On a side note, can you please edit the spelling for the currency to “Swiss Franc”?

My family made pizza every Friday night, so she definitely had it wrong! 😉

Jessica,

That reminds of my college roommate, Freshman year. She was genuinely shocked that we didn’t all have tacos every Friday night. Friday night is taco night! How could we not know that!

So funny.

I think this is why I love meeting and talking to people, just in general, to find out how assumptions or cultural things we do in a certain way are different. They can change from country to country, state to state, and family to family. For example, my entire family (quite large) uses a spoon to get jelly out of the jar. I first ran into someone using a knife for jelly (knife is peanut butter only in my family) while in college and it blew my mind. First, how do you balance the jelly on the knife, and second, why are you putting the dirty peanut-butter knife into the jelly jar? Ick! 😉

I love these posts, because they often challenge my thinking in different ways–many times even beyond what you’ve mentioned in the post! Talking to my coworkers from different countries is often the best part of my day, because I always learn something knew or come away thinking hard about “how we do things” being the “right” way.

I love Swiss Saturdays, too – even the ones that are less illuminating and just amusing.

It is amazing what we take for granted as “just the way things are done.” I remember spraining my knee on a hiking trip in Switzerland years ago, and being floored that I couldn’t just waltz into a pharmacy and grab some ibuprophen and a knee brace. The pharmacist insisted on talking to me before handing over a basic neoprene sleeve.

But if your meat is packed poorly then you have to be careful about how you pack your groceries the first time.

I’m not at all convinced that reusable bags are the key to environmental bliss, either. But I do like how the meat is packaged here.

(Also, those reusable bags take between 30 and 200 times as much energy to manufacture, so the average shopper has to use them for about four years to break even on that. And they take a lot longer to break down in a landfill, too.)

Living abroad and traveling as much as possible has taught me that culture influences almost all that we do. You can’t recognize it because it’s just how things are done until you run into someone else who does it differently.

I’m glad you enjoy the Swiss Saturday posts. I intend to keep writing them!