Merci Beaucoup!

We want to thank the many people who made it possible for us to have this wonderful adventure.

Primacy of place has to go to Duke University, whose generous sabbatical policy made it possible for Mark to take this time away.  It wasn't time away from work (he likes to say), but it was time away from the work obligations that require being on campus.

When we started thinking about this trip, we thought we needed housesitters willing to take care of our pets.  But then we realized that what we really needed were petsitters willing to live in our house.  And we were very lucky to connect with Kate Bowler and Toban Penner, who lived in our house, took care of our pets, forwarded important mail, and generally made us confident that all would be well when we returned home.  And their dog, Huey, became good pals with Rita and Mona, and even made peace with our cat, Sadie.

Toban

Kate

Huey

Shawna Anderson, Mark's Research Associate and Project Manager at Duke, made sure that two of Mark's major research projects moved smoothly along while he was away.  It would not have been possible to be away this long were it not for Shawna's super competent work back at the office.

Shawna

Kathy George, our long-time nanny and friend, took care of our house and pets when Kate and Toban were away, got us to and from the airport on both ends of our trip, and even put up and decorated a Christmas tree in our house so we'd have holiday cheer when we returned home!

Kathy

Joerg Stolz, Mark's colleague, collaborator, and friend at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), made it possible for Mark to have a position at UNIL, and he helped with many logistical details.  More fundamentally, Joerg designed and implemented the Swiss National Congregations Study, which led to Mark's first visit to Lausanne in December, 2009.  Without Joerg's initiative on that project, this adventure would not have happened.

Mark and Joerg

Olga Borrajo Rouyer (photo not available), secretary of the Institut de Sciences Sociales des Religions Contemporaines Observatoire des Religions en Suisse, helped with many logistics, both before and after we arrived.

We loved our Lausanne apartment, and we feel very luck to have found it.  Catherine Malek, our Lausanne landlady, who lived below us, was wonderful in every way.  She encouraged Christopher and Matthew to play in the building's yard, shared vegetables from her garden, and provided all sorts of helpful information along the way.  She and her husband, Nabil, became friends, and even invited us to join their family for a lovely Christmas Eve dinner.

Catherine and Ami

We also were very lucky to find the Ecole Bilingue de la Suisse Romand.  Its Director, Tina Rosseler, welcomed our children into her small school, even though we'd only be there half a year, and as a result Christopher and Matthew had an excellent semester of bilingual education, learning French while at the same time studying math and language arts in English -- a perfect combination for our situation.

Christopher and Matthew with Tina

There also were some objects that enhanced our experience in significant ways.

Our GPS made it easy to find our way around when exploring Switzerland's highways and byways by car.

Our Vonage internet telephone enabled us to make calls to and from the U.S. without paying international long distance rates.  It made my work, a lot of which involves conference calls and telephone interviews, a lot easier to accomplish from overseas, and in a way that was effortless for my clients.

Our French-English Dictionary, which I carried everywhere and used every single day, was indispensable.

This is not an exhaustive list of the people and institutions who we should thank for making these last few months so special.  We haven't mentioned the wonderful teachers at the Ecole Bilingue, the Lilly Endowment grant that supported Mark's sabbatical, the Dean who approved Joerg's proposal for Mark's UNIL appointment, our Durham neighbors who helped keep an eye on our house, and the many Lausanne people who tolerated our less than perfect French.

In any event, we wanted to end this blog by recognizing that we did not produce on our own the adventure it chronicles.  Everyone who helped along the way will, at some level, be in our minds and hearts every time we respond to the question, "So how was it to live in Switzerland?"

Thank you.

Au Revoir Lausanne

All good things must come to an end.

Our last few days in Lausanne were busy ones, spent mainly on the many tasks related to returning to North Carolina:  returning our leased car, shipping boxes, buying gifts, closing our Swiss bank account, and packing.

But we found time to say goodbye to some of our favorite places, including one last visit to Ouchy Harbor, where we often went to ride scooters, play chess, and just hang out by the water:

At the Ouchy Metro stop

At the harbor

Ouchy was much less crowded now than in the summer and fall, but it still was lovely to stroll, enjoy a view of the lake, and talk about the many fun times we had here.

We took the metro back up to our stop, conveniently called "Ours":

And we road the bus up the hill to our apartment:

Usually, when we arrived at our bus stop the boys would run ahead to our building and up the stairs to our apartment so they could wave to us from the window in the stairwell:

We of course celebrated Christmas in Lausanne.  The boys were excited that Santa knew how to find them in Switzerland.

Christmas morning in Lausanne

Alas, our last evening in Lausanne arrived.  We decided to eat out.  Eating out is way more expensive in Switzerland than in the U.S., so we did it only rarely.  In fact, this was only the second (!) time we ate dinner out as a family in Lausanne.  But we wanted one more fondue before we left, so we walked over to one of our neighborhood restaurants, Cafe de Bethusy.

Fondue at Cafe de Bethusy on our last night in Lausanne.

Packing to leave was a bit of a challenge.  We shipped a few things back and left a few things behind, but we still had plenty of luggage!

About to leave our apartment for the last time.

The bags packed, the apartment checked one last time, all that's left to do is lock the door and leave.

Locking our apartment door for the last time.

Walking down our hill to the train station

Waiting for the super fast train to Paris--our departure city.

After more than a year of planning and almost six months in Switzerland, it's hard to believe that it's over.

If I sound sad, it's because I am.  We're looking forward to seeing people back home, but we're also not quite ready for our time here to be over.  I'll miss hearing and speaking French, riding the bus and train to school, going on day-trips or overnight adventures nearly every weekend, working at the dining room table with Mark, being able to choose which variety of fresh Gruyere cheese to buy, and so much more.

We also wonder how this time away might have changed us, and might shape our lives going forward.  We wonder about small changes:  Will we be better recyclers?  Will we eat more (high quality) chocolate?  Will we watch (and play) more soccer?   But we also wonder whether we've been changed in more significant ways:  Will we find ways, especially for Christopher and Matthew, to learn more French? Will we take more weekends away to visit interesting places in the U.S. (which would require fewer weekend sports obligations)?  Will we use more public transportation?  Will Mark work more at home?  And perhaps the biggest question, prompted by living perfectly comfortably and enjoyably in a 2-bedroom apartment:  Will we downsize to a smaller house?

We don't know the answers to these questions, but we look forward to finding out.  And we know that, whatever long-term consequences there may or may not be, we will cherish our time in Switzerland for the sheer joy it gave us and for the many happy memories it has left us with.

Au Revoir Lausanne!

Let it Snow!

Snow finally arrived in Lausanne!  We had been enjoying the relatively mild weather but, after all, snow is what you think of when you think of December in Switzerland!  While we had seen snow on a couple of our mountain excursions, we had yet to see it here in town -- until a few days ago.

We got a chance to go sledding at Mon Repos, Lausanne's main park, just a few blocks from our apartment.

Twilight sledding at Mon Repos

And the boys made snow men (bonhomme de neige, as they say here) in the back yard.

Alas, the snow did not last.  The temperature is back into the low 40s.  The remains of our snowmen are still in the yard, but only barely.  Christmas won't be white, at least not in this part of Switzerland.

Ticino

Our time in Switzerland is almost over, but we managed one last trip out of Lausanne.

We had yet to visit the Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, near the Italian border, so off we went!

We took a five hour train ride from Lausanne to Locarno, a town on Lake Maggiore.

In Locarno's main square

Locarno is a cute town and was dressed up in its Christmas finery.   It was decked out in lights and decorations, and it had a small Christmas market.  There was even an ice skating rink set up on the town square.  So we did a little skating (except for Mark, who didn't want to risk injury, and, anyway, someone had to take pictures and drink vin chaude).

While this was fun, the main purpose of our visit was to see Bellinzona, the dramatic site of three medieval castles.  These castles are built high on rocky cliffs that overlook the valley and town below. Of all the castles we've been to on this adventure (now 12, in case you lost count) Bellinzona's castles provided the clearest and most dramatic example of a how a castle and its fortifications could dominate and protect an area.

Bellinzona was originally under the Milano regime, and these castles were built to keep out invaders from the north and to control trade through the valley.  The castles and their walls formed (and still form) a connected defensive system stretching across the entire (rather narrow, at this point) valley.  The Swiss eventually took control, though, which is why this region is now part of Switzerland rather than Italy.

Mark and the boys at Bellinzona's Castlegrande

Matthew running down one of the rampart walls

Christopher and Matthew in the tunnel below the rampart walls

Boys at Castlegrande

View from one of the towers at Castlegrande  That's me at the door to the other tower.

At Castello di Montebello

Seeing the castles was the main objective of our visit,  but we also strolled through and had lunch in Bellinzona's town center.  Like Locarno, it was decorated for the holiday.

In Bellinzona's main square

Speaking of Christmas decorations, it's interesting that municipal buildings and town squares are way more decorated than in the U.S., but private houses are way less decorated than in the states.  Maybe that illustrates a more general difference between Swiss and U.S. culture and society.

While in Ticino we rode trains run by their local transit authority.  On our way out of town, Christopher and Matthew wanted a picture of them with the transit authority's initials.  We're not sure why.

Arrivederci Ticino!

Au Revoir Ecole Bilingue

On December 16th, Christopher and Matthew finished their semester at the Ecole Bilingue de la Suisse Romand.

In our last days we tried to capture some of our going-to-school routines, including:

Reading "20 Minutes," a free daily newspaper.  We'd pick up our copy at the metro station and read it as we walked to school.  The value of seeing our boys reading a French newspaper?  Priceless.  They usually just caught up on the latest football (soccer) scores, but still.

Each morning on the way to school we also said hello to Monsieur Vinet, a famous Swiss literary critic and author.

On many days we stopped to marvel at a big tree. We called it the "hugging tree" because when we first saw it we tried (unsuccessfully) to join hands around it.  The circumference of this trunk is 241.5 inches (we measured!).

If we were running a little ahead of schedule, we took a detour to walk through a park near the school. The guys would jump off the retaining wall -- with Mark's help!

We are very thankful to have found the Ecole Bilingue de la Suisee Romand.  It provided a great combination of small class sizes and an environment where the boys could learn French without being fully immersed (meaning mainly that their math classes were in English!).

While in some ways the school was very different than a US elementary school (kids travel from teacher to teacher, they work at their own pace, there is no homework or tests), in other ways it was similar.

One similarity was the end-of-the calendar year celebration.  Like many schools, ours had the children put on a little Holiday performance.  The children, from pre-K to 5th primary, sang holiday songs in English, French, German, Spanish and Latin.

Here are the guys with some of their pals from school.

Christopher and Matthew with Ethan and Paige

Matthew with Milan and Arnaud

Au revoir nos amis!