Cloudy Days in Switzerland

Switzerland is a place that I have returned to many times, but each return seems to be spaced more years apart from the last.

Landing in Switzerland this time, after more than ten years since my last visit, I feel a bit nostalgic for those things that are Switzerland to me. Not mountains or chocolates, but rather the days of long ago when I visited Switzerland as a child with my father and those memories: the friends and relatives there, feeding the birds at Lake Lucerne, games of cards my father always referred to as the “Swiss Game,” and getting sleepy trying to follow the conversations in my limited Swiss language skills as I quietly sat and listened.

I want my kids to experience some of that, but I also want them to see some of the Switzerland that I haven’t seen much. So we plan to visit friends and family and also do some hiking in the mountains.

In a way, it’s sad to return. Memories freeze a place in time, but upon returning all those years gone instantly disappear. People are older or no longer there. A decade passes in an instant.

Despite being born in Switzerland, I have always felt like a foreigner there. I never really learned the language as a child and my two week visits, spaced years apart, weren’t enough. But I tried. I moved to Switzerland at age eighteen and worked at various jobs and learned to speak a somewhat broken mix of Swiss and German.

In my few months in Switzerland I worked at numerous temporary jobs, but the one I remember most was the kitchen of Swiss Air at the Zurich airport where all my co-workers were from Pakistan. It was my last job in Switzerland.

Switzerland is a place where everything always runs on time. But for me, things in Switzerland never seemed to quite work out as planned. At age eighteen, I had planned to stay in Switzerland for some time and get fluent in the language, but this never happened. This time, things didn’t quite work out as planned either.

My kids did get to experience some of the Switzerland that I remember. They had the opportunity to meet family they never knew and try foods that they have never even heard of like vermicelles (sweet chestnut spaghetti) and Rivella (milk whey soft drink).

I was hoping to take them to see some of the Switzerland that I have never really known, but this proved difficult as the weather in Switzerland is terrible this summer. It’s cold and cloudy and raining much of the time. It feels more like winter than summer.

So instead of climbing mountains we put on our rain jackets and walk along the lake. We stop along the way to feed the birds and soon we are surrounded by pigeons, gulls, ducks and sparrows all eager for a crumb.

It’s our last day in Switzerland and I don’t know when we will return. A cold fog fills the streets of Basel, another place I spent time many years ago looking for work. This time, I walk the streets with my kids looking for our name. It’s an unusual last name in the US, but in Basel it is everywhere. And seeing our name on a street sign is the final reminder to us that we are Swiss, even if we don’t really feel it.