Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 10:06:36 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Where is she?

I am starting to get worried.  The attractive, atheist, non-smoking,
single,  English speaking, female physics grad student who is supposed to
be moving into the other room where I live still has not arrived.  I am
quite concerned that something may have happened to her.  Has anyone heard
from her or know where she is?  I'd sleep much better at night if I knew
where she was and how to get a hold of her.  If any one knows anything,
please tell her I'm worried about her and have her get in touch ASAP.

A pen managed to end up in the washing machine with my clothes the other
day.  (No, it was not my pen and I had nothing to do with it being in
there, it belongs to the woman who owns the house and she has no idea how
it got in their either.)  Anyway, I think the slow-mo washing machine may
have saved me.  It only managed to get noticable amounts on three pieces
of clothing, and 95% of it was on one shirt which I was not particularly
fond of anyway.  I got most of it out of the other two pieces of clothing,
although some Lestoil sure would have been helpful.  I managed to take the
skin off the back of one of my fingers using them as scrubbers with a
granular cleanser.

The entire city here is decked out in its christian propaganda.  Lights
everywhere.  Between every set of lightposts (well, actually, there are no
lightposts since the street lights are hanging on cables strung between
buildings) on all the downtown streets and all the way out the main street
to the burb I live in (20 minutes by bus) are fancy shaped light
arrangements and curly-ques of fake boughs.  Some of the trees downtown
even have bobbles in them (vandalism is just not the same here), some as
big as your head (ooooh-aaaaah - head sized bobbles).

Apparently Dec. 6 is some sort of special day for children here.  The
woman I live with gave me a bread-person with raisin eyes and sugar
crystal sprinkles (the fin like appendages made it look vaugely like
Aqua-man).  I thought she said it was "Sani Cola" [is this a bubbly toilet
cleaner?] day or something and she did not do a very good job of
explaining except to say it was a special day for the children.  I just
asked Michel (and I only recently discovered his name has no 'a' in it)
what Dec. 6th is and he repeated that it was "Sani Cola" day.  However,
the second time he said it I managed to notice that if you move around
some stresses and accents you get "St. Nicolas" which puts a whole new
light on the situation. Apparently, on Sani Cola day children get peanuts
or some other small food stuff.  Hardly seems interesting, although
compared with Victoria day or St. Patrick's day I guess it's not bad.  On
christmas, the presents are delivered by the christmas Pear (this famous
fruit is aka Pere Noel), who looks a lot like Santa Claus.  At least they
do not have the confusion between St. Nicholas (a real, but dead person
who is the patron st. of children) and Santa Claus (who is an imaginary
person created by Coke (based on European traditions of father christmas)
and maintained through continued efforts of Coke, Hallmark and others and
probably represents the most society changing ad campaign ever initiated).
The Aqua-man was somewhat tasty, but really, it was bread, not pastry, so
how good could one expect it to be?  [Since the original Sani Cola
incident, I have attempted to discuss this with others, and when I say
Sani Cola, everyone of them knew exactly what I had said, making it not
worth discussing.]

Speaking of ad campaigns... What do you get if you take one very
attractive woman, two sets of nice, feminin undergarments and 20 or so
billboards on major bus routes?  You get one really cool set of billboards
:)  This is the ad campaign underway by H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) which is a
big, international department store chain.  Consciously, I am no more
likely to shop at H&M than I was before, but we all know that my
subconscious is telling me "Go to H&M, she might be there..."

Speaking of women's underwear, one of the tabloids here has photos of Elle
McPherson doing stretching exercises in nothing but her bra and panties.
Last week one had topless photos of someone else.  As interesting as this
all might make a trip to the grocery store sound, one should note that
they don't sell the tabloids at grocery store check out lines like they do
in NA.  I guess my newly found high fibre cereal will have to be
excitement enough for a visit to the grocery store.

I received a copy of the acceptance letter for my presention in Rome in
January via fax today.  It was addressed to Dr. Sanderson :)  Someone's
jumped the gun.  My prof says that whenever anyone uses a title you have
not yet actually earned it means they want something from you.  I'm
scheduled to present at 11:30.  For anyone who thought that me giving a
presentation in Rome sounded awfully cool, it should be noted that it will
probably be about 5 minutes long and will mearly chart the progress we
have made here (ie. nothing) since the last meeting in October in Vienna.
The real reason I am giving a presentation at all is because UVic will
only give $100 travel funding for travel to a conference, but will give
$250 if you are actually presenting at the conference.

Here's a stupid idea for you:  putting bookmarks in the dictionary for
those words you are always misspelling :)

Well my bus stop at the University is more or less back.  For a while
there was nothing, then some steel posts, then the roof supports, then
benches and a garbage can (yeah, like I really need the garbage can and
benches before the roof).  Eventually a roof showed up.  No walls yet.

Wednesday night we had a bit of adventure.  There were two students
visitting for most of the week, one from Vienna (different one than
before) and the other from a Swiss city a couple hours away.  Around 20:00
I was in the basement working on the computer in the 'lab' and they were
upstairs (4th and top floor, which is the 3rd story - one quickly learns
in Europe that the floor above the ground floor is the first story, and is
so labelled) working on the computers up here.  I decided to take a break
and check my email.  I get in the elevator and it smells a little smokey,
but since there are no smoking restrictions here, this is not that
unusual.  I get upstairs and wander down the hall and start logging in and
I notice I can still smell the smoke.  I ask them if they can smell it and
only one of them (there were 3 people here besides me) says he can.  I go
back into the hallway and look towards the end and I can see smoke.  So we
all go down to the end of the hall and look down the stairwell.  It is
coming from somewhere down there.  We go down the stairs and three other
people are rolling a dumpster billowing smoke out the front doors.  Ths
smoke is thick enough to make you gag.  They are filling a garbage can
with water and pouring it into the dumpster (these are smallish inside
dumpsters).  Eventually we get the thing more or less out.  There was
never any flames.  Someone had obviously thrown a cigarette butt into the
garbage.  The smoke detectors never went off.  Really inspires confidence
doesn't it.

Also on Wednesday night, there was a train robbery in Switzerland.  I do
not know if this made it as far as North America, but it has spread over
much of Europe (including full front page in one German paper (Blick))
because it is considered very amusing.  The theives boarded the train as
passengers and while it was in transit crawled outside the train and up
into the engine.  They overtook the engineer at gunpoint and tied and
gagged him.  They then stopped the train such that the car containing the
money being transferred by a bank was stopped on an overpass where a
waiting truck was parked below.  They broke into the money car and threw
the money bags down into the waiting truck.  So far they seem to have
elluded capture and have absconded with 2-3 million SFr.  Train robberies
in the 1990's is not something I would have thought was possible.

They put weird things on pizza here.  Thursday night I had a pizza with
mushrooms, tuna, salami, and egg.  The funny thing is that when it arrived
at my table it did not actually have any salami.  I did not really notice,
having forgotten what I had ordered exactly, but about a quarter of the
way into the pizza our waiter came out with a bowl of salami and proceeded
to add it to my pizza because it had been left out.  Obvioulsy not the
sort of French care I have previously mentioned.  This was an Italian
restaurant, very informal, and infact in the most bizarre place.  My prof
took us, and we entered an unlabelled building through a small side
entrance, walked down a hall and through a card room to get to the
restaurant.  It was tasty and relatively inexpensive, just an odd
location.

Yesterday (Saturday) I went to a hockey game.  The game I went to was not
in Neuchatel, but the other "large" town in the canton, La Chaux-de-Fonds.
It is about 35 minutes by train and many of the people at the university
live there.  I went with a Ph.D. student here named Max.  Max was born and
has always lived in Chaux-de-Fond even though he holds an Italian
passport.  (It is extremely easy to live and work in Switzerland as a
foreigner from a developed country, but if you are Swiss, it is difficult
to work in the EEC, thus, many people here are not Swiss, even though they
have always lived here.)  Max is a an active member of the Swiss communist
party (and atually holds a relatively important appointment in his city).
He knows alot about the history of the area.  We went early to tour the
town.  He showed me were Lenon spoke on his first visit to Switzerland,
the train station where Musolini worked, the square where the revolution
to throw the Prussians out started.  C-d-F is very unEuropean in its
layout because a fire levelled it in the 1800's.  All the blocks are very
grid like and the houses are all built with spaces between them to prevent
another such fire.  They also have a building 14 stories high right
downtown.  Unfortunately, it was foggy so we could not see much from
there.  The main street, which is the longest straight road in Switzerland
at an amazing 2km (when I told him Yonge street was over 200 km long (not
dead straight), and that in the praires you could probably drive dead
straight for hours on end, it was only a reconfirmation of the different
length scales in Europe and North America) has cube trimmed trees running
down the middle, and all the trees are trimmed monthly to keep the top
surface at exactly 1000m above see level.  They actually have piles of
snow in C-d-F. We also went to a small local zoo, and saw a very unusual
clock built in the 70's to celebrate the major industry of the area
(Tissot, Ebel, Cartier, Rolex are all located in C-d-F).  The clock is
near the time keeping museum and the technical school where one learns to
make clocks and watches.  The huge monument clock we saw is built mostly
out of stainless steel and has a big red, LED digital display.  Not only
does it play music at the appropriate times, but it also plays psychedelic
70's sounds and whale noises and has funny coloured pieces the flip up and
down.  Not quite what one expects.  Anyway, onto the hockey game.

Needless to say, the quality of play is sub-NHL, but not bad.  The import
players like Anderson and Cowie can almost skate circles around some of
the other players.  This was the national A league (the top league).
There is also a national B, and a regional league.  One neat aspect to the
leagues here is that the top six teams in each league have a playoff, as
do the worst 6.  The team that wins the top-6 playoff moves up a league
(except from A) and the last place team from the low-6 moves down a
league.  Definitely makes being last a bad thing.  Even in the A league
though, only about half the players are professional.  The rest have other
jobs.  To go to the game only costs 15 SFr for students in the standing
three quarters of the arena, which is where we went (and I am glad we
did).  One of the weird things is that half an hour before the game the
teams come out and dump a bucket of pucks on the ice and actually have a
practice warm up, one team was even in their practice uniforms.  Then the
Zamboni comes out and does the ice (very slowly I might add) and the game
starts.  The timer counts up, which is no big deal.  The refs wear partly
striped, partly polka dotted uniforms.  The players uniforms are covered
with ads and since the top of the back is very valuable ad space, their
names are down at their waists.  No fighting and the international rules
for icing are the only noticeable differences in play.  However, the crowd
is totally different.

First, because the game is so cheap, many young people attend (young
enough that even I thought they were young :).  Our section had 4 full
size bass drums, a trumpet and an electric megaphone.  (The enemy section,
for which people had travelled 4 hours to come to, the farthest away one
can come from in Switzerland had a couple hundred people and 3 drums)  The
crowd is chearing or chanting or singing almost the entire game (Aller,
Aller HCC (Hockey Club C-d-F) sung to the tune of YMCA/Pet Shop Boys "Go
West" is quite good).  Many of the chants actually said something, but I
have no idea what.  I now also understand how a crowd can collapse a
stadium.  There were only about 6000 people (in a 7000 person arena) at
the game, but when 3 or 4 thousand of them jump up and down on the
bleachers in time to a drum beat, I can believe they could make a building
collapse.  The other fun thing, besides the chanting, jumping and motions
is that when the home players are announced at the beginning and after
goals, they only announce their number and first name and the whole crowd
yells out the last names.  After a goal, a huge flag covering our whole
section is unfurled and lifted over everybody's heads.  At the start of
the game, everyone lights sparklers.  Beer and cigarettes are everywhere
and we were searched when we came in.  The hockey may not be the NHL but
the game was a lot more fun to attend, and at 15 SFr, buy the tickets at
the door (Max gets in for 10 SFr because of his political appointment) I
think I might go again.  Not to mention being Canadian was considered cool
by our surrounders, and not suprisingly so since a Canadian was involved
in every goal "we" scored.

The final score was 5-4 for us (last goal 2 minutes from the end) which
was slightly suprising because "we" are second to last in the legue and
the other team is second best.  Anderson had 2 goals and an assist and
Cowie had three assists.  They do not keep track of shots.  After the game
the team lines up on the ice and skates toward the crowd, slowly lifting
their sticks and the crowd raises the pitch of the noise in sync with the
sticks and as the team gets to the glass everybody, including the team,
gives one big shout.  Anderson may not be playing in the NHL, but Max
figures he makes about 200k and he is really a hero here.  Not really a
bad trade off.


Well, this has once again gotten longer that it should have.  By the way,
I bought a scanner yesterday, so I'll be getting some pictures (including
X-files "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink") posted soon.  So, for anyone who does
not know how to use Netscape (ie. my parents) find someone to show you
how.

Aaron de Neuchatel