Bad Cop

Every week, my darling husband spends roughly 44,5 hours with his family. He uses this precious time to watch sports with our son, play Monopoly with our daughter and play silly games on the i-pad with both of them.

Stuff that I feign an interest in during the week, only to fail miserably. I do try though. The other night I even watched a bit of Champions League with my son. I have to admit though that I just sat and suffered in silence. He tried to make up for it by talking incessantly about the players on the field, the coaches, the players on the bench and God knows what else. Somehow, I don't think we'll be doing that again any time soon.
I am as horrible when I, after much nagging, grudgingly agree to a round of Monopoly. Playing board games for me really is all about winning. I can't help myself. I am just very competitive. The fact that my daughter doesn't care whether she wins or loses and plays accordingly, drives me insane.  My husband on the other hand,  finds it endearing.
He by the way allready moved to the Netherlands to start a new job, while the children and I are staying in Switzerland to finish the school year. It's not great, especially since we got so used to having him around a bit more over the last (jobless) months, but still infintely better than trying to move the whole family within a fortnight.
Since my husband left, I have struggled most with homework and mealtimes, especially since the two seem to collide in our house most days. At first, I quite enjoyed letting myself, the house and the quality of cooking go a little bit. Eating hot dogs, pizza's, or tinned soup, while watching utter crap on the telly. Marvellous!
But as the weeks went by, I felt that we needed vegetables back in our lives. And now I am 'bad cop' all the time. With no one to back me up, I enforce healthy eating, as well as finishing homework on time, tidying ones own bedroom and a myriad of other household rules.
So now, I completely hate my husband. I loath being a single parent as I feel that I spend all my time policing the children and not nearly enough time enjoying them. My husband on the other hand gets to play the relaxed, superdad during the weekends, throwing in visits to Mc Donald's and the nearest tropical pool extravaganza.
How absolutely wonderful it is though to have 44,5 hours of guilt free whinging. Every week! To have a lie in on a Saturday and a Sunday, to be rewarded lots of nice family reunion dinners at all our favourite local restaurants, to not have to accompany the family to the nearest tropical pool extravaganza. I might even get used to it.

Running

The circumference of the Swiss Aegeri lake is almost fourteen kilometres. I know this, because today I ran all around it. Now, all I want to do, is lie down, eat chocolate and gloat.

My Dutch friend S. is leading the way. Much more than a runner than I am, she has rounded the lake a couple of times before. So far, I always managed to come up with some excuse. Not today though. My friend sets a pretty fast pace, leaving me completely out of breath. Luckily she does most of the talking and is nice enough not to be offended by the occasional grunt from my end of our conversation.

Making it sound as if she needs a bit of a break, S. suggests after seven kilometers, that we need to slow down a bit. Just in time. Taking in the beautiful mountain scenery whilst at the same time trying to ignore our stiffening muscles, we make it back to the car in an hour and twentysix minutes. Not bad. Not bad at all.
I wasn't always a runner. In fact, until six or so years ago I was completely and utterly convinced that I couldn't run. Yes I could hike a fair distance, cycle all day if I had to and even skate more than twenty kilometres, but running, really was a bridge too far. Until my English friend P. accepted a bet. If she could train up to run ten kilometres, the man she loved agreed to learn Spanish. 

All he did of course, was taking himself off to a lovely language course in sunny Spain, whereas she and I battled the elements two times a week, for months on end. It came as a lovely surprise though that we, in fact, could run, as long as we did it very, very slowly.

We ran the Manchester 10 K twice. The first time at such a leisurely pace, that two guys in shark suits could easily overtake us. The next and last time though we ran our ten kilometres in under an hour!

Optimistic and very convinced that I was never going to stop running,  I moved to Italy. There, the runner in me only lasted for about six weeks. The heat, the obnoxious mosquito's and the rather forlorn looking public parks quickly took all the fun out of any running.  During the three years that I lived in lovely Bologna, I never made it past a weekly yoga class.

But then I arrived in Switzerland. Green, spacious, clean aired Switzerland. Before I had even unpacked my boxes, I had joined a ladies running group. Allthough the American and Scandinavian group members were so much fitter than I was and had mostly come to gripps with running up mountains, I stuck with it. Most of the times I would fall behind within the first ten minutes of a run, but I just wouldn't led them beat me.

I started running on my own, as well as with the group and found that I was never lonely in the woods and fields a stones throw away from my house. Scores of upbeat Nordic walking elderly Swiss and majestic snow capped peaks kept me company. Time and again.

Will I keep running back in the Netherlands do I wonder. With the upcoming move back home I have started to take stock of the things that I like about my Swiss life. Running is definitely on the list of things I want to keep. But will I find an equally nice and motivating group of running friends? And will I be as keen to get myself out of the door in flat, unassuming Holland as I am here in wonderful Switzerland? Only time will tell. I will keep you posted!

Exam

The ins and out of caving, whether or not bird song is related to human speech and some pointers on how to become a scriptwriter. Since my Cambridge Advanced English exam last Saturday I am a bit of an expert on these and a a wide variety of other quite useless subjects. Let's hope though that I gave my views in correct English.

It's been roughly twenty years since I last sat down in an exam hall with my intestines dancing the samba. Allthough I had no reason to be nervous - my lovely English teacher told me again and again that I should pass without a problem - I found myself feeling slightly nauseous.

It didn't help that I was by far the oldest candidate in the room. To be precise: the main hall of the Kirchgemeindehaus in Winterthur was filled with 121 - I counted them! - twenty somethings and me.
They all seemed to cope so much better with the fact that we had to report in Winterthur (a 45 minute drive from my home near Zurich) at 7.15 in the morning. At least they could all still have a fag to wake up, whereas I am now at an age where most people, including me, have long given up smoking. So I had to make do with a bottle of water. And not a coffee machine in sight.
At exactly 8.09 we received our instructions from the man with the colourful tie, behind the desk on the stage at the front of the room. His main concern seemed to be the switching off of mobile phones, which we had to do unanimously before every paper. The devilish devices then had to be put into a specially designed red bag ('hold your hand under the bag in case it has a hole in it') and carefully placed under our desks. Oh joy!
We sat a total of four papers - reading, writing, use of English and listening - is quick succession, with fifteen minute breaks between the papers in which some 75 women needed to use the only three available toilets. Try and sneak into to the men's toilets and a Swiss Kirchgemeinde worker would get on to you quicker than you could turn around to check if someone noticed. I tried, only to find myself at the tailend of the women's queue for a very long time. I nearly missed the next mobile phone ritual.
I wrote a report on a newly published Language School newspaper, debated the correct spelling of enthusiastic (which I of course spelled with an 'o' following the 'u'), had some lunch and listened to some guy babbling away about his trip to lake Baikal in Russia.  At the end of which I felt like a wrung out tea towel. Ravenously hungry, without any clear idea about what sort of food I was after. I settled for a mars bar and a tin of roasted almonds, just stuffing myself without actually registering what I was doing.
But never mind, within a few weeks I should receive an email to tell me that I passed this bloody exam. That I will actually have something to show for my years of speaking, breathing, reading and thinking in English. Some weird form of closure after eight years of being an expat wife.

Pudding Club

Strawberry Cheesecake, Millionaire Shortbread, Coffee and Walnut Cake and Nanaimo Bars: those all get sampled by me on a regular basis, during Pudding Club. One of the  nicest rituals of my Swiss expat life.

It's Friday morning and some twenty women are gathered around a table, spread lavishly with cakes, biscuits and other home made goodies. We do chat politely - you can hear snippets of conversations in English, American, Dutch and Italian - but all the while keep our eyes on the table.  Most of us will have skipped breakfast, to better enjoy the feast.
Before we attack though, the bakers of the month tell a little bit about their treats; often touching stories about recipes being hand down through generations. Or lovely tales about particular cakes tasted while living abroad for the first time.
Flap Jacks, for instance, still evoke memories in me of stately homes and their ubiquitous tea shops, of rainy walks and welcoming log fires. Of hours and hours spend with my friend H. in soft play area's and muddy parks. And since I found a shop in Zurich that sells Golden Syrup, I have my regular Flap Jack fix.
Back to Pudding Club though. It's ten 'o clock and we all dig in. Every single woman in the room tasts every single cake. For the two hours that we're together no one worries about their waistline. Such a relief. I have sat through too many coffee mornings with women munching on a bunch of grapes or a clementine, trying so hard to ignore the more calorifically scary offerings.
I find our monthly Pudding  Club get togethers very uplifting. Uninhibited cake eating really brings out the best in people. After the first round we laugh just a little bit louder and talk just a tad more animated. It doesn't matter that we come from very different backgrounds, have a completely different outlook on life and sometimes haven't even been born in the same decade. We just eat cake. Heaven!