adventure, asset, annoyance / 2

Adventure – Our refrigerator. It has been my experience that refrigerators with built-in freezer sections only work well for refrigerating, not freezing. Apparently the reverse is true in Switzerland, or at least with our fridge. Perhaps it is just showing its age.

Our fridge is space efficient and freezes ice cubes within the small freezer section within just a few short hours. However, it really stinks at  refrigeration. Items in the door, particularly the upper shelves mold faster than we can even think about eating them and we have to keep the fridge turned up to 7 in order to keep them even remotely cool. (The manual says 3-4 should be sufficient.) I think it may just be getting old, but I also must remember that refrigeration is less popular over here. For example, all the milk and eggs are unrefrigerated at the store. Needless to say either our fridge needs repair/replacement or it just going to take us awhile to figure out where to put the salsa and cheese so it is cold, but not frozen.

Asset – Our heated towel rack. Why aren’t these more common in America? There is nothing better than a warm, dry, soft bath towel. In our bathroom, Martin’s towel lives on the heated towel rack because his more frequent post-training showers means he needs his towel dried more quickly. Sometimes I just move my towel over from the other bar so that it gets a little warm before my shower. It also does wonders to help air dry clothes dry more quickly. Maybe I won’t appreciate it as much in the summer, but after a long run and the chill of cooling off, nothing ends a shower better than a warm towel.

Annoyance – No mixed recyclables. After living with Seattle’s mandatory recycling rules for 5 years, I’ve become an avid recycler. I feel guilty when I’m home in Mt. Shasta and paper, glass, and plastics go only in the trash. (Easy recycling hasn’t made it there yet.)

Here in Zürich, they are nearly fanatical about recycling, even down to the level of how to properly bundle recyclables for pick-up. PET plastics are dropped off at the grocery store for recycling. Metal, foil, and glass must be sorted by color (white, green, brown) and deposited in neighborhood bins, but only during certain hours. (Do not deposit glass on Sundays!) And, cardboard and paper must be properly bundled with twine and left on the curb every few weeks before 7 am. Apparently Martin and I still need to work on proper bundling because a few weeks ago our paper bundle wasn’t picked up with the others. Guess which is our bundle?

Hey, cut us some slack. It is hard to perfectly flatten and fold packing paper. I’m trying to decide if our lack of perfection is related to recycling too many types of paper, as most of the other bundles always look just like newspaper and the occasional magazine, or if we just lack the Swiss precision gene required for proper bundling. At least they took this bundle so we must be doing something right.