¶ … Switzerland Visiting Switzerland was a tremendous opportunity to experience a foreign culture and society. To my surprise, many people spoke English, which was a tremendous help to us since none of us spoke French or German or any of the many Swiss dialects derived from one or the other of those languages. Likewise, many of the public services provided posted instructions in English and some of them also had buttons allowing visitors to listen to recorded instructions in a choice of various languages including English.

The Swiss transportation system is very reliable and the buses and trains are all part of the same integrated system. That made coordinating different legs of our daily trips very convenient.

Another tremendous convenience in that regard was the fact that we were able to purchase weekly travel passes that allowed unlimited use of the trains and busses instead of having to worry about buying tickets at every train station and railroad station. We were also able to purchase our tickets from automatic kiosks instead of having to wait in any lines for manned ticket windows.

Unlike many components of American transportation systems, they were always extremely punctual and impeccably clean. We noticed that cleanliness was something that applied more generally to streets and to all public facilities as well. Whereas public...

are typically filthy and missing the basic necessities (such as toilet paper), in Switzerland, every public facility was spotless and perfectly maintained. In fact, we never really considered how much we have come to accept public filth in the U.S. until we encountered such an obvious difference in Switzerland and it made us wonder why that is so difficult to achieve at home.
We noticed that some Swiss people dressed very much the same way as we did and that soccer is obviously a big sport in Switzerland because of all of the clothing with references to European soccer teams. We also discovered that handball is a bog sport and we watched a handball tournament in a local gymnasium in Interlaken. It is a team sport that resembles soccer except that the players handle a ball about the same size as a miniature volleyball that they try to throw past a goalie. American sports team jerseys are also popular in Switzerland but we discovered that they may wear them strictly because they are fashionable or colorful. On one occasion, I asked two people about our age if they went to UCLA because they both wore UCLA sweatshirts. They responded indicating that they did not speak English and when I pointed to their sweatshirts, they said "Ya, ookla, ya." It seemed to me that they had no idea what UCLA stood for and thought that it was just the name of a clothing…