Culture shock.

We’ve been in Switzerland for three weeks now. In some ways this feels like an incredibly long amount of time, and in some ways it feels like we just got here. The first week or so was kind of like a weird vacation, but no nice hotel and going to work all day instead of exploring. But now we’ve been here 3 weeks, which is long enough to get used to some things, and for other things to really stand out as different/tough.

There are several aspects of our everyday life that we’ve gotten reasonably comfortable with: we can hop on the bus and get pretty much anywhere we want to go, we can go to the grocery store or pharmacy and leave with what we set out to get, and we’ve learned some basic French vocabulary so that we can successfully order in a restaurant (most of the time). I recognize how ridiculous that all sounds, but it really did take a few failed attempts at each of these things to get it right.

And we’ve also had a lot of very necessary tasks that were near impossible to complete (and that we’re still working on):

1. Getting a bank account here as an American is pretty challenging (apparently this is the IRS’s fault). We were finally able to open ours last week, once we had the document proving that we live here full time (our “Attestation”).
2. Getting said “Attestation” was not easy either – the canton of Geneva wants to know your permanent address in order to give you this document, and our current address is temporary.
3. Finding someone to rent you an apartment without an “Attestation” is also hard…so you’ve got this chicken-and-egg situation here. The good news – we found an apartment! It’s about 20 minutes outside of the city center and it’s just perfect. It’s also a sublet, which made the paperwork significantly easier. We move in August 28, and we can’t wait.
4. You also can’t get a cell phone contract until you are able to present your permanent residence permit (we don’t receive ours for another week or so). I was able to get a phone through work, but Andy is using a go-phone for now.

To summarize – the Swiss love rules/regulations and paper work. Our first 3 weeks here have been largely consumed with these administrative, get-our-stuff-together type tasks, and we haven’t had a ton of time to do many fun things…until this past weekend!

My parents came to visit us, and we had such a great time showing them a bit of our city. We enjoyed some touristy activities with them, but even more so just appreciated having some familiarity in our lives, even if just for a few days. Here are a few pictures from the weekend (Sue took so many more than I did):

 Picture with Jet D'eau #23

 Some of the best Italian food I've ever had - with an amazing view!

 St. Pierre's Cathedral

So anyway, culture shock.

In addition to the difficulties in getting settled in here, the following is just a list of our cultural observations that we thought were interesting/funny.

Clothes.

• Men wear a loooot of capri pants. And super tight full-length pants.
• Grown men (like 40 and up) pop their collars.
• We see at least 3 people every day wearing some sort of American flag or American phrase on their clothes – and they definitely aren’t American.

Language.

• About 50% of the time that we go somewhere, whoever we try to talk to is able to speak English – it’s so impressive to us. If you think about the reverse, a French person who speaks little-to-no English would have an incredibly difficult time in the US.
• We hear a lot of broken English that can be pretty funny. For example, Trevor’s vet told us that “his liver isn’t very beautiful.” Our new landlord also referred to the dishwasher as a "robot". We were super confused for about 5 seconds.
• Before we learned how to say “I don’t speak French” properly, Andy told a couple different people “You don’t speak French.” That went well.
• We can both carry a simple conversation in Spanish, which has been incredibly helpful – we find that a lot of people here speak Spanish as a second language if they don’t speak English.

Food.

• SO. MUCH. PIZZA. If we want to eat something cheap for dinner without cooking ourselves, our options are pizza or sandwiches.
• Wine is cheaper than water.
• We eat dessert every day. Gelato, pain du chocolat, tarts, pastries, custards…if we weren’t walking so much every day, we’d be well on our way to type 2 diabetes.

Other general observations.

• Cigarette smoke is literally everywhere. Even though people can’t smoke indoors or on public transportation, we walk outside a lot too – and I would say about 50% of the general population smokes.
• Apartments do not have air conditioning ever, and rarely have a dishwasher or washing machine.
• Personal space is an American concept. I'm pretty sure that the lack of personal space here isn’t just a Swiss thing, because this city is so international- everyone is from all over the world- and the Americans are the only ones who will step back and give you some space on the sidewalk or on the bus. I decided that this is one of my favorite things about American culture.

So yeah – it’s an adventure, to say the least. Every couple of days, one of us asks the other - “are you still glad we did this?” And so far, the answer is still yes. It’s hard, every day presents a new challenge; but we’re learning a lot, and every day also gets a bit easier. We’re really excited to get moved into our new apartment, and even more pumped to start planning our first trip – Paris!

We made it!

We’re here! The past 3 weeks have been an absolute whirlwind, but we’re here and we are slowly but surely settling in.

As a brief recap, since July 16^th, we:

1. Resigned from our jobs in Denver
2. Packed/shipped/donated/sold all of our possessions
3. Closed on the sale of our home
4. Sold both the cars
5. Drove to Texas and had an awesome week of visiting family and friends
6. Arrived in Geneva!

We’ve now been in Geneva for 9 days now and have gotten reasonably comfortable in our surroundings, but the first few days here was anything but comfortable…

I’ll preface this story by telling you: All of this is 100% true, and Trevor is fine now. Okay, continue.

On July 27^th, we flew from Houston to Newark with no problems at all- the PetSafe office in Houston where we dropped the dogs off for the flight was very organized, and the woman who took the dogs and our paperwork could not have been more helpful. When we arrived in Newark, we were able to pick up the dogs with very little trouble and get to our hotel fairly quickly – and we are so glad we decided to stay a night in Newark between the two flights. It was so nice to let the dogs settle down and take them for lots of walks after being in their kennels for 6 hours, and we got one more really good night of sleep before having to deal with jet lag.

The next day, dropping the dogs off at the Newark PetSafe office was not quite as easy. PetSafe decided that Trevor’s kennel was too small for an international flight, despite the fact that (i) he could comfortably lay down, stand, turn around, and do a somersault in there, and (ii) he had just flown from Houston to Newark in the kennel with no issues. Thankfully, they had a larger kennel on hand that they were able to sell to us, for $250. This thing is enormous. This incident was also way more stressful than it had to be, because Sam hates his kennel and could see us, so he cried for the entire 45 minutes that this took to sort out.

Our flight went well and we arrived in Geneva on time the morning of Wednesday, July 29^th. We collected our bags and found someone to show us where to pick up our animals, who directed us to a lone conveyor belt coming out of a yellow wall with pictures of dogs and cats on it.

We stood by this conveyor belt for 10 minutes…

15 minutes…
20 minutes…
30 minutes…

And my worry is increasing with every passing minute. After 30 minutes, I tell Andy (through tears) that our dogs are obviously still on the plane and on their way somewhere else by now. He asks a few more people (I think he spoke to 7 different airport personnel before finding someone who could help), and we learn that only SMALL animals come through the yellow wall hole – big dogs are taken to the freight facility. Which is not inside the airport.

So we go outside to get in a car to take us to freight - and the car we had reserved to pick us up is nowhere to be found. Through some lively charades, we were able to communicate to the taxi attendants that a normal taxi isn’t going to cut it once we have the kennels (especially with the small condo that Trevor is now traveling in). They are finally able to find us an 18-passenger van who is willing to take us to the freight facility. Perfect!

We get to the freight facility, which is essentially a huge warehouse. There are 5 different entrances, each of which has a directory of the different airlines contained in that particular entrance. After looking at each of the 5 directories, we have not found United. I walk in to the first one I see, Lufthansa (while Andy goes to make sure our van hasn’t left us), to ask where the United desk is. The response?

Lufthansa employee, with a heavy French accent: There is no United desk.
Me: Oh. Okay. So where do you think our dogs are?
Lufthansa employee: Hmm…maybe you try Swissworld? Or Swissport? Swissworld or Swissport. Try this.
Me: Um, okay. Merci.

We go to Swissworld first, where they direct us to Swissport. As soon as we got to the right desk, they knew who we were and told us the dogs were fine. Cue more tears from me, except this time from overwhelming relief. After signing some papers, paying some fees, then signing some more papers, we get to leave with our dogs. Yay!

Our van found our Airbnb apartment with no trouble at all, and the “concierge” (he was more like a personal assistant to the owner of the apartment I think) was waiting for us outside with the keys. He spoke great English and was very friendly and helpful; he helped with our bags, showed me how to use the coffee maker and internet, and told us where to take our garbage.

So he leaves, and we’re feeling pretty good about life. We log in to the Wi-Fi from our cellphones so we can check our email, and I feed the dogs. They were starving by this point – it was about noon, and they hadn’t eaten anything since the day before when we dropped them off at 2 pm. They both wolf their food down faster than usual, and Trevor starts gagging. This isn’t that unusual when he eats too quickly, just like if a person were to swallow too big of a bite. But then he kept gagging and trying to vomit.

For about 10 minutes, Trevor walked around our tiny apartment, trying to vomit – and nothing would come up. He was starting to walk funny too, and we noticed his stomach was starting to expand. After some quick Google-ing, we realize it’s pretty likely that his stomach has flipped. If you’ve never heard of this, a quick explanation from Wikipedia:

Gastric dilatation volvulus (also known as twisted stomach, gastric torsion and GDV) is a medical condition in which the stomach becomes overstretched and rotated by excessive gas content. The word bloat is often used as a general term to cover gas distension without twisting and is often a normal change after eating or with aerophagia. It is sometimes used incorrectly to indicate gastric torsion. Gastric dilatation volvulus always involves the twisting of the stomach and is a life-threatening condition that requires prompt treatment. The condition occurs commonly in domesticated animals, especially certain dog breeds. Deep-chested breeds are especially at risk. Mortality rates in dogs range from 10 to 60 percent, even with treatment. With surgery, the mortality rate is 15 to 33 percent.

So as you can imagine, we are FREAKING OUT. We start Google-ing “Geneva vet English-speaking”, and find a general number for veterinary services to call. They referred us to the closest emergency veterinary hospital…which is in France (Geneva is only 15 minutes from the French border, so this isn’t as ridiculous as it may sound). We call the hospital, but the desk staff only speaks French:

Me: Parle-vous anglais?
Receptionist: Non.
Me: Um...Parle vous…anyone…anglais?
Receptionist: Non…?

So we call the veterinary services office again, who graciously offer to call the French vet and explain our situation so that we can start heading that way.

Not knowing of any other options, we call the general taxi service number for Geneva and get a cab to come pick us up ASAP. We already know that taxis in Geneva are outrageously expensive, but we don’t have time to figure out how to take a train to France with a dog. When the cab arrives, the driver speaks verrrrry basic English – so I start in with the charades again, trying to explain that our “chien” (dog) is very sick, so he’s getting in the taxi with us. The cab driver is not excited to have a dog in his car, but I’m crying and visibly unstable, so he lets Andy load Trevor up in the back.

The drive to the vet in France takes about 40 minutes – and about every 5-10 minutes, an awful retching sound is coming from the back of the car. Worried that this man is going to throw us out of his cab, Andy and I would talk loudly to cover the noise…it’s convenient that the driver’s English was poor, because I think we said the same 2 or 3 sentences over and over, not having anything new to say to each other.

It’s about 3 pm when we arrive at the vet’s office. We pay the cab driver his 200 CHF (about $215) and the office staff take Trevor back to an operating room immediately. After waiting in reception for about 20 minutes, the doctor comes out to update us – and his English is great, thank goodness. He tells us that we got there just in time, Trevor is in surgery now and it should take about an hour. He suggests that we go back to our apartment, get something to eat, take a nap, and call to check on him when we wake up.

So that’s exactly what we did. The vet ordered another cab for us, we got a sandwich at the café next door to our apartment, and we went to sleep for about an hour. When I called the vet at about 5:30, we learned that surgery had gone very smoothly and he was in recovery. The vet wanted Trevor to stay there for a few days so that he could monitor his eating, and suggested that we call anytime we wanted to check on him.

For the next 2 days, we called 2-3 times a day and had the following exchange with the receptionist:

Me: Je m’appelle Stephanie Giblin –
Receptionist: Ah oui, Trevor! Un moment.

And then the vet would come to the phone and give us an update. We got to pick him up last Friday evening, and he has recovered like a champ. As of today (1 week later), he’s back to eating normal food, has stopped taking pain medication, and is begging for treats when Andy and I eat at the table.

While Trevor stayed at the vet in France those 2.5 days, Andy and I did our best to get somewhat settled. We:

1. Bought our bus passes
2. Changed our cash at the currency exchange
3. Explored the train station
4. Walked around the lake
5. Hunted for an apartment
6. Ate lots of croissants
7. Slept at odd hours

And that’s pretty much how our first 3 days here went. We are so thankful Trevor is okay, and thankful for a smart vet who was willing to help a couple of sleep-deprived foreigners.