Items related to Living Among the Swiss
This book provides a primer for those seeking actually or vicariously to adjust to Swiss culture and society. It discusses everything Swiss from age and sex discrimination to xenophobia, with a particular focus on questionable Swiss banking and investment practices, including some which would be illegal in the U.S. and U.K. It also provides a travel guide to the cantons of Zürich, the Bernese Alps, Central Switzerland, Graubünden or Grisons, and Wallis or Valais, with especial emphasis on skiing, hiking, and fine dining.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
A satiric jewel of a memoir that captures the beauty and peacefulness of Switzerland as well as the glacial stolidity of many of its inhabitants. -- Amazon.com Buying Information, June 6, 2000: Review by Rita Kasper, wife of a Swiss dealer in kitchen furniture.
This witty author has a strong background in Latin and a large English vocabulary. I learned much about places in Switzerland which I thought I had known. -- Amazon.com Buying Information: June 6, 2000 review by Dr. Vollrat Von Deichmann, a professor of forestry who taught at Arizona State University.
From the Author:
This witty author has a strong background in Latin and a large English vocabulary. I learned much about places in Switzerland which I thought I had known. -- Amazon.com Buying Information: June 6, 2000 review by Dr. Vollrat Von Deichmann, a professor of forestry who taught at Arizona State University.
Switzerland is notorious for being 'ein verschlossenes Volk,' a closed society. You can live here for twenty years and still feel like an observer or a tourist rather than a participant. Often you will be made to feel that you do not exist or are invisible, like a little boy standing at the edge of a schoolyard watching the trams back up and turn around at the end of the line while a few yards away his classmates play a boisterous game of 'baseball' with a tennis ball, oblivious to his feelings of rejection upon not being chosen for either team. If only he had been the one child who remembered to bring a ball to school that day! He would keep it in his pocket until the end of the recess and then take it out and bounce it ostentatiously to show the others that it is he who rejects them. But in Switzerland it is never your ball or your field. As Paul Erdman notes in his book 'The Swiss Account' it is impossible to get close to the Swiss - especially when they deliberately speak their local dialect rapidly so that you cannot understand what they are saying. Do not expect to be invited to socialize with colleagues or, if you chance upon them in a social context, to be introduced to their spouses. In eight years of living here I have been invited to Swiss homes only three or four times.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherMinerva Press
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 0754104893
- ISBN 13 9780754104896
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages174
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want