The Four Seasons: Winter, Winter, Winter and Winter

After living in Switzerland for over 2 years, I think it is fair for me to say that the weather sucks. Right now it's mid-July, and it feels like March. It's been raining for three days straight and it's so cold that I considered getting out my little space heater to warm my toes. I keep thinking, maybe I'm not being fair, that this is just a freak incident, but then I thought back to last July, when my aunt was here and we went hiking. I couldn't even hold my hiking sticks without my fingers freezing off. So no, this weather, sadly enough, appears to be normal.

My husband, being the great boss that he is, organized a team-building outing for his department. It was a build-a-bridge very engineering activity somewhere outdoors near Lake Zurich. Even they were calling him this morning, saying his event may be cancelled due to weather. Never mind the fact that this weekend he went out of his way to buy vegi burgers for one of his employees to grill at the lunch, where he figured the choice of sausages or sausages wouldn't really cut it for the vegetarian on his team.

The main problem is that in Switzerland, there is just not much to do when the weather is bad. Sundays are the worst since no stores are open. Yesterday, after jogging in the rain, we decided to check out Musee Bizarre in Baden for lack of anything else to do. Like most Swiss museums, it took longer to get there than to go through the museum. There was about three tiny rooms of exhibit and the museum was the size of our apartment. Still, the size did not seem to influence the price, as we still paid 20 CHF total for our 10 minutes of amusement.

Of course, there are pleasant days scattered here and there. You just never know when they will be. The only thing you can guarantee is that they'll probably fall on a Wednesday.

The only redeeming factor to all of this is that at least now I'm starting to understand why no one smiles. It's hard to look happy when the even the sun is a foreigner. It's November on everyone's faces all year, but really, who can blame them?