(Skip to the second half to read about our fantastic weekend hike & my best day so far, if you don’t feel like listening to me complain about household chores)
Before I tell you about laundry I have to tell you about quiet hours.
Every apartment building has quiet hours. Ours are 10p-7a (reasonable) and noon-1p (for siesta? No idea why).
During quiet hours you can’t run any noisy appliances, or play loud music or TV, etc. It’s actually pretty cool and it’s nice to be able to hear the sounds of nature outside your window (instead of your neighbor’s TV).
Another important piece of this story is that we are currently car-less. We ordered a car the day we got our visas, but it’s not ready yet, and Derrick’s company only paid for one month of rental car, which has expired.
So we are using our bus passes to get around, which is fine, but it just makes every trip take a little longer.
I am still working US hours (aka very late), so I don’t get up before 9 unless the spirit really moves me, which is about once a week.
Why do you need all of this backstory?
Because it’s relevant to how one load of laundry, consisting of two towels and a bathmat, took me over TWELVE HOURS.
Here’s what happened:
8:45am – wake up early, put two towels and a bathmat in the laundry. Why only these things? Because they fill the entire washing machine.
9:55am – wash cycle not yet complete. My German lesson begins at 10am, so I won’t be able to move the laundry to the dryer until after my German lesson
11:45am – my German lesson ends, but quiet hours begin at noon, so I can’t start the dryer. However, I need to leave to catch the bus to start the day’s errands and I don’t know when I’ll be back. So I hang the towels up to dry
3:30pm – return home. Place towels in dryer.
4:30pm – leave again. Dryer cycle not complete.
9:20pm – return home. Open dryer. Towels still damp. Run dryer again
10:00pm – quiet time begins. Check towels. Towels still damp. Begin screaming while hanging them up to dry the second time. (I just realized this defeats the purpose of not using the machine during quiet hours)
10:15pm – explain to my exhausted husband that I cannot live like this anymore, and I need to eat cake directly out of the cake pan while crying in bed. He is a good husband, so he lets me eat cake directly out of the cake pan while crying in bed, and he didn’t even ask me for a slice.
Part two: Sunday’s hike to Staubern
We have been looking forward to this hike since before we moved here. Derrick found an expat group on Facebook that plans all kinds of cool events, and arranged everything with the group leader. We were even working out in advance to make sure we’d be fit enough to make it to the top.
Here are some pictures that other people took of the peak at Staubern:
And then it rained.
It rained every day for the entire month we’ve been here.
But we were not to be deterred! The expat group leader said she was still going, and we said we’d come along too. Because, you see, it was going to be clear for a few hours in the mid-morning and we’d get some great views!
And we did!
Every time we stopped to look around, we were in awe. It is truly stunning.
There was a little mud (at one point we are scrambling up holding on to tree roots and branches), and a lot of cows (we had to off-road it for a little bit because one cow was simply not interested in getting off the path).
There was also the world’s most adorable hut mid-way up the mountain, where they sell apple juice and play very Swiss music, and a random dog played fetch with us for half an hour. I would go back again just for the dog.
However.
After briefly clearing up in the mid-morning, it went back to being a little cloudy.
As in, you could actually see the clouds closing in on you from all sides.
And by the time we got to the top (the one I showed you earlier in the blog post, with the stunning views), it looked like this:
We will have to go back, preferably on a sunnier day. and now that we know we are fit enough to do the hike in terrible weather, we’re excited to do it in better weather!
But there’s some good news
I found an aerial arts class, messaged the instructor, and she said I could attend! This was really, really encouraging because every place I have reached out to about taking horseback riding lessons told me I couldn’t come until I spoke better German.
So I psyched myself up (actually, one of my US friends psyched me up and told me how much fun I was gonna have – thanks Mary!) and went to the class. I was only able to do two of the exercises all evening, but this was one of them:
But that isn’t the cool part. The cool part is that I made some friends! With local people! And I am now in a German language group chat! And I got invited to go to the lake! We even took a group selfie which I’m not going to post because this blog is public and if one of them sees it I’ll be mortified.
It was such a relief to have a normal “get to know you” chat with new people. It immediately made the feelings of isolation slip away.
For all of my complaining about the laundry situation, this place is breathtakingly beautiful and I am so, so, grateful to have the chance to live here, if only for a few years. The experience is worth all the hard bits.
Catherine Tries Her Best 