After living in Switzerland for almost three years, it’s becoming harder and harder to travel abroad.
“Oh my God, there’s a leaf on the sidewalk,” I’ll exclaim to my husband on one of our weekend trips to France, “And did you see that PET bottle in the gutter? It should have been recycled!”
Switzerland is the cleanest country I’ve ever lived in. I enjoy the shiny public toilets. I enjoy the spotless streets. I enjoy the way I could drink from my gutter after my neighbour’s had her way with it. But it sure makes going anywhere else a bummer.
Like inside my own apartment, for example. Here, dirty dishes never fail to take over the kitchen and piles of paper always threaten to consume the living room. Forget my white socks, if anything screams foreigner, it’s the state of my apartment.
While the whole Swiss “timeliness is next to Godliness” philosophy has rubbed off on me and I no longer think twice about giving that one-minute tardy tram driver the evil eye, I just can’t seem to let dirt bother me.
This is really schlecht, I know, but somehow when I see men hired to scrub trashcans at public transportation hubs, I can’t help but feel it’s a bit unnecessary in the overall scheme of things.
But then again, if I had made a career of cleaning, I wouldn’t be an English copywriter without much copy to write, waiting for a train in Bubikon and staring at a billboard for lingerie that says “Just feel on wings”, which is located next to a gigantic gleaming ashtray. Clearly when you have the choice between polished English or shiny receptacles, the garbage cans win in Switzerland.
So when I have to stand in a small line for exactly 23 minutes and 13 seconds to get an ice cream cone on a sunny Sunday, I’m not surprised at the wait time. After all, it’s not that the ice cream man scoops slowly, or that he’s disorganized. It’s just that after every scoop, he takes a rag and wipes down the counter.
When I’m finally handed my cone, I can’t help but feel a little afraid as I take it. Because what happens, heaven forbid, if I drip?
Tags: garbage, Life in Switzerland, litter, recycling, Swiss
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Chantal - you are becoming Swiss. This is what integrating means. You are going through a process. First you go through the WOW phase, when you first arrive. Then, after 6 months to a year, you hit a negative phase (it’s not as good as home), then suddenly you go into a positive phase (everywhere else is not as good as here), then you go into acceptance phase (nowhere is paradise), then suddenly something negative happens and you go back to negative phase and the whole process starts again. Welcome to the positive phase. Me, I’m in acceptance phase.
This is yet another tantalizing view you have provided. We are now making weekly trips to IKEA to recycle everything that our local pickup in Detroit won’t take at the curb, but driving down any road in the area still offers the putrid view of winter carelessness here. Based on your description, I believe we would feel like we have arrived on our home planet if we were ever fortunate enough to emigrate to Switzerland. On the other hand, if you ever make it back to the `states (especially if it is early spring in the Detroit area), be prepared to feel like you are swimming in a landfill.
That sounds like a much better balanced article - thank you! I too have caught the bug that i cannot but help notice rubbish, to the point where i regularly go around our village with a rubbish picker device. Yesterday I did the rounds with my 10 year old daughter, and to my delight an unknown neighbor rushed out to say thank you and pressed a 10 CHF note into my daughter’s hand. Now my son wants to go on the next round
You can live in Switzerland long enough, that you begin to think it’s the real world.
Nice blog, good to read your account of life in Switzerland. I live in Plainpalais in Geneva, coming from the UK, and since it’s part of a busy local area, it can get well lived-in before the regular cleaners come to usher the dirt away. I like it like that - well loved but not too fussed over. It has a positive, energetic atmosphere. I’ve only been here a few weeks, so I’m in what is described by your reader Lynx as the WOW phase. I’ve heard that things change for the negative. What are you going to do? The alternative is to stay at home. And as much as I love the UK, I was - and am - ready to move on.
I’ve been living in Geneva on and off since 1994 and I couldn’t agree with you more about the positive influence of Swiss life in my own life and perception of things. I have no shame in declaring my total devotion to punctuality, be it in official or unofficial functions. I also take care to collect any trash accumulated during a day trip until I can find a suitable disposal joint.
As Ian T pointed out here, the risk in living too long in Switzerland is that you can become addicted and think that this is the standard by which all things in the world should be measured. To avoid this pitfall, I endeavor to live in other parts of the world and only come back to Switzerland to “rest and recharge my batteries” before I set off again.
Long live Switzerland.
Glad you could relate. After getting used to the Swiss Post buses the last three years, I advised some visitors that of course we should be able to get to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in Italy without a rental car. Ha. Wishful thinking.