The birds and the bees

I promised a more factual posting, so here we go. When I registered as an inhabitant of Zuoz, they gave me a handy booklet with important information about the municipality. The town of Zuoz is located at 1,700 meters (5,600 feet). The municipality's highest point (Piz Kesch - I climbed it several times wtih my father) is at 3,417 meters (11,200 feet). Its area is 66 square kilometers (16,300 acres). In the year 2000 (the info obviously is somewhat outdated!) there were 1,353 inhabitants, 46% of which speak German, 34% Romantsch and 12% Italian.

In addition to these human inhabitants, there also are 243 cows and calves, 561 sheep, 24 horses, 85 pigs, 5 goats, 83 chicken, 25 rabbits and 43 bee hives.

The languages are a constant source of confusion. I am reading an English book, Time Magazine, and of course most of my email correspondence is in English. In town I speak Swiss German, although I am often answered in high German. TV is either in Swiss German, or in high German. The cashier at the store speaks Italian, and everywhere there is much banter in Italian. I spent the weekend with my sister, and so French was the only language, although the hills were full of Brits. I subscribed to the local paper, Engadiner Post, which is written both in German and in Romantsch. A free magazine is written in German, English and Italian. Most of the time I can keep the languages in their proper place, but it becomes very difficult on the train. On Monday, returning from my sister's I went from French to German, then boarded a train coming from Italy, switched back to a Swiss train with mostly German, and eventually returned to the Romantsch/Italian area. Greeting someone always is a guessing game, and I usually get it wrong! It is all much fun though, and I am looking forward to finally picking up some Romantsch: enough students have registered to make the next course viable, and so the first class will be held next Monday night - from 8:15pm to 9:45pm! I don't know how I'll be able to focus so late at night. The class will be in another town, some 15 minutes up the valley by train, and the train schedule does not at all coincide with the timing of the class... I hope one of my class mates will come from Zuoz and be the proud owner of a car!

As I mentioned above, I spent the weekend at Brigitte's - at the other end of Switzerland, in another beautiful area in the Alps: Villars. It's a long day on the train, and I got up at 6:30am to catch an early one. It was hard to get out of bed in the dark (hint: this is where you are supposed to feel sorry for me) but the reward was the sunrise tinting the tops of the mountains with pink. This was the first time I wasn't crying when leaving the valley... and when I returned, late on Monday night, my relationship to the area, to the town, to the apartment, was changed: all of a sudden it no longer felt like my Dad's vacation place, but like my home. A good feeling. I had mentioned that while here it's always nice, there was a lot of snow fall on the north side of the Alps. The whole country was under snow, and in Villars the quantity of snow is astounding - much more than here, and much fresher, hence cleaner, whiter, even more beautiful.


This is the end of my hermit period: this weekend the first of many visitors will arrive, my high school friend Pierre. He is working on extending the Swiss National Park (park boundary is 2 miles from my house) and invited me to join him in a meeting on Friday afternoon in Zernez. On Saturday we hope to ski together... If the weather is good I might give downhill a try.

The above picture is of the vineyards near Lausanne under the snow. I will soon publish a set of pics on Picasa - promise!