Jules Verne Panorama Bar...except, not

Portrait of a sick day.

Last night was crazy-hard.  Alex was up for an hour with a racking cough, and then Ella for a half-hour with a nightmare.  Something to do with Jon Arbuckle being eaten by zombies.  The fallout was a bleary-eyed mommy and a little boy who got to stay home from school for the day.

(Ella was just fine, however. Within 30 seconds of her waking up, the noises of her sawing away at her magic vanishing cabinet resumed.  She's a special girl, all right.)

I suppose the colds were inevitable, having put my kids in a petri dish of 30-odd families for a week and then exposed them to the elements for 6 hours each day.

Alex could not believe his luck.

After a pot of coffee in under an hour, I did my best to be good mommy: we made little houses out of paper, we cooked together ("But I don't have to eat it, right, Mommy?"), and we played games...before I surrendered and parked the boys in front of A Bug's Life.  Well, what good is a sick day if you don't get to veg, just a little.  Before watching his show, Alex rewarded me for a job well-done by gift wrapping a half-franc coin in about six layers of construction paper. A little something for my effort.

Joey's pretty sick, too. I couldn't convince him to take a nap at all.  I was sitting outside his door, listening to his howls of protestation, when Alex came to me, very worried: "Mom, can I try? I'm really good at getting him to stay in bed." Sweet boy.

Ella came home with a pile of homework and was resistant to doing any of it.  By the time Dennis came home, I was ready to do someone great damage. But instead I had to brush my hair and change my clothes.  For the first time since I moved here, I was leaving the house alone.  Without a single kid. Not one!

A helpful friend had a put me in touch with a British work colleague who's lived here for 8 months, promising us that we'd like each other. And I was grateful, because a girl needs a friend or two.  But, all the same, I'm not so extroverted, and I felt a little silly, like I was being set up on a blind date. Dennis jokingly promised to call with an "emergency" if things went horribly awry.

The girl I was meeting chose the Jules Verne Panorama Bar, in downtown Zürich, because one of her friends recommended it.  So I made my way up, marveling at how pretty Zürich looks when I'm not focusing on the constant threats to my children's safety. 

I suppose I'd recommend the bar for the view alone, although that's all I really got to assess about the place. There was a crush of bodies that I found absurd on a Tuesday night, and many of them seemed to be American.  Well, at least the misogynistic trio who were closest to me at the reception desk were.  Way to represent, gentlemen.

I'll admit I was feeling a little gloomy as I waited for this potential friend, groaning to myself that she was probably as posh as the bar. She probably even took the time to blow-dry her hair this morning. Oh, god. What would we talk about?

See? It really was like a blind date.

Except, unlike blind dates, this worked out.  A friendly face finally caught my eye, and it was she, suggesting we leave this ridiculously crowded bar at once. And we found a little pub with big beers on tap and had a refreshing conversation.  Dennis teased me, too, on my pride for having closed the place out.  Granted, it closed at 9:00 PM, but still...check me out!