On the road again

23 05 2011

So did the world end last Saturday? I have been so out of touch I wouldn’t have noticed. But somehow it seems like the same place it was prior to May 21st, 2011 – the date all those religious conspiracy-theroist wingnuts, who misused every medium in the country, tried to convince us that The Rapture was upon us.

Looks like Judgement Day came and went, huh?

But that’s kinda why it’s taken me so long to update my blog… I didn’t want to do all the work, you know, for nothing. Just wanted to wait and see if we would still be around after last Saturday.

(And we are! Great!)

I’ve been traveling with my husband and some friends, and have not had time to unpack my computer, let alone look at email or check up on current events since about 10 days ago. I have gone totally radio silent on Facebook. My FB friends are probably wondering if I drove into a ditch or something. Withdrawl has been brutal.

I don’t even know what day of the week it is. (Thursday?)

We have been on a whirlwind tour of the southwest USA, doing things like…this:

Early morning hiking in Grand Canyon. (May 22, 2011)

Our friends – two lovely Swiss folks who have been to the United States only twice before – are thankful guests, and the ultimate tourguide R. has been showing them everything this great part of the world has to offer.

My own role as the sidekick has been to provide the color commentary, filling them in with useful (and useless) USA-flavored information, mostly comprehensible translations of common Americanisms and vignettes from my own childhood in small-town America.

They often greet my explanations with blank, puzzled looks. There is clearly a clash of cultures going on here.

And fun as it has been, I have noticed that I am stressing out quite a bit about not getting enough alone-time. Prior to our roadtrip I spent 2½ months in my own little Evelynn-Starr world, doing all sorts of Evelynn-Starr things whenever and however Evelynn Starr felt like doing them. And now I have to share my time and my space with three other people. It’s been a rather rough re-entry into social life.

Complicating things is that our travel companions are somewhat novice. Imagine innocent camera-toting tourists underway in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language or understand the humor. I need not say more – you’ve all seen them, you know what I am talking about.

So I have decided to take a break from group activities, just for a few hours, to recover a bit of sanity. At this moment, I am sitting on the 18th floor of the Aquarius Casino and Resort in Laughlin, Nevada (also known as “Little Las Vegas”). I just won 50 bucks at a blackjack table downstairs and retreated to my hotel room in order to take some time to stare out the window at the Colorado River and think.

Just call me the Lone Rangerette.


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Categories : Americana, Cruisin', EuroTrash, This & that in the real world

Go play with guns, kids.

14 02 2011

The Swiss never cease to underwhelm me. Yesterday’s national referendum on weapons control which I wrote about a month ago (here), went down in flames. More than 55 percent of the population voted to keep semi-automatic military weapons in homes, garages, sheds, stables, cottages and greenhouses across the country.

And they said loud and clear: Children, you can continue to have fun playing with firearms you find in the closet. Men, you can continue to threaten your families with your weapons. And suicide-endangered individuals, Hey – go for it!

The trench was clearly drawn between the country’s small urban, cosmopolitan population and the vast majority of (backward, insular, godforsaken mountain) folk that live the Alps and behind the moon. There is also a marked division along language lines – the French-speakers said mostly “yes”, the German-speakers said mostly “no”. The so-called Röstigraben, the ditch dividing the two language regions, just got that much deeper.

The French and the Zurichers got it right this time.

Some German-speaking cantons declined the measure with majorities of more than 72 percent. 72 percent! If this had happened in any other country on the planet, the OECD election observers would declare the vote unfair and corrupt and say ballot boxes had been stuffed. But because it’s Switzerland, nobody bats an eyelid.

Why does this make me so angry? Because the referendum’s opponents knew nothing better than to use propaganda and intimidation to get their point across to a willfully brainwashed public. There was no single logical, rational reason to decline the referendum, as there is no single rational reason to keep these lethal weapons (responsible for more than 300 deaths every year) at home and not locked up in an armory. But the opponents’ message rang loud and clear: “Take away our weapons and you take away our traditions.”

Well you know, I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing. Some ancient traditions, established in the dark ages, really need to be done away with. One such tradition is the annual Zurich holiday called “Knabenschiessen.” Literally translated that would mean: “Young Boys Shooting (Day)”.  (No, young boys are NOT lined up to be shot – as much as we might wish that to be the case sometimes.) It’s a day when a canton-wide shooting tournament is held for young people. A few years ago, the organizers graciously started to invite the girls too.

And simply questioning the status quo or any God-given rights regarding guns those oh-so-traditionalist Swiss claim for themselves instantly draws their (f)ire and an emotional overreaction. On Knabenschiessen day two years ago, I was filleted by a Facebook friend when I posted an anti-childrens’-shooting status note. Shortly thereafter she defriended me.

Yesterday’s vote is another prime example of where direct democracy just doesn’t work, and where a country’s population must be protected from its own supidity.

After more than six years in Switzerland, I think it is time for greener pastures. And the winters here are too damn cold, anyway.

Singapore is starting to look pretty good right about now.


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True piloting and love letters

11 02 2011

On Monday I once again took a foray into the mysterious world of night flying. Two winters ago, I decided to get my qualification – under visual flight rules – just because, well, because it seemed like a cool thing to have.

Not that I would ever dare to go out there after sunset without an instructor safely belted into the right seat. You don’t actually SEE anything when you fly at night except lots of streetlights. And on this night the slim crescent moon provided zero additional illumination. So it just tends to be… really dark out there, and the biggest challenge is making sure you know where you are going. And avoiding terrain, of course.

Cool, huh?

We hit evening rush hour at Zurich International Airport, and despite having reserved a slot time in advance, the folks in the tower decided that our little Cessna 152 would be relegated to their lowest priority. HB-CFF is a trusty trainer, about my age, and, like me, a workhorse that loves to fly and hates to idle on the tarmac.

But as the one of the creatures lowest on the aviation food chain, she and her fellow 152s are also regularly subjected to a fair amount of abuse from aviation authorities (like air traffic controllers) and anyone who flies in anything with more than two seats.

Such as the insult of having to wait at the holding point as at least 15 heavies – commercial aircraft, behemoths of the sky – saunter past with the arrogance that giants tend to exude. They all know that our prop wash is peanuts against their jet blast, and they could knock us over in less time than it takes to say “Full power”.

Our view out the windshield is just about at the same level of their million-watt headlights. Thank you, gentlemen – that’s almost as much fun as enduring a laser attack on short final.

A full 23 minutes after an initial “Ready for Departure” call to Zurich Tower, I wondered aloud if Zurich Tower was going to let us sit there all night till we were completely blinded or till we ran out of fuel – whatever came second. A follow-up call had its desired effect: we were told to line up on the active runway 28. Only to wait some more as another three jets were cleared to cross on a taxiway in the distance.

Once (finally, FINALLY!) in the air, that familiar feeling of ultimate liberation returned and I once again wondered why it took me so long to come back. We flew into the deep orange stripe still highlighting the western horizon, chasing the sun that was long gone. Our destination was Basel, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) northwest of here, and finding the airport was a challenging mini-refresher in night navigation (sans GPS, folks).

Three smooth as silk touch-and-go’s on a runway lit up like a Christmas tree validated my confidence in my landing abilities. On the homeward leg, a clear starry sky stretched over us like a cloudless ink-black dome. Simply magical. It doesn’t get any better than this, I think. You just don’t get this feeling in an jet, no matter how hard you try.

Little birds like CFF are often mocked in places where tonnage and thrust play a leading role, but I maintain they are still the better way to fly. After all, what’s cooler? Actual piloting or systems management? It’s a philosophical discussion among aviators that’s been conducted ad nauseum since computers crept into the cockpit.

I guess that’s kind of like the debate between a ring binder full of paper and an I-pad. Of course the I-pad can do so much more than a stack of paper, but honestly – don’t you long for a handwritten love letter once in a while?

Yeah, me too.

 

(Thanks to the folks at Flying in Crosswinds for the ultra-cool night landing photo. And I sincerely apologize for not having given credit earlier.)


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Happy Anniversary, ladies.

7 02 2011

Today is a very, very important 40th anniversary. It is the 40th anniversary of womens’ right to vote in Switzerland. Fortieth, you ask? Only the fortieth? Yes, folks, women in Switzerland have had the right to vote for less time than I have been alive.

Shocking, is it not? I certainly think so.

In the run-up to this anniversary, there have been a number of news reports about the referendum that took place forty short years ago. The vote was, of course, open only to men. Swiss men, not usually known for their progressive, open, liberal nature, had to decide if, in the future, women would be allowed to take part in the political process, or if 50 percent of the population would continue to live in silence. Fortunately, a majority of these men noticed that the times, they were a-changin’ (only seven years after the song was released) and voted “yes”.

In the recent news coverage, the media dug up a few classic referendum campaign posters, which I would not want to withhold from my international readership. They range from the simply unbelievable to the simply unbelievably absurd.

For the English-speakers among you, here just a quick German-English mini-dictionary of words used in the posters:

Frauenstimmrecht = Womens’ voting rights

Nein = No

So ladies – look and weep. This is what we would have had to deal with, had we been born a generation earlier, in Switzerland.

Interesting. No flies on my pacifier.

“Is this the kind of woman you want?"

(And… what kind of woman would that be? Possessed? Terrorized? Frazzled? Shell-shocked? Demented? Witch-like?)

"Leave us out of the game!"

(Somehow I can not believe this young woman actually volunteered to have her photo on this poster. And notice the very subtle claws…)

 

This last poster I find particularly disturbing, because it seems to me not only to support the “no” vote, but also to be advocating violence against women. Or maybe it just challenges the viewer to find 101 household uses for a carpet beater, at least one of which surely has to do with female suffrage.

I am simply aghast.

Fortunately, on that fateful Sunday in 1971, a majority of Swiss men had the good sense to decide that running the country alone was a miserable task. So they offered women the opportunity to join them in the political trenches. One lonely backwater Kanton in eastern Switzerland needed 20 more years to grant women the right to vote on regional issues. Today there are more women (4) in the federal cabinet than men (3), and so far, they seem to be rather successful at what they do.

In corporate life, however, there is still a veeeerrrrry looooong way to go. Don’t even get me started on that.


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Categories : EuroTrash, Just another working stiff, The Savvy Aviatrix, This & that in the real world

Snow Bunnies take St. Moritz

1 02 2011

Last weekend I finally got my butt off the sofa and went skiing. It was my first venture into the Alps this season, and I guess I didn’t remember how cold it is out there. And how heavy all that damn equipment is.

WANTED: A competent skier.

But first things first. The story begins like this. About three years ago I found out that my friend Pascale’s family owns a mountain home near St. Moritz.

For those unfamiliar with St. Moritz, allow me to introduce the place. It is probably the most exclusive (expensive) ski area in the Swiss Alps, on par with, say, Vail, Colorado in the Rockies. It is a place where the rich and famous (and the not-so-famous – just rich) gather to party, ski, see and be seen. Regular guests include, for example: botoxed, bejeweled Russian madams and mistresses, just-divorced German corporate captains on the rebound, and morally corrupt Italian Prime Ministers. “Fur” is not a bad word here, especially when daytime temperatures hang around a nippy -25 degrees Centigrade (-13 degrees Farenheit).

It is a place where 100 ml (3.4 oz) of fresh-squeezed strawberry juice will run you about 65 U.S. dollars.

So imagine my delight when Pascale invited me to stay at her house, eat her food and drink her fresh strawberry juice – for free.

Pascale spends most of her weekends in this picturesque valley in southeastern Switzerland. On Saturday morning she took me to her winter playground, the Corviglia ski area. I spent the first 15 minutes getting reacquainted with my ski-boots. (Ummm… how do we do this again?) Then we each dragged 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of dead weight ski equipment up a steep hill to the lift. Only here in Switzerland do they test your fitness before you even get into the gondola that will take you to the top of the mountain. If you didn’t have a heart attack, you’re good to go.

Backcountry skiers – the purists who spend six hours walking up the mountain in order to then spend 20 minutes skiing back down – frown on gondolas, of course.

Once at the top, all arrows pointed into the valley, though stubborn morning clouds initially drained the pistes of any contrast whatsoever. White on white is always tough to navigate, no matter how wide you open your eyes.

My dear friend Pascale, who has been skiing roughly 20 years longer than I have, elegantly and gracefully zipped across the labyrinth of pistes like a real snow bunny, putting my inferior (yet gutsy!) ski talent to shame. But she was kind enough to stop and wait for me every few hundred meters. And if she hadn’t been around I would still be standing at the top of Piz Nair today, wondering which run would get me back to the car.

On top of the world last Saturday afternoon.

Joy of joys, I had a good day. A really good day. Seven hours standing in my ski boots and leaving other athletes in my dust, without eating any snow myself, or otherwise wiping out in spectacular fashion – not once! Just call me Lindsey Vonn from now on.

So maybe I really did learn something by watching World Cup skiing on TV the last few weekends, and not even at the expense of my anterior cruciate ligaments or any other key body part(s). As I returned to the lowlands happy and satisfied on Sunday afternoon, my red blood cells were still jumping for joy.

And they deserve more of the same… so I’ll be back in the mountains next weekend, guaranteed.


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