So it’s Thanksgiving, aka Jewish Christmas (because we all know Chanukah is a racket). And for the second time in my life, I’m not in the United States. Which means that it’s not Thanksgiving; it’s Thursday.
But fuck it - it is Thanksgiving! So here are some things I’m thankful for: ridiculous snow-covered mountains, glowing in the pale sunlight. My little Monty dog and slightly larger Sam man. Apartments with big kitchens and lake views. Patient German teachers. Bakeries with amazing bread. Getting to visit Morocco over New Year's with Fadoua. Zara being our first American visitor in January. Going to see my parents in a few weeks for my mom's birthday. Friends and family in general. And the WiFi and interconnected world that lets me stay in touch with those near and dear to me while I settle into a new place where I know few people. Also cheese. Duh.
A not uncommon evening view
I’ve been here in Switzerland for almost a month-and-a-half, and Sam’s been in Switzerland since August 18, and living in Silvaplana since mid-September. A little background info: Silvaplana is a small town in the Engadin valley in Southeastern Switzerland. The valley is high, 1800 meters, and the mountains are already covered in snow, the ground lightly dusted. We are here specifically because Sam got a printing job in St. Moritz, the famed pricey ski town.
Switzerland is a country roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire put together. However, just because the country is small doesn’t mean everything is a hop, skip, and a jump away from everything else. First of all: mountains. Like these enormous, jagged, pointy rocks jutting up from the earth, making something that might just be 20 kilometers away “as the crow flies” (ugh, that saying) actually an hour by train or car.
So our high valley is actually pretty remote. We’re less than an hour’s drive from one of Switzerland’s borders with Italy, but an over three-hour drive to Zurich, which becomes four hours by train (and since we know how I love to drive…).
I’m currently taking a German class in Davos, which, unlike St. Moritz, is a famous ski city (because apparently 12,000 people makes a city in this country of around eight-and-a-half million) as opposed to ski town and is also around two hours away, each way, by train. The train does have UNESCO World Heritage status though. That's a real thing.
This won’t go on forever because starting next semester I’ll take a German class closer to our house, it’s just that it had already started by the time I moved here, whereas the one I’m in now is an intensive course that’s just a month-and-a-half and intensive. That being said, here's who is in my German class: one Spaniard, three Italians, one Slovakian, one Bosnian, two Portuguese, and one Turk. And me! The only American and native English speaker. Kind of a nice change.
One of the views from a UNESCO World Heritage train
Ok, enough about me, here’s more about me.
In case you didn’t quite get the idea from above, we are seriously in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a beautiful nowhere. When I’m not in class, I work part-time from a distance (temporarily though) for my old job at Virginia Tech, or try and do my own creative writing thang which unfortunately mostly manifests as rewatching old episodes of 30 Rock. I spend most of my time with Monty of course, the most wonderful, albeit over-energetic, dog in the world.
My constant companion. This was autumn. Everything is snow now.
Like I said, where we live is really close to Italy, and close to an Italian-speaking part of Switzerland (not Ticino, another part, some of which recently got washed out by a landslide). There is also a language spoken in this particular area called Romansch. Romansch is one of Switzerland’s four official languages, and it’s spoken by roughly 20,000 people. Because it isn’t widely spoken, pretty much everyone who speaks Romansch also speaks German. However, all the children in school here are required to learn Romansch along with German so the language doesn’t die out. And Romansch itself actually has a number of distinct dialects. I think the one spoken where we live is called Puter. All I know in Romansch is allegra which means “welcome”, and proxima fermeda (sp?) which means “next stop”.
People here are impressive language-wise. People will just speak to me in Italian and when that doesn’t work, they try German. Fun fact: the word for German in Italian is tedesco. They can switch back and forth seamlessly. I’ve had people ask me, when they hear my subpar German, if I speak Italian, but the joke’s on them, because I’m an American, dammit, and I just speak English. But that’s okay because they often speak some English too.
Here’s a list of the friends I’ve made in Switzerland (not counting all of Sam’s friends and family): a Spanish girl from my German class (who speaks perfect English of course), her fiancé, a older lady with a dog who speaks English but told me she’d speak to me in German so I’d learn, a man who lives in a red house near the bus stop who has a dog named Simba that Monty likes.
I'd be lying if I said that I don't get lonely or frustrated here. Sure, I get to socialize in German class, but it takes me two hours to get there and another two hours back. If I miss my bus, it pushes my whole schedule back by an hour. And as of right now, there are not a lot of people living in Silvaplana. That should change in the next couple of weeks when the ski season starts and people start to flow in to visit and work but right now, it's pretty dead. As a New Yorker (I know, I never mention it), I seem to keep moving to weirder and weirder places with fewer and fewer people. I like the beauty, but I'm really not a hermit. I like people, and I miss them!
So back to Thanksgiving, which my darling Americans are enjoying as we speak. While I had originally planned to be a Thanksgiving grinch, I decided to try and make some resembling a Thanksgiving dinner after all. I went to the Coop, which is not a co-operative as far as I know, just one of Switzerland's two main supermarkets, and bought a chicken, some brussels sprouts and shroomies, green beans, pecans and pie crust, and some kind of canned cherries to make a sauce resembling cranberry. The Coop actually did have two turkeys, but there were around $120 each.
The dinner worked out surprisingly well. I'm known in our little household as being a terrible baker, but the pie worked out okay (I know that if you buy the crust pre-made it barely counts as baking but I still had to mix sugar and eggs and stuff and use an oven that's in celsius). The chicken was good; I put lemons and garlic up its butt. The brussels sprouts and shroomies were okay, not as good as like home. And how can you go wrong with mashed potatoes? They were just regular potatoes because Sam doesn't like sweet potatoes and I don't know if they even have sweet potatoes here anyway. Plus we had a bunch of expired potatoes Sam bought half-off and they were already sprouting, so it was time.
Even though Sam got home late because he was working, it was nice to have something resembling a Thanksgiving. In part just because it showed me I could function in my new home; get a bunch of groceries, use my weird oven, substitute agave syrup for corn syrup and weird cherries for cranberries (even that wasn't terrible, although it definitely wasn't good).
The world's cutest saddest little Thanksgiving
Speaking of Sam, his job is going really well. He's a supervisor! HBIC! He runs a big fancy printing press and manages people and is being used to his full potential, which is especially nice after his job at Virginia Tech where he basically got paid to sit around all day and do nothing. And when he's not working, he's dealing with my visa, making phone calls for me because I'm too shy in my shitty German, driving us to the supermarket because I'm too nervous to fit in those tiny parking spaces, and generally doing a good job showing me around the area and taking care of me when I get a case of the lonelies.
So I guess that's the update from here. I miss everyone reading this, unless I get some kind of crazy following and strangers read this in which case, I probably don't miss you, although maybe I would if I knew you.
I hope you all come visit and see our little snowy slice of the world. On the other hand, if you want to meet up in a real place like Paris or London or Amsterdam, I'm all about that as well. Happy Thursday!
He's always up to something...