“I’ve booked the flight to Zurich,” my husband said several weeks in advance of his interview for what I figured would be an onsite job offer.
The last time my husband left the country for business-related travel, he’d gone to Japan, Kobe’s helicopter crashed, and COVID locked the doors for a year. I don’t have positive associations with his international travel. But he’d not traveled to Switzerland.
November being holiday insanity time, adding international travel that had nothing to do with the holidays had the potential to throw us into an elfish spin. The plan required Husband to take a very short trip to Switzerland in order to return home from his Monday interview before Thanksgiving Thursday that same week. He’d spend a few hours at Heathrow before catching his flight to Zurich. Leave on November 18th, a Saturday, and return on the 21st, a Tuesday. All he needed to be prepared before taking off was a fitting wardrobe for an interview.
After laying out a pair of royal blue Bonobos, a blue-accented white dress shirt, and his orange and blue tie (trust me, this works), I pulled out his sweater options. Average highs in Zurich in November range within the mid-40s. (November in San Diego: about 70.) I held a camel half-zip up to the outfit.
“Wear this sweater with a tie?” he asked in disbelief.
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me. Incredulous.
I took this as a thrown glove. “Trying to find out if I’ll cave in and say ‘No’?” I tested his resolve for a duel. “Yeah, really.”
“No,” he said. “I just [insert vocal hedge and tennis match head rotations between the shirt with tie and the sweater] I don’t think I can wear that. I’ll feel weird about it.”
I picked up my proverbial glove, contemplating how much battle I wanted to pursue. The sweater worked. He’d look great in it. In other circumstances, I may have pushed him to wear it, but for a job interview, I wouldn’t dare. I’d already picked the combination I had because I knew he liked it and felt good in it. He may not be willing to do my 90 seconds of Power Pose in the bathroom beforehand, but I can dress him so that he’ll be confident.
“Okay,” I said. “But you don’t have a coat that goes with it.”
“I know. Are you okay with going shopping for one?”
For the record: I hate shopping. Hate it. But I can handle it and am willing to do it if I have a specific goal in mind.
“Sure,” I told him.
“Can we get, more like, a blazer than a coat coat?”
“I assume so. It depends on what’s in stock, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t carry something like that all the time.”
So the evening before the flight, his attire, including a new camel blazer — no elbow patches despite my nerdish affinity for them, was packed. I had no idea what time he planned to leave in the morning because I planned to be asleep through his early morning departure. At least the departure from our home.
On the morning of November 18th, Husband left while I slept. His alarm went off and I didn’t whine or anything. I just prayed for quiet and a return to sleep.
I believe in answered prayers. Here’s my evidence. I received a text from Husband that morning at 5:53am. “Somehow left my e-ink tablet at home. Sigh. I’ll be fine, but I had hoped to use it to brainstorm [prep work for the interview].” There’s no record of a response from me for two hours — so either, I ignored him or I slept through the message. Now I might take a good ten or fifteen minutes to respond to something I don’t want to when I’m not busy, but if I’m available, I’m not going to sit on an unanswered text.
This is our actual exchange via text that morning:
You may be able to tell something didn’t make it into this written exchange. And that something was the request that I deliver the tablet to Husband at the airport because his flight was delayed.
Before I could carry out my plans to grumble in an empty car about driving all the way to the airport when I hate the airport and crowds of people, and the general self-importance of everyone needing to get to their destination on time to make their lives operate or they’ll keel over like a dead rat, Husband called. His flight had been delayed further. With so much time until the new departure, he’d just come home and get it himself.
My angst averted. His turned up with an anxious simmer.
He was home when the flight was cancelled and began arranging new travel plans that could get him to Switzerland as soon as possible. Although he left that night, there was no way he’d make a Monday meeting with the new arrangement. The new schedule required that he stay overnight in London, not landing in Zurich until Tuesday.
After much toing and froing on his part, Husband had a new plan. Interview pushed to Tuesday. Keeping some elements from the old plan, he still thought it a good idea to rock the interview with a camel jacket instead of sweater and tie.
Both plans: ☑️☑️. He flew to London, stayed overnight, bought himself a scarf because it was even colder than expected, departed and landed in Zurich, interviewed for several hours on extreme jet lag, and then turned around and began heading back to the States. By golly, there was turkey to be consumed and thanks to be given; no time could be wasted.
Two items remained to be figured after Husband’s Switzerland trip: when would the offer come? and how much would it be? Zurich, afterall, is one of the most expensive cities in the world.
We are not wealthy relative to the area we live, but we live in a relatively wealthy area, and, looking into the cost of living in Zurich, I was floored to discover it would be more expensive than the Southern California metro area we called home. More than that, as of January 2024, Zurich was listed by Architectural Digest as the most expensive city in the world to live in.
Great. There goes any plan of total retirement from the working world.
In the days after the interview and after the Thanksgiving holiday, my husband and I, expecting an offer but also on vacation, passively researched life in Switzerland.
We discovered the number of official languages. We decided our buddy Roger Federer (Rog, as we call him), would be happy to show us around. We looked into what we would need to bring in as a salary to live in Zurich, or if we could make it outside of Zurich, assuming Rog didn’t take us up on our offer to let him pay our living expenses. We crunched numbers considering if we sold our cars — factored in a lack of car insurance payments. Then what would we need?
And we dreamed.
If we moved to Zurich, we could go see the areas both our families are from that aren’t too far away. Bern for him. Milan for me. Go back to Lake Keszthely, where I spent a summer teaching English. See Champions League matches because they aren’t on in the middle of the day while we’re at work or school. Go to Champions League matches. Speak German. See Liverpool play! Practice our French. Hike in the Alps! Each chocolate and pastries. Kayak on Lake Zurich. And, for me, perhaps, stop teaching.
The dreams began by the bucket load, pouring down upon us throughout the day and splashing over us when we talked at night or early in the morning. After a week of not hearing anything from the company, the steady downpour decreased to a light stream, only splashing over into dialogue every so often. After a couple of weeks, it turned into a trickle that sounded a lot like—
“Maybe it didn’t go as well as I thought it did.”
“Maybe. It’s so weird that they’d fly you all the way out there, though. I mean, unless you bombed it, I would have expected that you’d hear from them by now.”
“I know. Me, too. I really thought it went well.”
And doubts began filling our drained buckets.
Husband was checking his email every morning when he woke up, looking to receive something during the Swiss work day. Before coffee, before the covers were off, before he was vertical, he’d check his phone. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Morning after morning. So he stopped checking first thing.
The holidays hold a sharp turn between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Christmas was only about a week away. My classroom had the same old look to it, no special decor, no extra scent in the final week of school in December. On that weekday morning, like any good teacher, I was counting down the days to vacation and wishing a fast forward button would appear on my desk where my computer mouse sat, already tired from use with the morning bell yet to ring.
A ringing sounded. I checked the clock. Still before eight. It’s not the school bell. A vibration followed the ring, demanding my attention. Ah ha! My phone!
HUSBAND CALLING
Why is my husband calling me before eight in the morning?
A flash of a thought: “It could be Switzerland.” It appeared then fell into the darkness without a flicker.
“Oh, please don’t tell me one of our kids is sick again,” I thought, as we’d seemed to run through at least a week-long illness for each one. I didn’t want to cycle through it again, now that it seemed it’d run its course.
I took a deep breath to prepare myself and slid the green button on my phone screen. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey. Are you sitting?”
Oh, Good God. This is bad, bad, bad. “Yes….” I said and took a deep breath to handle whatever deluge followed.
“We got an offer from Switzerland.”
“Yesss!!!” I whisper-shouted into a room of 34 empty desks and clenched a fist as though I’d scored a goal in stoppage time to win the game.
“We’re going to Switzerland.”
“Yessssss!”
“Do you want details?”
“Not yet. We’ll chat after school. Just read me the acceptance sentence.”
Husband read it to me and said, “Okay, now this feels reel.”
Of course we wanted to go to Swtizerland. We’d begun to entertain its plausibility, but with the details to be able to figure out how realistic, how practical, plausible was, we felt thrilled and overwhelmed. How does someone make an informed decision about moving to a place where almost everything is unknown? And we were on a 10 day deadline. After the offer came through, we had until just after Christmas to weigh its viability. They expected an answer by December 29th.
Without kids, that answer is easy: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! With little kids, that answer is a deliberating yes; they’re acquiring language so fast at that age, the language barriers they have as they land in Switzerland due to their Americanness will dissolve by the time we get through customs. With tweens and teenagers, hmph. This will be complicated.
Kids, at all ages, are vicious. If we take our teenage boys to Switzerland, where they do not speak the language, kids will get made fun of — And, if we stay Stateside, they’ll get made fun of for different reasons because, well, kids are vicious. Sometimes cliches are true. However, being foreigners will certainly force some empathy on them, and humility for that matter. Of course, they’d also learn the language. Eventually. It may take longer than for a 7-year-old because their brains are more developed, because the language mastery a (reader/)teenager has over a child is alarming, but the adolescent brain is undergoing a major construction project. — Hmm, with construction already begun, it seems like a good time to make changes to the site plan, upgrade the appliances, perhaps. Instead of gas, electric. Instead of English, German.
If only it were so simple. The kids being the primary concern, Husband and I wanted to speak with someone at the schools they might attend — and discover the options of where they could go. Switzerland’s education system is not the same as the American. The first thing we researched was the option for the kids to attend school in English and discovered that opportunity translated to attending American schools in Zurich. Such institutions are private and therefore require a tuition. There are several options, each with its own rate. Assuming openings for our sons, they could continue an American-styled education. For approximately $40,000.
Per year.
Per kid.
Yowzahs!
That bit of information narrowed things down a bit. Either the kids manage to attend the free public schools without major detriment to their learning or their educational prospects or we do not go to Switzerland.
The guiding question became: can the boys make their way either to university in Europe or back to the U.S. for college by going through the Swiss system of education?
What language are they even taught in?
For that, we got a relatively quick answer. Public school instruction in the Canton of Zurich (sort of like a county if not a state) is conducted in German, high German. —Oh yeah, remember all the language talk from the last post? We’re not done with it. Let’s revive the spirit language of Swiss German. The one Swiss kids grow up speaking but has no grammatical structure. Since you cannot use an unwritten language in formal academic instruction that includes reading, writing, and arithmetic, Swiss schools do not operate in Swiss German (at least not once the kids can write a sentence). That’ll have to be normal German.
Screeching halt here for my Marketing/PR buddies. Normal German? Making Swiss German…ab-normal? Oh, no. No, no, no, no. This cannot be. We will not call German normal and Swiss ab-normal. Swiss German is spirit; it is effervescent, formless, free. Abnormal is a far too negative term of such loftiness. We will call that German form of German “Hochdeutsch” and we will use Sweizerdeutsch.
[Note: The only verifiable fact in the paragraph above is that the German used in education is called Hochdeutsch, literal translation is “High German.” Don’t worry Marketing friends, I know, I know. What I do not know know is how that “Hoch” (high) part identifies this type of German as Standard German. I know this, too: standard is boring, dull, basic, sleepytime. I’ll take my VW with the upgrades, please, not just what comes standard.]
I’m sure I’ve lost you by now with my word nerdery and ability to get lost in the possibilities that haven’t any merit to them but sound kind of fun to me. Let me give it to you straight: If we go to Switzerland, the boys would need to learn German — and learn their other subjects through German. They would probably need Swiss German, too, for the playground. Oh, and Swiss students start taking French around 5th grade. They’ll need to learn that as well.
This was mounting up. Perhaps I could do one thing I’ve been avoiding since I stepped into motherhood.
What are the guidelines around homeschooling? Perhaps that could be our free and English way to learn. I am a talented teacher. I’d already taught Older Kid in my public school English class, and he’d survived it. More impressive: so had I. Maybe I’d just have to do all subjects with all kids all the time.
Ugh. That sounded exhausting.
Or maybe there was an Americans in Zurich homeschooling group that worked together on some days or in some subjects.
I did my research with scholarly depth and precision.
Oh, All-Knowing Google, tell me about homeschooling in Zurich.
Did you know that in the Canton of Zurich homeschooling must be done in the official language of the local schools? German. I did not. Did you know that homeschooling instruction can only be done by a parent without a teaching credential for one year? I did not. Did you know that needs to be a Swiss credential, not a Californian one? — Yeah, I bet you did.
Oy to the vey. Goodbye to that solution.
How about an online school? In the States? That we access in Switzerland? I mean, I HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE the idea of online education for my children. I was a teacher during the pandemic. I knew that fiasco firsthand. But, instead of $80K/year, I’d at least look into it.
Briefly. Because that was another dead end. Time zones alone could provide issue. If the kids attended school in an American time zone, could they even connect with kids in Switzerland outside of school hours? Eek. Sounds like loneliness. Trouble ensues. No thank you.
As I spent time debriefing Husband on these things, he’d then debrief on his findings, trying to get questions answered by people in Switzerland. Couldn’t we talk to someone at an actual school?
Well, of course we could not. It was Christmastime! Schools were closed for the vacation, just like my school would be in two more days. I was waking up in those too dark hours of the alarm clock howl to see my husband sitting at a desk in our bedroom, making phone calls to try to connect with anyone who could tell us more about Swiss education.
“Hallo. Sprechen Sie Englisch?” I’d hear him say from behind my coffee cup. or the cover held over my eyes. You know, depending on the day.
Every time he said it, “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” I heard Chris Rock’s voice respond as Marty the Zebra in Madagascar. “Yeah. I sprecken!”
Making these phone calls, Husband found us an educational specialist with whom to speak, someone who had worked in the school systems for a while, both public and private. We made an appointment for a free consultation on Tuesday morning at 6am. Rise and shine.
The night before said consultation, I’d cleaned up after participating in the Younger Kid’s soccer practice, and the husband and I were in agreement: we wanted our kids to learn more languages, experience other cultures, push out from their (and our) American boundaries. We would send them to public school. They could use the academic challenge, certainly. Even though we were a solid 90% certain on our decision, we decided to keep the appointment for no other reason than “Why not?”
Why not? Why not? Why? Not? That is a bad question.
Going into the discussion, we knew about the tracks in the Swiss system. The higher track, gymnasium, leading to university and the lower to an internship. In order to access the upper track, a student must pass a test. In what language? German, of course.
“Oh nein,” said Education Specialist. “Oh. This is really something very difficult. Very difficult. Even native speakers cannot make it into gymnasium. And to get to university, your kids must go to gymnasium. It is famous, you know, that Albert Einstein, he failed the test to get into the Zurich gymnasium,” the consultant informed us as we sat partly poker-faced and partly stun gunned by the words she spoke from the other side of the world to us.
[The Einstein story is not the whole truth, and, in being so, rather misleading — but it is the popular culture version, so it didn’t matter that the Einstein thing was only partially true — it was true enough to carry emotional weight.]
“Really,” she said, ” I am sorry to be sounding so negative. But it is really very difficult. Very small chance unless your kids go to the private schools. The international school system. Are you interested in doing that?”
Oh, nein is right. We couldn’t send the kids to private school. That would take a job I did not have, and the whole of its salary to do so. It sounded as though sending our kids to school in Zurich would mean they’d never get to go to universities, here in the States or elsewhere.
Armed with that information, we asked the company offering Husband the job if they would pay for the American schooling of our children.
In short, they said no.
And, in short, we then had to say no right back to them.
WAIT, WHAT??!!
I know. We said no. Which means of course there’s more to tell! Third leg is on the way.
KZ Rochelle 