Goodbye Lindt

Es kann ich nicht verstehen/ Je ne peux pas comprendre

Lindt & Sprungli launched a new range of chocolates in the past week, and there were a few things I noticed when I walked into my local Coop and was smashed in the face by the marketing campaign. The new chocolates are called Hello, and they are somewhat of a departure from what you'd expect from Lindt. On their Swiss website, the company claims that they are known worldwide for their leadership in the premium chocolate segment, which I found interesting, because I thought they were known for making an advert that is acknowledged to be cheesier than the Ferrero Rocher advert. But taking Lindt at their word, and assuming they are the leading premium chocolate maker in the world, the new line of Hello chocolates do not seem to reflect this positioning.

Kid's Skiing Near Geneva

Piou-piou, we look up to you

We took the girls to Valorcine over the holidays, a little resort some friends of ours recommended, 15km north of Chamonix and only 2km from the border with Vallais.  Neither of us had ever really considered skiing before we moved to Switzerland. For myself that's largely because I actually can't physically ski.
We've tried a few lessons last year, so we decided to go for a week  We enrolled them in a week long ski course with a giant yellow bird called Piou-piou, because hey, when you think of animals that might be good at teaching people to ski, you think of birds! Piou-piou is actually the mascot for the Ecole du Ski Francais' courses for kids aged 3 and older.
At the end of the week both girls received a little badge for completing the course. Though the big one clearly deserved it more than her little sister as she completed every minute of the course, whilst altitude sickness (literally: on Christmas eve) and bad weather, combined to make the little one less enamoured of skiing, and in the end she only completed about half the course. I think she was the smallest one on the course, perhaps if the weather was better she would have been ok, but I suspect now we'll have a tough time getting her back on skis.
It occurred to me that the Ecole du Ski Francais might be to skiing what the British Council, or Bell is to English. But then a friend tells me kids the eldest will start skiing with school in a couple of years and be taught by the Ecole Suisse de Ski, which, you'd think might be better (just cos it's Swiss), but according to the World Cup Standings, this isn't so. Anyway, the irony is that from Geneva they have to go to France to ski, as it's closer.

French Lessons

We started going to French lessons provided free by the canton, because our eldest daughter goes to a local primary school.  I can't work out whether the idea of the free French lessons is benign, a gentle encouragement to learn the language so we can support our daughter in her school work, or aimed more at encouraging our cultural assimilation. The class is a ragtag of immigrants to Switzerland, a mixture of people from all over, but mainly, oddly, from Bolivia or Korea.  There are a few folk from the Middle East and one or two Europeans. None of us are very good at the language, we all try hard one way or another.

Cafe de Paris on Rue Mont Blanc

Last night we walked out the house leaving the nanny to put the kids to bed. Our conversion to Genevoisie is progressing well it seems. The sun was still out, it was warm and the whole experience felt really quite civilised. We had a movie to see at 8.15, which turned out to be one of those terrible "an idea I got reading A Brief History of Time" SciFi stories. Still it was entertaining enough, and we happened to pick the right restaurant to get a bite to eat from before hand.

Border crossing

When we were planning how to live in Geneva and concerned about the high cost of living in the canton, we did for a moment think of living in France and crossing the border every day to go to work. However, a few simple things put us off, in particular the possibility of living in the sticks in a country where we don't speak the language and aren't familiar with the culture. A universal concern for people moving to a foreign country I would expect.
On Sunday we visited some friends, Parisians, who live just over the border, in what appears to be a beautiful village, where the school is a five minute walk and the ski lift a five minute drive. They commute to Geneva on a daily basis, and handily the Genevoise don't have border controls with France, so the commute can be easily accomplished without the aid of a passport.
Their beautiful home is so carefully modernised it could have been built yesterday, though they assure me it was not. And the garden covers an area twice the size of our flat, giving outdoor freedom to their children that is not available to the high-rise dweller. All this located just minutes over the border makes a saving on the cost of living that happily makes up for the additional commuting time into the city. I tried to suggest that this saving may only be available to those who could speak reasonable French, and so would easily fit into village life. I was surprised to hear that on a rough estimate about a quarter of the village speak English as a first language, or fluently as a second.
With their children a bit older than ours perhaps our friends are less in need of the city's simple distractions on a daily basis. I guess it will be a few years before we contemplate a move to the sticks, a few more years and a few more French lessons.