Switzerland Visiting Switzerland Was a Tremendous Opportunity

¶ … 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 restrooms in the U.S. 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 company pronounced exactly the way it is spelled.

Other Swiss people were dressed in traditional Swiss clothes, which included lederhosen socks with little individual suspenders above the calf and shorts with colorful shoulder suspenders. The men also carried traditional walking sticks that had pointy metal tips on the bottoms and mountain-climbing chisel hammers on the top that doubled as handles when the stick is used as a walking stick. Many of the men wore knives on their belts in leather sheaths; the boys also wore similar knives and their relative size seemed always to be roughly in proportion to the age of the boys.

Everybody in Switzerland seemed quite friendly and very eager to help us whenever we asked for directions or anything else along those lines. We also noticed Swiss military members quite often, especially on the trains. That struck as somewhat unexpected because Switzerland is such a small country that is infamous for its neutrality.

In almost every town, we saw obvious "tourist trap" shops that all had very similar versions of the same Swiss Army knives, cuckoo clocks, wooden whistles, and miniature versions of the Swiss railroad system train cars, locomotives, and train tracks; they all carried many different types of chocolate and hard wheels of Swiss cheese, as well.