my name

I always knew my name was difficult to pronounce, but I never thought of it as being weird. Welcome, Ms Adie, to Switzerland. People here have never heard anything like it. I think I've not had one instance of telling someone my name here that it wasn't met with a queer stare. What kind of name is that, they ask. Not from around here, I tell them. No indeed. Things become even more complicated when I try to spell it, as English speakers and German speakers pronounce vowels quite differently. For our ay, ee, eye, oh, you, (and sometimes wye!) the Germans have ah, ay, ee, oh, oo (und manchmal uepsilon!). So those three crucial letters--A, E, I--spelling them in English gives the wrong impression entirely. (Megan Ed?i) Now I just kind of apologize to people, and tell them I know it's weird, and then I spell it again, sehr langsamer (very slowly), in German. Oh well, I think their words are funny. All those umlauts? The alphabet has so many damn characters here that the drawers of type are heavier than any I've known. Harder to put away, too, since there are so many more compartments. How interesting, that the world has so many languages. I heard once that the Hawaiians had no written language until printing came to the islands, and then our alphabets didn't have enough of the letter k. Rather than waiting months for a boat to bring more type from the mainland, Hawaiian printers started breaking the tops off of upper-case Rs in order to make more. Veeery smart.

Did I mention that it is finally warm here? I've done some planting. With any luck, these little suckers will start popping up before I head back to CA for the summer...

from top left: chard (aka mangold, ha ha ha), peas, peas, and peas; in the front, lettuce.Also repotted both the thyme and basil.

You know, it doesn't help me to think how stupid it is that to say "Meryl Streep is an American actress" you must say "Meryl Streep ist eine amerikanische Filmschauspielerin" -- instead, I should just accept the length and complexity of the words and move on to learning them. Must. Stop. Resisting. Must. Stop.

ZwiebelFisch

Well, how about this: I got a key to the Druckwerk studio today. Druck = print. Letterpress printing is known as Buchdruck (buch = book) and, in exchange for volunteer hours (1:1) that's exactly what I'll be doing. Some Things I Learned At The Print Shop Today:

1. If a letter in your case of type is in the wrong spot, it's called a fish (Fisch). If it belongs in another case entirely, it's called an Onion Fish (ZwiebelFisch).
2. Everyone knows about points from their word processing program. Turns out, points in America are slightly smaller than points in Europe. What?! I wrote more about this on flickr.
3. Spending 3 hours thoroughly vacuuming and sweeping up a print shop can make you sore in the haunches but is still worth it for the earned trust and brownie-points.
I'm going back tomorrow to do some more organizing, and start setting type for a business card. Check out the shop's website, if you feel like parsing through some German.

More pictures, of course.

Spring is warming things up around here, and I had lunch today by the Rhein (about a 2 minute walk from the studio) in the sun. I possibly even got a tiny bit sunburnt. And, I stood (briefly, briefly) in the river, which is full of snowmelt at the moment. Marcel, one of the printers, told me that during the summer he often walks from the studio down to the river for a quick swim. What a perfect way to take a break.