Our new Swiss Life!

Well, its been awhile since our last blog entry. We have gone through many changes since our Vancouver days. The end of December was a whirlwind as Johanna finished exams, Ben worked everyday, moving our belongings into storage, painting our apartment for the new renters, finishing Christmas shopping and packing for the holidays as well as for our new venture in Switzerland! We made it home to Frontier on Dec. 24th and enjoyed ourselves there with family and friends until Jan.3rd. Then we made our way to Calgary for more family time, skiing/boarding in Sunshine, and Mike and Tamara’s wedding on January 6th. Then two days later we boarded a plane with a send-off from our family to Switzerland. And so we have been here a grand total of 8 days. We live in a town called Liestal just outside of Basel. It is a quaint little place with rolling green hills, some cobblestone streets, and ringing church bells. We have already discovered the amazing yogurt! Get this: Latte flavored, Mocha, chocolate, etc (Why don’t we have those in Canada!?!!? Really…?) Bread is insanely good, so many different varieties….not like Wonder Bread you can squish into an itty bitty ball. And the cherry on top is we already have a car! It’s a burgundy1993 Ford Fiesta. With a HUGE 1.0 Litre engine, with a staggering power-house 50 horsepower motor! (for comparison, your average “grandma’s car” in Canada has about 200hp) Its hilarious….we have to gear down to 2nd to make it up any incline! We are trying to figure out how it might leap its way to Rome with us. But it’s free and good on gas and we love it. We would like to give him (Ben decided it was like a little boy) a name…any suggestions?? We have adjusted surprisingly well to all this change…even Johanna enduring her sinus infection, which caused her some unpleasant discomforts and emotional breakdowns. Thankfully life here is like a small town and the “sinus specialist” opened his office just for her…and his secretary will call sometime to have us come in and pay. Things seem to be on the honor system. As for where we live: we are renting a room in a huge 3-story 100-year old mansion. It was actually supposed to be torn down a while back but a young fellow here has bought it and has been doing renovations (obviously not our room yet! ;-) But rent is super-cheap, only $260/month including all utilities! And if you know anything about the living cost in Switzerland, that is an incredible deal. So far he’s done a pretty good job renovating and its quite cozy. Five other young people live here besides us….mostly students. It’s a little strange for us to go from being so independent to living in community like this. But we shall see how it goes… Other than that life is going pretty well as we continue to adjust to our new life here! We have started an intensive German course with a private tutor named Manuela. She is amazing and is so helpful. We meet three times a week for 2.5 hrs, so hopefully we will continue to learn at a decent pace. This is especially important for Ben because he has other filming jobs dependant upon his ability to speak the language! And another thing to note: you should see how expensive fast food is here! McDonald’s Happy Meal is $7.00 and a regular adult’s Big Mac Meal is $13.00 CRAZY! (Ben is depressed) Well, goodbye for now, take care, come visit us or just mail us a box of KD! Our new address is: Erzenbergstrasse 71 4410 Liestal, Switzerland.