Day two in Yverdon was about finding Pete and me a French school. Our first port of call was Migros. Migros is Switzerland’s favourite child, loved and adored by everyone, so much so that its ego is completely out of control. 

It started as a mere supermarket chain, like Coles and Woollies back home, (well at least I think it did), but then soon realised that in the eye of the Swiss people there wasn’t much it could do wrong. So basking in the glory of the population, Migros decided it could be what ever it wanted to be. Thus, Switzerland has Migros travel, Migros cafes, Migros florist shops, Migros supermarkets in which they sell everything from potatoes to computers and then there is of course Migros education, a bit like our tafe back home.

 

Pete and I had decided after our three weeks with Christine and Jean-Paul and the fact that we had both listened to the whole eight Michele Thomas French CDs, (Grace Kelly learnt French off this guy so he has to be good), that we didn’t need to go into a beginners class. There were three streams in the Migros college pamphlet. We could maybe come at doing the second stream but really it would be better if we went straight into the conversation stream. After all we’d been having conversations and the reality of things was that we weren’t here for very long, so we needed to start as high up the ladder as we could and move along as fast as possible.

 

The girl behind the desk had long thin brown hair that came down to her waist, big owl glasses and a shirt that didn’t quite meet the waistband of her black trousers at the back. She was somewhere in her early twenties. She smiled at us shyly as we came up to the desk and listened as we both stumbled along in French explaining that we wanted to do a French course, perhaps the more advanced one, the conversation one. Somehow she managed to understand what we were saying and said in French, that yes, that would be fine but we’d have to do an examination first to assess what level we were at.

 

I felt all the nerves of high school exams tingle through me and thought, ‘Oh ick.’

 

‘You want to do an exam?’ I asked Pete.

 

‘Well if it’s the only way we can get into the course then we’ll have to.’

 

She gave us each a booklet of questions and an official answer sheet, one of those ones where you have to colour in the right circle with a pencil. For a moment, I thought Migros were so serious about the examination that she was going to lead us into separate rooms so we couldn’t cheat, but to my relief we were both shown into a room where we could sit next to each other. She told us we had half an hour to complete the exam and then closed the door behind her.

 

I looked down at the answer page in front of me where I had to fill in my details and wondered where my first name was supposed to go and which was the line for my last name. Pete, always the true professional when it comes to exams, was already powering away and obviously knew where our names were supposed to go, so I just copied his.

 

There were thirty questions in the booklet. That meant we had to get through one question a minute. The first three questions took me ten minutes, and then I got stumped. I looked over at Pete, he was underlining words in a question and reading them out loud over and over again.

 

‘What did you get for four?’ I asked.

 

‘Huh?’ He said, without looking up.

 

‘What did you get for four?’

 

‘Not sure I think it’s c.’

 

I looked back at the answer choices on the page, ‘It couldn’t be c.’

 

‘Huh.’

 

‘It couldn’t be c.’

 

‘Why not?’

 

‘It doesn’t make sense.’

 

‘Yes it does, Pierre was the one waiting for the train, not Madeline.’

 

‘Who?’

 

‘Pierre.’

 

‘There is no Pierre.’

 

‘Yes there is.’

 

‘No…’ Then all of a sudden I realised that Migros were serious and they had no intention of letting us cheat at all. They’d given us both completely different exam papers.

 

‘Shit,’ I said.

 

‘What?’ Pete asked still mumbling the same words.

 

‘They’ve given us different exam papers.’

 

He stopped and looked up, ‘Your kidding?’

 

‘No.’

 

‘Oh well, there goes the idea that I just had, you do the last half and I do the first.’

 

‘Well help me with this one anyway.’

 

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, just a minute.’

 

I stumbled on with a few more questions, half figuring them out, half guessing. Then, when Pete was ready to help me, we both attacked question four. It wasn’t the only difficult question on the sheets. I helped Pete with one or two on his and Pete, who was already better at the whole reading and writing thing, helped me with a few more on mine. In the end though we had to stop helping each other because we realised we’d only done nine questions out of thirty and there was only ten minutes left.

 

‘We’ll be right,’ Pete said without looking up from his paper, ‘they won’t take the whole time thing seriously.’

 

But he was wrong. Exactly thirty minutes after we’d sat down the door opened making us both jump. It was the same young woman who’d put us in the room, she told us our time was up.

 

Pete, with a look of panic on his face looked up from his paper, ‘Un autre dix minute?’

 

‘Non, c’est temps finir.’

 

‘Cinq minute?’

 

She smiled, ‘Non.’

 

While Pete begged for extra time I managed to go back and colour in answers for some of the ones I’d missed and put in guesses for some of the ones I hadn’t got to yet.

 

I handed my sheet to the girl.

 

‘Deux minute?’ Pete asked.

 

The girl laughed, ‘non.’

 

Pete and I waited in the reception area while the girl quickly ran through the answers. Pete kept saying if he’d known they were serious about how much time we had he would have gone a lot faster. Yeah right, we were struggling to understand the instructions at the top of the page, speed, unless it was random guesses that happened to be right, was not going to work in our favour.

 

The girl behind the desk showed us our answer sheets. I’d got thirteen out of thirty, and Pete twelve. I was pretty chuffed, considering I’d only answered eighteen questions. I might have been a bit slow but I’d done OK with the ones I’d answered and no doubt lucked onto some of the ones I’d guessed. Pete wasn’t happy though, an exam was an exam and weather you’d studied for it or not you were supposed to do well. The fact that I’d beaten him by one point didn’t help. I know he’d done one question less than me, but I’d done one more, so my exam technique was obviously better. The fact that he’d helped me out with a couple of answers was a trivial aside, for all we knew they could have been the questions that I ended up getting wrong couldn’t they?

 

Really though, in the end, our results proved only one thing, we were both dumb arses when it came to French. We were only eligible to join the beginner’s class. If we attended that for the next six months, Migros said there was a possibility that we could then start in a beginner’s conversation class.  In six months though we’d be gone. The plan for the six months we were in Switzerland was to have conversation well and truly happening. We enquired about the acceleration courses Migros’ advertised but the girl behind the desk said that there hadn’t been enough interest so for the moment they were cancelled. It looked like Migros, Switzerland’s favourite child, wasn’t going to be our answer after all.

 

Pete and I spent the rest of the morning trawling through the phone book and then in the afternoon, after we’d dropped the kids back at school, we visited potential language schools. Just before we were due to pick up the kids from school, we found a language school that thought they could help us. They said they themselves didn’t have any courses running that would suit us, but they had an older retired guy working for them who might be interested in taking us on in a private class capacity. It turned out that the guy they had was interested. He agreed to take us on four days a week an hour a half each day at a time that would work around the kids’ timetables.

 

Switzerland itself runs on a tight schedule, Pete likes to describe it as an enlarged model railway system. Without fail just as the kids are walking out of their classrooms their little yellow bus turns up to take them home for lunch. Then, just as the teacher arrives back from lunch the little yellow bus that has chugged around the hills picking all the kids up turns up. For a while, when we first arrived we felt like we were in the Trueman show. It was as if someone was saying, ‘They’re coming! They’re coming! Quick everyone to their places. Drop the railway gates, don’t forget the flashing lights and the lovely chime noise, that’s it now, where’s the train, hurry, hurry where’s the train. Right, now for the little post van, and then you you’re next, Madame school bus, yes you, get a move on.’ Switzerland is nothing if it’s not neat and tidy, if it’s not organised and running on time.

 

We had been given our schedule and for those of you who know us well back at home you’ll know that schedules are a challenge for us even when we can understand what everyone is saying, even when we can read every note that comes home from school without having to trawl over it for two hours with a dictionary. Switzerland was determined that we, like everyone else in the country, would arrive on time. It was determined to provide our most difficult time management challenge since the birth of our four kids.

 

This is how the timetable went. Jack and Noah started school in the dark at 7.40, ideally getting there five to ten minutes early. Kai started at 7.50 but that didn’t mean his teacher wouldn’t close the door five to ten minutes before this time if he thought enough children were already there and then yell at anyone who walked in the door after it had been closed, even though they were there before the official starting time. Poppy started at 8.40 and then we started our class in town at 9.00. Then, after we finished class there were another four pick up times as we gathered everyone from all their different places to take them home for lunch. Then, after lunch, four separate drop off times and then, the first pick up time for the end of the day started an hour and a half later. How parents over here don’t go slowly insane and end up in a psychiatric home by the time all of their children are at school is beyond me. Of course our own situation wasn’t helped by the fact that our children all going to different schools (besides Jack and Noah) and the schools were outside the zone we were living in. So the little yellow bus that looked like it was out of a Postman Pat episode and took all the kids to Kai and Poppy’s schools, didn’t come anywhere near our house.

 

Needless to say we were late too many times and people were not happy, particularly Kai’s teacher. The fact that we were late nearly everyday for Kai’s school that first week probably didn’t help Kai’s or our relationship with Kai’s teacher. We were fast learning that not only was he obsessive about everything being clean and tidy, but there was also a strict schedule in his classroom that everything and everyone ran by. That first week though was difficult; we had no idea who was going where and at what time. We constantly had to refer to the timetable I’d scrawled down in the front of my diary to see in which direction we should be heading first. This added to the fact that we didn’t know our way around town did not make for calm, smooth drop off times. It took us two weeks to figure out who should be dropped off first, who should wait at home while others are dropped off and who should come to fit in on the end of a drop off. Two weeks was too long for Kai’s teacher. At the end of the second week Kai came home in tears because he’d got into trouble for being late again. I found myself explaining to his teacher in really bad French that the first two weeks had been really hard, sorting out who had to go where and what time. I apologised profusely Kai’s late arrival and told him it wouldn’t happen again, told him we thought we had things under control now.

 

He smiled and said that was fine, that he understood. I walked away very pleased with myself thinking that I’d taken a big step towards a positive relationship.

 

In that first week in Yverdon positive relationships seemed like they were going to be the challenge of our stay. Noah also came home with plenty of stories about his teacher that took him for French, that meant he had her most of the time. He gave her a daily rating according to the number of ‘psychs’ she had at him. A good day was when the ‘psych’ count came in under five; a bad day was when it went above. Noah was surprisingly non-plussed about the so-called ‘psychs.’ He did amazingly well at seeing the funny side of these ‘psychs’, telling us all about how red her face would go, sometimes heading towards a shade of purple and how the veins in her neck would pop out so far that sometimes he thought they might burst. I asked him what he did when she was going off at him like this, he said he just sat there and waited for her to stop. He said she was crazy because what was the point in all that yelling when he couldn’t understand a word she was saying anyway.

 

And then of course there were the Moggy’s.

 

One of the first nights we were there I had to go down and get Madame Moggy because I couldn’t get the silly glass top stove with its fandangle touch buttons to work. I tried for half an hour before I finally gave up and went down and got her. The last thing I wanted was her in my house, (well I guess it was her house really), telling me what needed to be cleaned and what was in the wrong place and needed to be moved, and what was pushed up against a wall and shouldn’t be.

 

Before I went downstairs to get her I did a quick scan of the place, shoved a load of dirty plates in the dishwasher, made sure the covers on the caramel suede couches were pulled up and threw the clothes that were spread across the floor into Pete and my room and closed the door.

 

When I went downstairs and explained as best I could that I couldn’t get the stove to work, (she seemed to understand what I meant), she came bustling up to our level, tut tutting with her tongue as if she owned the place, which of course she did. She didn’t however go straight to the stove. First she did a lap of the house, well, a lap of level two. In my absence from the top level one of the covers had slipped off the couch, who knows how that could have happened with four kids in the house? She went straight over to the couch and pulled the cover up and back over.

 

‘Faire attention civil plait, faire attention,’ she said looking straight into my eyes, dissolving any thoughts that might have crept into mind the day we moved in about her being meek and mild after all. Then she noticed the handprints on the window above the couch. This glass had been see through clean when we moved in.

 

She rubbed at the fingerprints and then started off in her Italian accented French at a fast pace. I didn’t get many of the words but the meaning was clear, ‘Don’t let your grotty children climb all over my couch and put their sticky hands on the glass.’ She finished off by saying she would clean it and made her way over to the sink to get a cleaner from underneath it.

 

‘Non, Non,’ I said, ‘Je fais.’

 

‘Non, Je fais.’

 

‘Non, c’est d’accord, Je fais.’ I said firmly.

 

‘D’accord.’ Luckily her insistence finished here because it was also about the spot where my French ran out.

 

Before she reached the stove, she pulled the cloth that had slipped off the small wooden shelf above the granite bench top back over and again gave me that look of ‘If you don’t look after my house I’ll make your life hell’ and then said the same that she’d said of the couch, ‘Fair attention Madame, fair attention. Oui?’

 

‘Oui oui,’ I said pointing at the stove.

 

But on the way to the stove she had to pass the garbage bin, which should have been under the sink, well that was where she kept it anyway, but we’d pulled it out for ease of access. As luck would have it, sitting on top the very top of the rubbish piled in the bin was a plate that Poppy had dropped on the tiled floors the night before and split in two right down the middle.

 

I saw her eyes register it and then move away. I waited for her to say something but nothing came, so I jumped in with an apology before the lecture that I didn’t have a chance of understanding started.

 

‘C’est d’accord,’ she said and went to the stove.

 

The stove didn’t perform as she expected it to under her finger tips, she cursed and I think called the stove stupid, then grabbed a tea towel to put between her fingers and the glass top. The touch sensitive buttons came on straight away then. She laughed and waved the tea towel at me indicating that sometimes you needed to use it for the stove to respond to touch.

 

On her way out she rubbed at a mark on the wall and opened the cupboard doors where all the coats were hung, leaving the doors ajar about half a foot demonstrating with her hands that they needed to be left like that. ‘Oui, oui,’ I nodded, thinking if only you knew every night those same doors are firmly closed with a strap strung around their handle and the front door handle to keep the world and you out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.