Strandbad Mythenquai

When the construction workers showed up in the street outside our front window this morning, I felt very sorry for them.  They were out there on one of the hottest days of the year, pouring hot, sticky asphalt. For this hot work, they were wearing the summer uniform of the Swiss construction workers:  neon-orange short-shorts, and nothing else. I guess they don't plan on spatters.

But I felt sorry for us, too: with the noise and the smell, there was no way we could open up any windows for a breeze this morning.  We had to leave.

What I really wanted to do was walk a block away to our pool and sit there all morning and afternoon, but Alex, with his knee, just can't be in the water.  So I came up with a sort of a compromise: for ages I'd been wanting to visit one of the beaches on the Zürichsee, Strandbad Mythenquai. Usually when we visit sandy beaches, Alex sticks to the shore and digs in the sand, so I hoped he wouldn't mind too terribly much if he wasn't allowed to swim there.

I was saving this trip for summer vacation because, although it isn't that far away, there's no fast way to get there. Our trip had to be on a day when we had as much time to spend on the journey as on the destination.

On the tram ride there, I was making conversation with the kids, and I asked Ella what her most- and least-favorite part of Switzerland.  She had an immediate answer: "Well, my favorite part of Switzerland is the same as my least favorite part of Switzerland: I've become a completely different person here.  It's like...I'm not afraid of anything anymore: I feel fearless. And now I know what's real."

Actually, I was just looking to find out what her favorite playground was, but this was interesting, too. I asked her explain what she meant by "knowing what's real."

"Well, I think my imagination has faded...maybe thirty percent! I just don't believe in as many things as I used to."  And then she started to go into her doubts as to the existence of Santa Claus, so I had to quickly derail the conversation: two other little pairs of ears were listening very carefully.

Fortunately, Ella has always had imagination to spare, so I doubt that she'll miss that thirty percent very much. After all, this is the little girl who spent most of her kindergarten year writing nightly letters to fairies and prosthelytizing to her classmates about how those fairies really were real.  She used to weep helplessly at bedtime sometimes, overwrought by the idea that she might have to grow up, and that this might happen before she got a chance to meet Peter Pan.

Curious that she'd put "knowing what's real" in both the "good" and "bad" category, and thinking of those melodramatic spells, I asked Ella how she liked growing up. "Oh, I think it's really good!  I like being really responsible. And I have all this money now!" And she grinned, patting her purse containing her little dragon hoard.

Because I'd let the kids bring their scooters, there was a bit of a shuffle at the end of our tram ride.  And Joey had started getting drowsy in the heat: he didn't want to get up from his comfortable chair.  Also, the tram was really crowded with vacationing kids and their mothers, so I didn't have a lot of room to maneuver. After I'd extracted our stuff from behind all of the other strollers and kids that were blocking us, I kind of threw the stroller and Joey's scooter out the door and then grabbed at Joey, shouting to Ella and Alex over my shoulder to get their things and get off the tram.

But oh, my really-responsible Ella: she was watching me and was worried that Joey was going to get stuck alone on the train, and so she came back on to try to help me get him up and off.  I didn't realize this, though, so when I finally got my puddle of a toddler off the tram and did my head count I realized I was short one: a head that appeared behind the glass of the now closed door of the tram, with a stricken expression.

There's always a moment between when the tram doors lock and when the tram has pulled away, and I used that moment to scream as loudly as I could.  And all of the moms on the inside of the tram joined my screams: thank goodness, the tram driver couldn't help but hear us and stopped and unlocked the door.  Tram stops are just too brief: I think getting separated from a kid on a tram is a nightmare that every mother shares, and I've coached all the kids over and over on what to do if it ever happens. (Stay on the tram and don't get off and wait for Mommy!)

We caught our breath and hugged each other at Bürkliplatz, where there always seems to be something fun going on.  Today we were surprised with the Concours d'Elégance Festival, a car show.  It made me really nervous to have the kids walking around with their metal scooters next to all of that shiny chrome, so we admired the cars from a distance. It was awfully cute, though, watching Joey walking among the cars, surveying them, nodding approvingly.

And then we made our slow way up the shore of the lake to Mythenquai beach. Really, I was the only one who was slow, lumbering behind my scooter gang with the stroller and sand toys and beach blanket.  I know I've said this before, but I really love watching my kids scoot together, following each other in a long, weaving line.  I find it unspeakably cute.

The kids made frequent pauses to let me catch up, watching the birds on the lake, especially the adolescent swans and their mothers. The kids couldn't believe that those huge grey birds were the babies they'd watched only a couple months ago, commenting on how quickly the little ones grew up.  I could sort of empathize with the mother swan's situation.

Joey liked watching the swans especially, and had curled up, crosslegged, on the bank, watching them.  When I tried to get him back on his scooter, he shook his head: "No. I wanna to stay here and watch."

An older woman was watching us watch the birds, and she approached me with something like disbelief.  "Have you really no bread for them?"

A word about the bread: the sliced sandwich bread that they sell in Switzerland, usually with a picture of an American flag on the bag, is dry and tasteless.  Rather, everyone buys their loaves fresh-baked each morning: you can get these sliced if you want to, but we generally don't because we don't want the bread to go stale immediately and we like breaking off chunks to smear with butter. Dennis often says that the Butterzopf bread (which is a lot like Challah) will be the only food he misses when we leave Zürich. But of course those fresh, preservative-free loaves dry out really quickly, and you usually end up with a little dry rock of a heel at the end of any given loaf.

Moms are always pulling these little stale chunks out of their purses for the kids to feed the birds, which is so odd for, coming from a city where, at most shores, feeding the birds is forbidden.  And, of course, I've had it drilled into me for years that bread is bad for birds.  But here, apparently, neglecting to bring bread for the birds is considered carelessness.  The woman shook her head and handed Alex a handful of the crumbs that she'd been scattering for the birds. And Alex regarded those crumbs and then took a nibble, which made the lady's jaw drop.  Not only do I not feed the birds, but apparently I also don't feed my children.

We made it to the beach soon after, but the kids were distracted by the playground and the toddler wading pool.  Alex had thought he'd be okay with not swimming, but he was kind of sad when he noticed how much fun the wading area was, with little waterfalls and stepping stones.  Ella took Joey into the water, while I stayed at the edge with Alex, keeping him happy playing games.

The toddler pool

One of the playgrounds

Lunch break

While they were playing, Ella made friends with another 8-year-old girl from New York who was visiting for the summer.  The two of them took off for the afternoon, mostly building a huge sand fort. Despite the heat, Ella was too excited by her new English-speaking friend to go swimming much in the water, which was too bad, because the lake looked really fun. They had a couple of docks with diving boards and a large inflated trampoline floating twenty meters from the shore.

I think poor Alex would join me in saying that I hope we can go back some weekend with Dennis so that we can really swim.  Alex did get his ankles wet, at least.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that Joey fell asleep almost immediately on our trip home. We took our time on the way back, too, stopping for ice cream and to feed the swans some of the bread we'd saved from our hotdogs. When in Zürich. (They don't do hot dog buns here, either; instead, they take half a baguette, hollow out the center by impaling it on a hot-dog shaped rod, fill the hole with ketchup or mayonnaise, and then push the hotdog in.)

Ice cream break

We took so much time getting home that we were only there for the length of a cartoon before it was time to leave again, this time for Alex's 4:00 doctor's appointment. He had to go to a pediatrician to make sure his knee wasn't infected and to check that his bursa sac still looked okay. And all was well.

I spent the evening doing some back-to-school shopping with Susannah, which seems a little silly since the kids have only been off school for four weeks.  We had to rush to get everything done before the stores closed at 8:00, when we suddenly found ourselves with nothing to do.  We wandered around the city for a little bit until the heat got the best of me: I got thirsty, and got it into my head that I really wanted some of the fresh-pressed cider that I'd seen advertised at our local farm.

Susannah noted that going to the farm at night, without the kids, might be a little weird, but she's an incredibly good sport, and so she didn't make too much fun of me for my cider cravings.

My foods-I'll-miss list is a little longer than Dennis's, and fresh milk, and now fresh cider, are right up there at the top.