pretty. The trip from St. Moritz to Tirano is a UNESCO World Heritage route. And those can be done any time of the year!

The train from Tirana back up to St. Moritz

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because we want you to visit! We like (most) people and we live in a really special place. Switzerland can be stupid expensive, but by having friends like us with a pull-out sofa covered in dog hair (and in April we’re moving to a place that has bunk-beds behind a wall panel!), you can have a relatively cheap Swiss vacation. 

Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff to do in Switzerland, cities to see, old towns to say “aww so cute”, different mountains to climb, and even different languages to practice. 

Ok, shameless plug over.

Year in Review

Looking back into the archives of this somewhat under-utilized blog, I see that my first entry was from this exact time last year, Thanksgiving (which was the 23rd, not the 22nd, but you get the idea). So this seems like an opportune moment for a year-in-review, to take stock of how Switzerland has changed me, how I’ve changed Switzerland (not at all I don’t think), and just generally what’s been going on.

Here are some changes and some sames:  

This time last year I was finished up A1 German, now I’m starting B1 (and I finished A2 somewhere in between)! However, I am back in Davos for this German class, meaning once again doing the 2-hour each way commute over the UNESCO World Heritage Status train line. I did do my A2 more locally in Samedan which was a nice change, but sadly, they do not seem to have intensive B1 classes (lack of interest I assume). 

Back on my UNESCO World Heritage route

While I am still not fully “employed” in the traditional sense of the word, I am more employed than I was a year ago. Well maybe. This specific time last year, I was actually on contract with my old job finishing up a project, which lasted through the end of 2017. Then I was project and contract-less. More recently, I’ve been upping (albeit very slowly) my freelance journalism game and in what I find to be a very promising and exciting turn of events, I am actually doing some translating. If you’ve ever heard me speak German, that might be comical, and indeed, when I’ve met with the people I end up translating for and interview with them in German, I kind of wonder if they speak German, because if they did, they would know how crazy I sound. But I’ve been doing work for St. Moritz Tourism taking German writing and making it into lovely English. The latest project I completed was their winter travel guide book which was actually over 100 pages and was a pretty large undertaking where I read a lot of German and wrote a lot of English and learned a lot about St. Moritz! (And also Sam proofread all of my work). That’s over now, but hopefully tale of my talents will now spread far and wide throughout the valley (we live in a valley).

I’ve also been waitressing occasionally which is some change news. However, I’m still pretty bad at it, so that’s the same. 

In same news, I still listen to American podcasts, watch American television, read English-language books, and just generally limit my media interactions to American/English-language media which is obviously not ideal for my linguistic development. However: I’ve discovered that they run old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer here and I think maybe because it’s an action-centric show with quippy humor and dramatic facial expressions for teenagers, I can actually understand most of it (plus I watched it all a million years ago and vaguely remember the storylines) so that’s been my biggest German media engagement.

Also, my hair is shorter.  

Ski season starts soon and unlike last year, I have a season pass! So I imagine myself waking up early, skiing every morning (when it’s sunny, I don’t do inclement weather), and just generally becoming an amazing sporty mountain woman. Assume that the next time you see me I’ll be thin and muscular and have permanent goggle tan.

Mountain getting all purdy and snow-covered for me because I deserve it.

And Monty is still the same as in he’s still the best most cutest most amazing dog in the world and that’s all there is to say about that.

Two cute beasts

Unlike last year, I won’t even be trying to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday this year because I have German class today and thanks to my long commute I won’t even be home before 11. But maybe this Saturday I’ll try and make a nice little chicken + potato + veggie + cranberry + pie situation like I did last year (I even snagged a bag of cranberries at the St. Moritz Coop and they’re in the freezer waiting for their moment). Once again, Sam is super busy at work because the whole region is heading into winter tourism season which means lots of brochures, magazines, bus plans, maps, and the tourist book I worked on all need to be printed!

Mostly, the news is just that I’m here now, for good. I mean, technically I’ve been here for good for the last year. But for the last couple of months I’ve been traveling a lot, in the states and a little in Central America, going to weddings (FYI, if you invite me to your wedding, no matter how far away, there’s like a 95% chance I will go, so just think carefully before you do), visiting friends and parents, exploring, networking and just generally not being home. So although I will obviously travel again in the future, I currently don’t have an specific plans to do so, and I’m just generally trying to feel more rooted here.

Which is maybe my final change, a change of attitude (I think that was corny but, oh well, shrug emoji). I don’t think it’s been a big secret that this has been a challenging adjustment for me. Going to a tiny town that also happened to be in a tiny country where I don’t speak the languages (they gave me four to choose from, and my brain was like “nope, none of these”) and don’t know many people and live far from most things has been a real challenge. For much of the last year, I’ve imagined us moving somewhere else, like Zürich or Bern or Luzern. Sam has been pretty great about all of it, dealing with my tantrums and agreeing to move if it was what I wanted. But I vacillated. I had told myself that we wouldn’t make any big decisions before a year, because it always takes time to settle into a new place, especially one as different as Silvaplana. Also Sam has a great job that he really likes, not something you give up carelessly.  

And I’m glad that despite my whining, we didn’t give up yet. I still don’t know that this is somewhere we’re going to settle for years and years, but instead of waiting to leave, I’m now more invested in trying to stay, to meet more people, feel more at home and settled, and more integrated, whatever that means. Despite being a bad waitress, that job has helped me a lot, especially because I ended up working at a number of events in town where I met lots of different people (including the mayor!). It has helped me see a version of our life where we are in this place, have friends here, belong here.

Perhaps a quick word on Thanksgiving, which while having extremely troublesome roots remains my favorite holiday, not due to its history, but for what it has always been to my family: basically our Christmas (because let’s face it, Chanukah is kind of bullshit) , a time of coming together and sharing and being among loved ones (but without the presents). So maybe I should do a quickie “things I’m thankful for” thingy:

• I’ll give Sam the number one slot because he’s a pretty great guy and I feel lucky to have him.

• But what about Monty!?!? Monty, you’re my everythinggggg! Sweet baby angel!

• My parents of course. My dad always said the most important choice you make in life is who your parents are, and I feel like I chose well with them.

• Other assorted family and friends: I feel especially lucky that I’ve been able to surround myself with friends and family who have good values and are, most importantly, kind.

• My extreme privilege that allows me to travel more than most people get to.

• My stellar German (eye roll emoji)

• My ski pass

• My ski boots which really changed the game last winter.

• And last but not least, these views!!

So that’s been our (but mostly my) year! Happy Thanksgiving and other assorted upcoming holidays!

Alone

Solo traveling, even for the short amount of time that I am doing so, gives me lots of alone time to consider being alone. There are multiple schools of thought on being alone. One is the loneliest number. You need to learn to be happy by yourself. You’re nobody till somebody loves you, or something like that. I imagine that, like alcohol, being alone is best done in moderation. Most of us need to be alone some of the time and would prefer to be with people at other times, the ratios shifting depending on our personalities and states of mind in the moment.

I´m currently wrapping up a three-week solo trip through Guatemala (with itsy bitsy stops in Honduras and El Salvador – country number 36!). It was designed as a hybrid fun/work trip where I do a little reporting/research on coffee and climate change stuff while also seeing some of the sights and visiting a friend of mine who I know from Nicaragua but now lives with his fiancée in Guatemala due to all the unrest in Nicaragua.

I’m currently in Flores, a small island town in the north of the country near Tikal, a park with Mayan ruins that is one of those “must-sees” for tourists. In an attempt to meet people, I am staying at what I believe is THE hostel in Flores, a big open space filled with plants and colorful murals and tourists of all (European and North American and Australian) nationalities, English spoken in most corners.

I love anywhere with water  

I must admit I’m a sucker for these kinds of places. I love the “vibes” and the intricate twisted-metal jewelry designs that local hippie artisans come to sell to the gringas like me and the over-priced vegetarian food. And I love that I get to meet people. I’m lucky to speak at least enough Spanish to make my way through the country alone, dealing with the occasional bus strike and asking for directions. This means that I don’t really have to follow the tourist trail, but it also means I sometimes find myself in places without these kind of hostels, and end up staying alone in cheap hotels, nice in one way, but it doesn’t provide as many opportunities to meet people.

Traveling around on my own, I’ve thought to myself how difficult it would be to travel in Central America if you didn’t speak Spanish, but I had forgotten what I would call the backpacker’s trail. A string of destinations that almost every backpacker seems to hit, with direct, over-proved shuttles running in between them all, travelers running into one another over and over again in Antigua, Tikal, Semuc Champey, Livingston, and so on.

Last Monday I had a tough travel day. I was leaving Nebaj, the mountain town where my friend Wilder and his fiancée Grace live, and was heading back to Guatemala City where I planned to spend the night and then go the following day to Esquipulas on the Honduran border. It was supposed to be relatively straight-forward: take a microbus from Nebaj to Quiché, available on the corner behind the park, and then from Quiché catch a direct bus to Guatemala City, maybe 5-6 hours overall. When I got to the corner, I was told there were no direct buses to Quiché due to some kind of strike, but the minibus was going to Sacapulas, which was on the way there, and then we could find an onward bus. Also this halfway bus would be the same price as the regular bus usually would have been. Something to due with the strike. But then someone got a phone call and it turned out they weren’t driving to Sacapulas anymore, just some town in-between, same price. So I took that microbus. From that in-between town we all stood around until a guy with a pickup truck offered to take us to Sacapulas (for money. Everyone with a pickup truck was making money that day). Luckily me and one other woman and her friend were sat in the truck itself and all the men went in the bed of the pickup.

From Sacapulas someone with a pickup offered to take us halfway to Quiché but then not enough people wanted to go so he decided it wasn’t worth the money he’d make. Meanwhile, there was another regular microbus in Sacapulas going to Huehuetenango, which wasn’t on the strike route. It was definitely out of the way by a fair bit, but I knew that there were direct buses from Huehuetenango to Guatemala City, whereas I wasn’t sure how long it would even take to get to Quiché and from there I didn’t know if there would be direct buses to Guatemala City. I talked to the drivers and their recommendation was to go to Huehuetenango. So I went.

I arrived in Huehuetenango around 1:30pm, which was almost the time I had originally imagined I would be in Guatemala City, but no matter. The next bus to Guatemala, which was an actual (albeit very cheap old) coach bus was at 2:30, so I used their office’s terrible bathroom and got some food at the station (which wasn’t some big air-conditioned bus station with fast food restaurants but a busy parking lot with some food stands. The bus office had two long uncomfortable benches to wait on). Around 2, the bus company buy announces that due to an accident on the road, our 2:30 bus was cancelled and the next one would be at midnight, 10 hours away. So after sending tragic text messages to Sam about my lot in life, I went to a McDonald’s 15 minutes away, used their WiFi to download Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage to my nook and then spent hours and hours on the bus station bench reading my new book. True to their word, we left around midnight (although they let us on the bus around 9pm so I slept a bit then as well). Once we got to Guatemala City, I just immediately took a taxi to the next bus and went directly to Esquipulas.

Bus station in Huehuetenango  

At times like that, it would be so ideal to not be alone, and so tempting to just be a part of the backpacker route, taking air-conditioned shuttles where one seat per person isn’t actually one seat per two people on a stuffy microbus. But of course, sticking to the backpacker’s route counts out a lot of places. Nebaj isn’t exactly off the beaten path – a lot of peace corps volunteers and NGO workers live there – but it also isn’t part of the popular backpacker’s itinerary. I don’t know if there are nice shuttle buses that go there (unless you go with a church group and then there probably are. Church groups seem to love Guatemala).

Nebaj was definitely a highlight for me. I got to see a friend and also meet his friends and soon-to-be wife! We went to the house of one of their friends who is American but has lived in Nebaj for three years working with textiles, helping connect weavers to the people who want to sell their weaving. At her apartment, we made Indian food of all things with a group that included Guatemalans, a Nicaraguan, and Americans (and a Swiss person if you count me as Swiss, which I’m not, but sometimes I pretend I am). Then we listened to reggaeton.

Nebaj from above on a hike

Indian food made in Guatemala! 

Before that I was in Chichicastenango, a town famous to tourists for its market that’s held on Thursdays and Sundays and takes over the whole town. I think tourists generally go there as part of a day trip from Antigua, but I was already nearby having gone to see a training for coffee extension agents nearby and I was able to take a couple buses there (which was also not my favorite bus experience – our first “chicken bus” broke somewhere along the road, they fixed it long enough to get us to another chicken bus, which already had people in it, so they piled us in. Chicken buses are old American school buses, and we were three to a seat, plus people standing, plus a woman trying to walk around and sell eye drops. Not ideal).

In Chichicastenango I stayed in a nice, cheap hotel, bought souvenirs and no doubt paid too much at the market, ate street food to the point of nausea, and when I was tired, I went back to my hotel room and watched episodes of shows I had already downloaded to Netflix. Nights like that are nice too, but I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a friend to eat dinner with in the park or to tell me if they liked the textile I was paying too much for.

Market day in Chichicastenango  

That being said, traveling alone now is not the same as traveling alone was 5, 10, 15, etc years ago. I am constantly connected. I have cell service almost everywhere, and I spend downtime texting Sam and other friends, checking Twitter or Facebook, or listening to podcasts – basically doing a lot of the same shit I do when I’m sitting alone at home. It would be a lot harder to travel alone if I really had to live in my loneliness, disconnected from people to talk to when I wanted to talk to them most.

Still, going to Tikal I knew I didn’t want to be alone. To see someplace as impressive as that, I wanted to go with people, even if I didn’t know the people I was going with. When I want to Machu Picchu and the Copan Ruins, I was alone, and while it was nice to just wander around by myself, I also remember wishing I could turn to someone and be like “whoa! Look at that!” Luckily, before the tour I met a girl at the hostel from the Netherlands and we became friendly and did the tour together as part of a group. Stuff like that is why I also can’t discount the big, ridiculous, drunken, direct-bus-filled, no hablo español backpacker experience.

Making friends means someone will take a picture of you in front of ruins! 

Back when I first arrived, over two weeks ago, I decided to start my trip at the beach in a town called Monterrico. Definitely not off the beaten trail but also not a big backpacker destination, it’s a black-sand beach that gets a lot of vacationers from Guatemala City. I had read that there was a direct bus from Guatemala City to Monterrico but I never found it and ended up taking two buses to a boat to get there. I spent my first day there alone, dipping my toes into the ocean because it was too rough to swim in, talking to a lifeguard (not an attractive Baywatch kind), swimming in the pool, where it was safe, and eating street tacos. Every evening the hotel did a turtle rescue thing where you paid 10 quetzales to an environmental organization and then you got to release a baby turtle that the organization had helped care for back into the ocean. There I met two guys, an American and Guatemalan who worked together in Antigua, and we drank beers and played darts.

The next night was Guatemalan (and Honduran and Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran…) independence day. I woke up early and took a boat tour through a nature reserve, napped in a hammock, and in the night danced terribly with a mix of tourists and locals and went (briefly) to a club.

Sunset in Monterrico

Traveling alone means that all these experiences, the good the bad the gringa, are experiences I’ve made for myself. I figured it out for myself, planned it mostly myself, and created something that is very much my own.

(Note: if you ever want to travel with me, please travel with me! I won’t make you take local buses unless you want to take local buses.)

In Which I Have Lots of Deep Thoughts about Climate Change

The first that I saw a glacier (at least that I was aware of) was in Argentina in late 2010. I was pretty disappointed actually. I didn’t really know what a glacier was – I imagined it as kind of a square version of the iceberg in Titanic, a huge block of ice floating in water. The glacier we visited was part of a park near Bariloche, and wasn’t floating at all, but looked to me like a patch of dirty snow tucked into a mountain crevice.  

Argentina glacier

I’ve become much more familiar with glaciers since Argentina, having lived three years in Montana where there is a literal national park named after glaciers! Now I live in the Engadin Valley of Switzerland, another place filled with glaciers present and memories of glaciers past. 

It’s hard to complain about the temperature here. Right now, as much of Europe is suffering from unprecedented high temperatures, we’re sitting pretty with highs of around 70-75 and in the evenings it can even be sweater weather. In contrast, I was in Lyon, Angers, and Paris, France a couple of weeks ago and oh my god was it hot. I like to imagine myself as an adaptable person who can handle a little heat – I mean, it is summer after all – but oh man was it hot. By the end of my time in Paris, I felt like my face was just a boiling tomato, red and sweaty and puffing up bigger every minute.

Spending a very hot day in Lyon on the water

Nighttime in Lyon is the right time (because it's not so freaking hot)

Angers - slightly less hot but still very hot

Classic Paris photo (not pictured: my sweaty face)

Sunset over Nanterre, right outside of Paris, which did I mention was so dang hot?

Still, living in a place with glaciers, you can’t really forget that overall, everything is just getting warmer. Glaciers are one of those climate change symbols that are easy to see the differences over time. I mean, I can’t see parts-per-million of CO2 in the air, but I can see a glacier and then look at the nearby placard showing “here is where the glacier was just 15 years ago” with a picture of a glacier double the size. 

Sam and I recently got our season passes for the nearby mountains. Really, they’re annual passes, and they’re a pretty amazing deal. You have to be a local resident, which means you have this red piece of paper which, in my case, has the world’s worst passport-sized photo attached. Then, for just $700, you get access from June 1, 2018 – May 31st, 2019 to take chairlifts and gondolas for all the nearby mountain resorts. That’s not just for skiing, but also for hiking. Just for context, a one-day ski ticket costs $80, and a ride up to some of the non-ski mountains costs $35 roundtrip. Anyway, just some exciting information about my privileged life there.

Since Sam and I can take gondolas up to the top of things whenever we want just for the fun of it without having to spend almost $100, we went up to the tippy top of Corvatsch the other day, which happened to be his birthday. The top of Corvatsch is 3303 meters high, which is almost 11,000 feet. From there, you obviously have a pretty decent view of the surrounding mountains, glaciers, and indents in mountains where glaciers used to be. Sam, who had gone up to the top of Corvatsch probably 20 years ago on a school trip, remembers how much bigger the glaciers used to be. And in nearby Pontresina, there is the famous Morteratsch glacier that is now also famously shrinking. 

View from Corvatsch where the glaciers used to be bigger

Meanwhile in other parts of Switzerland, it has been so hot and so dry that freshwater fish are dying. Like, a lot of them, especially in the Rhine in the canton of Schaffhausen. The Rhine is obviously a very big river, but in some smaller bodies of water, local officials are fishing the fish out of the water using electric-fanned equipment to move them into cooler waters, a good emergency strategy but definitely stressful to the fish. In other areas, they are trying to cool the water temperature artificially. 

I bring this up now because I just read the New York Times’s article (but really novella because it’s quite long) called “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” and it’s really quite something. First of all, it’s fun in a depressing way to recognize the names of politicians who’ve been around for decades or recognizing someone’s last name and being like “oh, their kid is important now! Nepotism is yay!” For example, Anne Gorsuch, mother of Neil, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Reagan with an anti-regulation zeal that would make Scott Pruitt proud. Or the weird kind-of déjà vu (although not really déjà vu for me because I wasn’t alive in 1980) where when Jimmy Carter was president, it seemed like action might be taken but then Reagan got elected and shut it down somewhat (and then kind of un-shut it down, and then George H.W. Bush and team and totally shut it down). Feels a little like the Paris Climate Accords under Obama, only to – surprise! – have Trump become president and shut that down all over again. 

The article is a really interesting read. It goes into the states of mind of a lot of people involved at the time. It’s hard to know, even with a better political consensus, how much of the carbon reduction goals really could have been reached. I’ve seen some responses online talking about how, while solar and wind existed at the time, they weren’t as sophisticated as they are now and probably couldn’t have done a good enough job to stop people from burning coal and using gas.  

The focus of the article really talked about how the intersection of politics and climate became the climate’s downfall. It’s hard to do much of anything on such a large scale without governments taking the lead. But governments often only focus on things that are popular, or that have easy solutions that they can turn around and be like “look what I did! Money and votes please?” 

From the article: “But it wasn’t a political problem. Know how you could tell? Political problems had solutions. And the climate issue had none. Without a solution — an obvious, attainable one — any policy could only fail. No elected politician desired to come within shouting distance of failure. So when it came to the dangers of despoiling our planet beyond the range of habitability, most politicians didn’t see a problem.”

When I worked at my last job doing communications for the IPM Innovation Lab, my boss was telling me about rearing biological control agents in different countries and their level of effectiveness. He was comparing releasing this biological control agents (usually a predator insect or a virus) in different countries, I think between Vietnam and another country I don’t remember. He said it was more successful in Vietnam because their communist government took the reins on the project, made government labs rear these biological control agents, and release them in the fields. In order to be effective, biological control agents need to be adopted by a majority of farmers, otherwise there won’t be enough and the pests in uncontrolled plots of land will win out. In capitalist countries, it’s harder to implement, because private industry might not be interested in taking up the cause of rearing these agents, and government can’t really force farmers to adopt the practice. It’s almost like when it comes to issues of the environment, it’s better to have some kind of environmental dictatorship that makes us do good things and doesn’t have to worry about getting votes (I mean, I’m definitely not advocating for a dictatorship, but obviously capitalist democracies don’t really get environmental stuff done).

The New York Times article tried to end on an optimistic note, but I don’t see it. I’m not a climate modeler or anything close obviously, but I feel like whatever shot there was, we msised it. Because even if tomorrow, everyone turned off their lights and cars and the whole world went back to burning sticks for heat and we never emitted again, the toothpaste can’t go back in the tube as they say. Stuff is alredy happening, and mostly to the most vulnerable people. Even if we stopped emitting tomorrow, sea levels are rising. People in island countries like Kiribati are losing their homes and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are getting flooded out of their camps and parts of Africa are becoming desertified and people are fighting thirst and starvation. People are becoming climate refugees and will need to be relocated and it’s really hard to imagine a current global system that will take that on, safer countries that will offer them a place. 

Instead of talking about how to deal with the millions of people who are going to suffer in the coming years due to climate change, I feel like we hear more about futuristic technologies like putting tiny particles in the air to reflect the sun and devices capable of taking carbon out of the atmosphere. I mean, I guess I’m glad this stuff exists, but why are we always going for the most complicated solution? Like, we can’t possibly bear to reduce our energy use or materialism even a little bit, but hey, what if we shoot sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect some of the sunlight coming to Earth instead? Keep it simple, right?

It’s hard to see much hope for the climate at times like this. It’s not like I’m worried for sweet mother earth. I imagine she’ll be fine, she always has been. We’ll pollute ourselves to extinction, suffering a lot in the meantime, and taking a lot of species along with us, and the earth will change like before. New species will emerge over millenia, the climate will continue to change, the earth I imagine will adapt, it always has. But we won’t. And while maybe humans don’t deserve to live one earth considering how we’ve treated it, as always, the poorest will suffer the most and the earliest, and we definitely don’t seem to care.

What else we learn about a place when we learn its language?

Here are some things we already know about Switzerland: it’s ridiculously pretty (see example below from recent hike), there are lots of cows, it’s a tiny country with a heckuva lot of surface area (aka mountains), and just like the moon, it’s made of cheese.

St. Moritz from above

Still, as another round of German classes come to a close, I’ve decided to take a moment to reflect on what the subject matter of our German class workbooks tell us about Switzerland itself. Because these books aren’t just grammar, but they also try to offer us insight into Swiss life, how to function on a daily basis in this new country where you also don’t really speak the language.

The book series, which is called Schritte Plus (Schritte means steps, and I think Plus just means plus) is from Germany but we get a Swiss edition, meaning the examples are Swiss instead of German (like, taking a bus to Bern and not Berlin) and some of the words are different (Jupe for skirt instead of Rocke, Velo for bike instead of Fahrrad, Glace for ice cream instead of Eis. Swiss German uses some French words, which makes sense since a large minority of the small country speaks French). And there’s a little Swiss flag on the front of the book so you know you’re in the right place. 

The books are divided into chapters that use different examples from Swiss life as a governing theme which is then intermixed with new grammar rules. Each level follows one person or family through some life events. The first two books in level A1 follow Niko, a Ukrainian immigrant in Switzerland as he finds an apartment, a job, makes friends, goes to the doctor, and stalks the doctor’s receptionist to her home to ask her on a date. (Seriously: after meeting her once, her finds her address in a phone book, buys flowers, and then just shows up. So I guess lesson number 1 of Swiss life: be aggressive. Be-e aggressive!)

Luckily it all works out and she eventually takes him shopping for new clothes which is how we learned the names of different items of clothing and how to tell somebody that they look bad in that sweater. Through Niko, we also got to say such fun sentences as “Vor neun Monaten war Niko manchmal alleine und traurig. Jetzt ist er glücklich und nicht allein.”(Nine months ago, Niko was sometimes alone and sad. Now he is happy and not alone.)

The two books we’ve used in the last five months for level A2 follows a Swiss family consisting of a mother and her daughter and a father and his son who get married and then have a baby together, and their Mexican au pair who happens to speak perfect German.

Chapters cover such exciting events as sorting garbage, paying taxes, sending mail, and going to the bank. The bank chapter was especially memorable for how the au pair Maria deals with getting a new bank card with accompanying pin number: she recites the number multiple times to herself, out loud, in both German and Spanish, then sets the paper on fire, and promptly forgets the pin number. 

The best security is fire security

From my limited Swiss experience, I’ve found that this is a place where there is often a “right” and a “wrong” way to do something. Garbage is a perfect example. It’s hard to imagine an American English class spending a week talking about sorting garbage. It would go something like “put all your trash in some kind of bag and then take it outside. It’s also nice to recycle if you feel like it. But if not, fuck it.” The accompanying grammar also wouldn’t take a week because after studying German, I’m not convinced that what English has should even be considered grammar.

Garbage so complicated you make this face!

Here the way you separate your garbage is important. Paper goes with paper and needs to be bundled. Ditto cardboard. Plastic PET bottles go somewhere different than plastic non-PET bottles. There is even a special place for Nespresso pods. Glass goes with glass and I’ve even seen places where it needs to be sorted by color. Garbage can only be thrown out in special Kantonalbags, which when you buy is the equivalent of paying a garbage fee. Breaking any of these rules can result in a substantial fine.

Not to say that this attention to garbage detail is a bad thing. After living in a country where climate change is considered debatable as opposed to factual, it’s nice to be somewhere that actually cares about the environment. And everyone knows that Switzerland is impeccably and impossibly clean.

Besides proper garbage disposal, we learned how to order in restaurants and how to complain about the order and send food back. Der Kaffee ist kalt (the coffee is cold), Das Bier ist warm (the beer is warm). We learned how to make excuses to call out of work. And of course, when listening to examples of traffic reports from the radio, we made sure to learn Tiere auf der Fahrbahn (animals on the road, because there are really sometimes large groups of cows or sheep on the road). 

We also had a lesson that included what time to show up to an event (5 minutes early is best, but definitely no more than 15 minutes late), how you should eat (a good amount but not too much, and if you have dietary restrictions you must let the host know beforehand), what you should bring (flowers or wine or chocolate) and when you can leave (don’t overstay your welcome but also don’t go immediately after eating because that’s rude). 

Not everything is so helpful though. The books, like life, also include some fun sexist references. Like the exercise where a woman tries on everything in her closet while her husband has to sit there and give his opinions. The exercise comes with the fun name, no joke, “Typisch Frau!” (Typical woman!).  

Gahhh women! Always be trying on clothes!

And of course all the examples of family life and romantic relationships are strictly heterosexual. I don’t remember what my French and Spanish books were like in middle and high school, but they were probably just as narrow. I wonder if books have been updated to keep up with the times? 

It makes me think about what English workbooks in America look like. What kinds of examples do they have? Do they have long lessons about how to add an avocado to your breakfast sandwich? Examples where people have conversations with supermarket employees asking about the differences between our 100 brands of breakfast cereals? Are students learning how to complain about the price of gas or ask for a refill of their Coke?

These language books are often an introduction not only to a new language but to a new culture as well. The facets of life they choose to teach us demonstrates what is considered important in a particular country, what they think we will need to know in order to integrate. In Switzerland, you really do need to know how garbage works and how to fill out different kinds of forms and how to be a good guest in a Swiss house. 

But if there are exercises where men lament their annoying wives for trying on too many outfits, then that tells me that maybe I’m in a place that still clings to old gender stereotypes (which is then confirmed when I see “Frauenbier” on a menu, which means “women’s beer” and is just a smaller beer). Not that this is just a Swiss thing. Sexism and gender expectations and heteronormativity exist in every country no doubt.

There should be a next generation of language books, where examples include how to ask someone their preferred pronoun and a same sex couple going on a boring shopping trip for household appliances.

(And this obviously goes way beyond people like me learning languages in a new country. What are school books like for young kids at their most impressionable? I honestly have no idea, because I don’t have kids and don’t work in education. Hopefully more relevant books are coming out, where kids can see themselves in the hokey examples. But then again, at least in the U.S., so little money is given to public education that I doubt books are getting much of an update at all.)

But wouldn’t it be nice to be introduced to your new home country, or to a subject in general, in a more open way, where people of all kinds feel like they have a place?