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Neuchâtel — Thoughts and Observations #6

  • Neuchâtel seems near-perpetually covered in fog during the winter. We had been warned about this by friends who’d lived here previously, but at the time I took their descriptions with a fair bit of salt. They have turned out to be quite correct. In the 10 days we’ve been here, we’ve been able to see the other side of the lake and the top of the mountain on only 1 day. The rest of the time, visibility is limited to a 1-2 kilometres (on good days) to a mere few hundred metres or less (on bad ones), making the world seem a lot smaller than it actually is (which is no small feat, since we live in a valley). We never see the sun at all. It brings to mind old Stephen King novellas and cheesy D&D campaign settings.
  • Cleaning up after your dog doesn’t seem like a high priority around here. There’s always dog crap along all the sidewalks in the parts, despite bag dispensers everywhere. This wouldn’t be such an interesting observation if I didn’t also observe people stepping in dog crap nearly every day.
  • Having grown up in Illinois (and North America in general, the land of high-fructose corn syrup), the weirdest thing I’m finding about the food selection at the local stores is the near non-existance of corn. Looking around today, I confirmed that there’s no frozen corn in the freezer section and only 1 baby food variety with corn in it. The only corn in the whole damn store is in the produce section, where one can buy shrink-wrapped packs of 2 sad looking ears imported from Florida. (?!?)
  • Having succeeded last week in making sure we could survive here, my goal for this week is to try to get a haircut. I’ll keep you posted.
This was written by Quentin Blasingame. Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010, at 14:55. Filed under Switzerland. Tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.