In Which We Exult in Our New Digs, and Wrestle With German Appliances

It is hard to decide where to begin my account, so I think I will just begin with our arrival in our new apartment.  It is brand new, so new in fact that we were the first family to move into the building.  (This became a bit of a problem on our first evening there, when we discovered that the elevator had been turned off.  Five floors is not an insurmountable climb, but not something one wants to do too often. )  The building is in the middle of the charming town of Baar, not far from Zug and the Zugersee, which we can see a little slice of from our window.  We are used to spectacular views from our eleventh-floor Philadelphia condo, but the view here is of a far different order -- beyond the town center stretch green Swiss hillsides and the beginnings of the Alps beyond, at least when we are not hemmed in by clouds.

On our first day, however, the weather was not merely cloudy.  It rained, no poured, the entire day.  Which left us free to explore our new environment without distraction.  We found ourselves in a superbly designed modern apartment with all the latest amenities.  The only problem was that to take advantage of most of them we had first to decipher the appliance manuals.  Which were in German -- or if we were lucky, in German, French and Italian, the three major official languages of Switzerland.  (There is actually one other, but I'll go into that another time.)  Here the fact became important that my husband, henceforth to be known as The Spouse, or TS for short, is fluent in French.  Even so, we discovered that many of the more technical words seem to be new to the language since his graduate school days.

The most crucial problem was figuring out how to use the oven.   We had thoughtfully been provided with a frozen pizza that we planned to have for dinner -- thus avoiding the necessity of venturing outside -- but we quickly learned that this oven was something special.  It seems that for the Swiss the latest in cooking technology involves not only convection but steam, something we had never encountered before.  In fact, aside from the fact that one can't simply broil something, there seem to be an infinite number of possible cooking methods.  As long as one can figure out which buttons to push and in which order.

In time, we -- or I should say he -- puzzled things out and we did have our pizza, along with a rather nice Chianti purchased from the local Coop supermarket.  After which, we settled in to surf our way through the channels on our Swisscom cable hookup, which include two BBC channels and CNN in addition to many in German, Swiss German (quite a different thing), French, and Italian.  We are nothing if not cosmopolitan here in Schweiz.