We have been back in town about 5 days, but I am already to head back to the mountains. Zürich, and the surrounding areas are really pretty, but scenery wise, I do not think I have ever seen anything like the alps before. The closest was Yosemite National Park in California. I do think Eowyn has been glad we are back.
The only time the cat has not been touching us, since we have been back, is when she is sitting on the balcony. She has slept on my arm every night. When we are gone for longer than two or three nights, I have a cat sitter that comes in every single day. The cat sitter spends an hour playing with her, cleaning the litter box, etc. Heck the cat probably gets treated better when we are gone. This time, the cat sitter even brought toys for her to play with at night. :).
Right before we went out of town, I kind of had my first run in with the Medical system. I say kind of, because the Wednesday before we left, I managed to break a tooth. It took a day of calling, but I finally found a Dentist that would see me. The dentist put on a temporary crown the day before we left. I have since been back to the dentist twice, once to get the permanent crown made, and another time for a cleaning. The dentist experience here was no worse than going to a dentist back home. I am thankful for that. I need to break down and get a Dr appointment for a physical. We were going to be doing that stuff back in the US, but since we can’t go back home any time soon… I just need to get it done.
We also had to get new glasses. I don’t remember if I talked about this before our trip or not, but glasses, are apparently a big thing over here. There are many optician offices within a mile of our house. I knew my vision had changed, as I was constantly taking my glasses on and off to focus. Most of the exam was the same as in the US. The only difference is to get a glaucoma test, you actually have to see a doctor. Glaucoma runs in Julie’s family, so I think we will be scheduling our first real doctor visit soon. Like everything glasses are more expensive over here, and there is no such thing as vision insurance at least that is what Amcor Human Resources told Julie when she was looking at insurance.
Julie is still on the two days in the office, two days working from home routine. For the most part Switzerland has Covid under control (at least it seems that way). To put it in perspective with the US, by population if Switzerland was a state, it would be the 11th or 12th largest state. It would fit between New Jersey and Virginia. These states are still having 400-500 new cases per day. Switzerland is on a slight uptick this week, we had been around 20 new cases, but now about 50 new cases per day. Still much less than many places in the US. However, her company recently told her they do not know when things will get back to normal. It was originally scheduled that next week all the employees will be back at work, but they are still taking it slowly. From what I read and see in the news, this is actually very common for companies here. I will say, for the most part, on our vacation outside of the train, there was no sign of Covid restrictions. On the train, it was like watching a game of Simon Says. Julie and I were typically the first ones on the train to don our masks, and if the car was even 1/2 full most people would pull a mask out of their pocket. That was only in the mountains, though. The closer we got to any city on the trains, the less people would worry about masks. I found that to be strange. Restaurant wise, the only place that worried about social distancing the tables, was a small Chinese restaurant in Grindelwald. They had every other table blocked off. In fact, the place could only seat 16 people due to Covid. How they stay in business is beyond me, because especially at dinner time, there is no concept of turning the tables. If you sit down at 6, you might stay there until 10.
Final brain fart: If anyone reading this is going to attend St Jude’s for Team David. Drop me a note with your fund raising page. Especially if you are looking at the Gold Level. Traveling back to the US for one weekend, doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially since we will hopefully be coming home a couple of weeks later for Christmas; so we want to spread our donation money around. If you haven’t signed up yet. There is still time, but I think some of the perqs have expired though. Here is the Team David Fundraising page: https://fundraising.stjude.org/site/TR/Heroes/Heroes?team_id=250200&pg=team&fr_id=121077
The rest of the blog will be pictures. I am going to separate them by day. There may be some duplicates from my earlier posts, but what the hell, very few read this thing anyway!
