Episode 4 - Why I Hate the Swiss

Let me just say it:  I hate the Swiss.  I own it and I won’t sugarcoat it.  Hate is not too strong of a word, that is how much I dislike them.  I suppose you want to know why, so I’ll tell you.  It’s because not a single Swiss person has ever been nice to me.  Ever.  They are terrible people and should be forced to live without electricity and indoor plumbing.

Let me start by saying that I am talking about Swiss people, not Switzerland the country.  Switzerland itself is quite beautiful.  Nestled between France, Germany, Austria and Italy (let’s not forget Lichtenstein), it is a nexus of culture and natural beauty.  There are the magnificent Alps running across the south of the country. To the north of Bern, there are lush, green forests.  And between Geneva and Lausanne, there are glittering bodies of water.  For sheer natural wonder, it is hard to find a place that makes all of it as accessible as Switzerland.  The country produces amazing time pieces and even lays claim to some pretty good chocolate.  So how is it, with all this going for it, it is home to such assholes?   You would think that with all of this great stuff in their backyard, they’d be the nicest people on the planet.  And, look, I’m someone who assumes the BEST in everyone.  I give EVERYONE the benefit of the doubt.  You have to work pretty hard for me to say “Ehhhh, don’t really like that guy,” let alone make me actively hate you.  But you gotta hand it to the Swiss, they have pulled it off.

I admit, I am partially to blame.  I should have put up my guard from the start based on the signs that were in plain sight.  First of all, let’s look at Swiss bank accounts, which are anonymous places to discreetly store large sums of money.  I’m as much into privacy as the next guy.  But why is it that the Swiss are SO good at it?  What are they trying to hide?  I get it, it’s not their money.  But they’re out there saying to every shady diplomat, minor despot and arms dealer, “Ach, but of course, we are happy to hold your ill-gotten funds.”  Where is the guilt by association here?  And without putting too fine a point on it, I’d ask you to look into their role in World War II stolen art trafficking.  All that said, I never had a problem with the Swiss banking system or their laissez-faire attitude toward art provenance.  All I’m saying is that I should have been more aware.

So what fuels my disdain for the Swiss?  I worked in Europe in the late 1980’s.  I was based in Frankfurt, which was an ideal place from which to travel to pretty much anywhere across Europe.  I landed in February, and for the next 40 days or so, never saw the sun.  Life was a constant grey, much like the black-and-white part of The Wizard of Oz.  You know the beginning of the movie where everyone is in Kansas and Dorothy has not yet gone over the rainbow?  That was Frankfurt in late-winter.  Add to that, we were working 80+ hour weeks, so it wouldn’t have mattered if it was sunny, raining, snowing or hailing.  We didn’t get a break until mid-March.  Now, before you say, “Oh well, you were in a terrible state of mind at that time.  It’s no wonder you dislike the Swiss.  You’d have found fault with anyone.”  Not true.  I was having the time of my life.  It was my first time outside of the United States and I was loving all of it.  Everything was different and interesting.  Even the stuff that wasn’t so great (for example, German food) was still fun. It was an experience of which I had dreamed for a long time.  So, when we got a long weekend off and some of the guys put together a trip to Zurich, I was psyched!  Off to Switzerland I went, ready to indulge in the local beers, the local cuisine and hopefully a Swiss Miss (“Yes, Mom, I mean the hot chocolate.  What did you think I meant?”).

We arrived early on a Friday, checked into our hotel and immediately went out to explore the city.  We were located in the heart of Altstadt, the Old Town, right on the Limmat River.  Being a kid from the Chicago suburbs, I found the Medieval architecture fascinating.  Frankfurt was pretty much levelled during World War II, so much of what we saw back in Germany at that time was pretty new.  It was different from the US, but it didn’t have the character or gravitas of what we saw in Zurich.  We wandered in and out of bars, enjoying the local beers (Feldschlösschen and Hopfenperle) and soaking up the ambiance.  Our bartenders and waiters weren’t the warmest folks we’d ever met, but we didn’t really care.  We chalked it up to them having a bad day and sampled the local fare.  Little did we know, things were about to go south. 

It was dinner time and we were hungry.  The five of us walked into a small pizzeria on a main square.  We sat down and the waiter brought over menus.  If you have traveled Europe, you are familiar with how their menus differ from ours in the US.  In the US, there are usually a few specialty pizzas and a “build your own” option, for which you select what you want from a list of toppings available.  This was not the case at this little establishment.  Across two pages of the menu were no less than forty pizzas, representing almost every combination of toppings offered.  There was cheese.  Cheese and sausage.  Cheese, sausage and mushrooms.  Cheese, sausage and peppers.  Cheese and pepperoni.  Cheese, pepperoni and mushrooms.  There was even one that had cheese, sausage, onions, mushrooms, peppers and capers (who puts fucking capers on a pizza?).  You get the point. 

I perused the list, reading through it twice.  Nowhere could I find a pizza with only cheese, sausage, mushrooms and onions.  A lot of pizzas had two or three of the four.  Some had my desired toppings plus a variety of pizza undesirables (Carrots?  Come on).  But apparently you don’t combine only mushrooms, onions and sausage on Swiss pizza.  No big deal, right?  I can just ask them to put some mushrooms and onions on a sausage pizza and call it a day.  Easy. 

Our waiter came by. In near flawless German, I made my request.  “Guten Nachmittag. Darf ich bitte eine Pizza mit Käse, Wurst, Zwiebeln und Pilzen haben?”  (translation: “Good afternoon.  May I please have a pizza with cheese, sausage, onions and mushrooms?”).  You’ll note that in addition to making the effort to speak in the local tongue, I was socially formal and polite.  Shit, even my intra-sentence punctuation came through with my near-perfect accent (why we have to capitalize vegetables, I don’t know, but I spoke accordingly. Just sayin’). 

The waiter looked up from his pad with a frown.  He looked over the menu.  I could see he was looking through the list of forty pizzas.  He read through the list twice.  Then he turned back to me and said, “Is not possible.” 

I was a bit taken aback. “What is not possible?” I asked. 

“This pizza, is not possible,” came the reply. 

“How can it be not possible?  You have all of the ingredients.  All you need to do is put them on the pizza.”

“Is not possible”

“So, I can have a pizza with cheese, sausage and mushrooms OR I can have a pizza with cheese, sausage and onions…”

“Ja, Pizza dreizehn oder Pizza achtzehn” he said, pointing at the menu (“yes, pizza thirteen or pizza eighteen”). 

I paused, absorbing this information, searching for the logic.  “I can even have a pizza with cheese, sausage, peppers, onions, mushrooms and capers…”

“Pizza zweiundzwanzig” (“pizza twenty two”)

  “…but if I simply want a pizza with cheese, sausage, onions and mushrooms…”

“Is not possible,” came the pre-emptive reply. 

It started to dawn on me, I wasn’t being told my pizza wasn’t available or that it wasn’t how they prepared their pizza.  I was being told it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility!  Think about it, that’s a pretty strong statement.  “Hello customer.  Yes, I understand what you’re requesting.  I regret to inform you it is not possible.  Yes, I understand you are not asking me to spin gold out of straw or have the French manufacture a quality automobile. It is simply not possible in this universe.” The fact that they had not documented this particular combination of ingredients on the menu of forty-plus pizzas made the provision of this pizza, in the mind of the Swiss man, an impossibility.  The only thing more rigid than this Swiss man was the stick that was up his ass.

I took a minute to consider this strange approach to customer service.  At this point, I was resigned to simply order Pizza 22 (properly capitalized in the middle of the sentence) and pick off the fucking capers.  I never got my chance.

While I was re-evaluating my options, the waiter turned to my friend Matt for his order. 

“I would like a pizza with cheese, sausage, onions and mushrooms please,” he said with a perfectly straight face.  The waiter took a brief glance at the menu and then looked at Matt.  He was not amused.

“I have said already, this pizza is not possible”

“But you have cheese, sausage, onions….”  Matt never got to finish his sentence.  The waiter turned on his heel and walked away.  I’d be lying if I said we all didn’t think it was pretty funny.  We thought it was funny, that is, until a gentleman in a suit came up to our table. He introduced himself as the manager.

“You must leave now,” he said. 

Our waiter came up behind the manager with a party of three couples in tow.  They had already given our damn table away.

“You must leave, we cannot serve you,” said the manager in his gravest voice, reserved for what I am sure are the direst of restaurant emergencies.  “We need this table for another party.”

We were getting kicked out of the restaurant!  In hindsight, we should have stood our ground.  I’m pretty certain the five of us could have taken the three couples, the manager and the waiter (two of the women were in heels, they would have been worthless in a brawl).  What would have been smarter, we should have ordered pizza twenty-two (fucking capers and all) and not given the wily Swiss the opening they clearly wanted.  Alas, we had fallen into the trap and we were so surprised at this turn of events that we stood up and left. 

As we walked out, we were talking about where else we could eat.  Matt looked up and said, “I’ve got a taste for pizza.  How about you guys?”  How could we not crack up?  We ended up at some Italian restaurant near Beethovenstrasse, feasting on a bottomless bowl of spaghetti.  There were no capers.

I want to be very clear on this next point:  Even after the Zurich Pizza Confrontation, I still did not hate the Swiss.  Though I was a young, inexperienced traveler, I did not simply assume that things should go exactly how I thought they would go in the United States.  Hey, I was a visitor in their country.  I knew I wasn’t going to starve and now I had a great story about the warmth and flexibility of the Swiss people to share with my friends back home.  No, I was still OK with them.  But a month later I was forced to draw the line.

Early April came and we planned a ski trip to St Moritz.  St Moritz is a beautiful resort located in the Engadin Valley in the eastern part of the country.  It is world class, not only for its terrain but also its luxury.  In other words, we had no business being there.  Not that our money wasn’t as good as anyone else’s.  We booked lodging in the village, we ate and drank at the finest places (No pizzas.  We had learned our lesson).  The reason we didn’t belong is because some of the guys couldn’t ski for shit.  We should have been at a much smaller mountain, with much better access to bunny hills and green runs.  I’m not an elitist, in fact I’m the exact opposite.  I believe the only way you learn and improve is to challenge yourself.  In skiing, they say, “If you aren’t falling, you’re not getting any better.”  But I have to admit, we probably could have found a resort more suited to the skills of our group.

That said, we were having a great time.  The scenery was incredible, the snow was soft and the runs were as challenging as you’ll find anywhere.  I was thoroughly enjoying myself.  On our third and last day on the mountain, I was taking it easy.  Matt was new to skiing, so he was sticking to the easier runs.  I was perfectly fine with that, as my legs were spent from a couple days of shredding.  I don’t recall the name of the run we were doing or where it was on the mountain.  What I do remember is it was served with a T-bar, not a lift.  For you non-skiers, a T-bar can be a bit tricky.  With a lift, you move up in line, a big bench hanging from a wire comes behind you, scoops you up and off you go up the mountain, somewhere between twenty to thirty feet in the air.  With a T-bar, you and a partner remain standing and a large, upside-down T comes sweeping along and is placed behind your legs.  You’re then towed up the mountain, never leaving the ground. The trick is you have to maintain your balance and keep your skis steady while you are pulled up the hill. 

As I mentioned, Matt was a new skier and wasn’t so good keeping his skis parallel.  I was partnered with him on the T-bar and we got off fine.  We were chatting as we moved and I told him to just stay relaxed.  If you tense up, you’re more likely to fall.  We had gone maybe one hundred feet when Matt started to lose it.  The tips of his skis crossed and he overcompensated in trying to get them straight.  The next thing I know he’s dragging his right leg behind him and holding onto the bar for dear life.  I’m watching this train wreck and trying to keep my cool.  Matt loses his right ski and tries to steady himself by grabbing my arm.  That was pretty much the end of us.  We collapse into a pile, cracking up at the situation. 

Because the T-bar does not stop, we had been dragged another fifty or hundred feet before we crashed.  Matt’s ski was about fifty feet downhill from where we had fallen.  Now, everywhere else in the world I have skied, people will go out of their way to help you if you wipe out.  Literally everywhere.  In general, people are kind and friendly.  BUT NOT THE SWISS!  Oh no, not the fucking Swiss.  I called downline, asking for some help from the other skiers riding the bar.  A guy picked up Matt’s ski and I thought, “Cool, a little help.”  Imagine my surprise when, instead of handing us the ski as he passed us, he throws it to the other side of the lift and, in heavily Swiss-accented English, sneers at us, “Learn how to ski”.  Can you believe that?  Keep in mind, we weren’t inconveniencing anyone.  No one was being held up in any way.  We were laying on the ground, out of the way.  But this Swiss man felt it necessary to not only pass judgment, but also be a total dick in the process.  That was a bridge too far for me.  Except for this jerk-off, I was OK giving these cold-hearted, art thieving assholes a pass.  Not after this, though.  Fool me with pizza twenty-two, shame on me.  Throw my buddy’s ski away, shame on you and your whole nationality.  The Swiss suck.