Thursday, April 28, 2011

Mobility mobiles and Boris bikes

Don’t have a car or a bike in Switzerland? No problem, you can still get around. Although I’ve outlined the problems I’ve had with Swiss trains, they really are quite efficient and can get you to all corners of Switzerland in no time. But sometimes it’s easier to go by car or bike.
Mobility mobiles docked at a station

So when we moved, we did our research and stumbled on the concept of car sharing. Mobility CarSharing is all over Switzerland; the website says they have over 2,500 cars available at over 1,250 stations throughout the country. You can even hire cars in Austria and Germany. We’ve found carsharing to be easy to use, plus it’s environmentally friendly and cost effective; we undoubtedly save thousands of CHFs in petrol, insurance, parking and registration. I’ve registered as a member, which costs around CHF200 with a SBB Half Fare card (more on that in an upcoming post). Then you just pay for your use by the kilometre and the hour. So for 2.5 hours and 14kms it took to move from our place in Sticksville to our new place in Nyon cost less than CHF20. Beats hiring a car through a rental company or getting a taxi!

Driving them is another matter. Like a rental company, you can hire different categories of vehicles from Micro (a cute little two-seater Smart car) up to Transport (a Mercedes Vito van), great for IKEA trips. And that’s the thing. Each car is different and not like the car you’re used to driving. Back home, I have a manual drivers’ licence but drive an automatic. So while I can drive a manual, it had been awhile since I’d done so, and getting used to different cars can sometimes produce interesting results. The first car I hired was a Renault Megane. I discovered – at the traffic lights in central Nyon with four other cars behind me – that it has a high clutch point and is really easy to stall, repeatedly. I’ve also hired a Mazda that I must have come very close to burning out the clutch on.

Then there’s driving in Switzerland. First, being from Australia means I drive on the left side of the road, and the right-hand side of the car. Having to do the opposite of both has produced some tense moments, especially when approaching slip lanes and left-hand turns across oncoming traffic. Emperor D and I have on a few occasions exchanged panicky words when we think an accident is imminent. Thankfully we haven’t had any dramas yet.

Secondly, there’s the speed limit. I often don’t know what it is, as it’s frequently not signposted. This is strange for me, where speed-limit-obsessed Australian traffic laws mean virtually every street, road and highway is sign-posted every 500 metres. Driving on Switzerland’s highways for the first time a few weeks ago, I pulled onto the highway and sped up to 100km/hr, the speed limit on Australian suburban freeways. Cars whizzed past me at least 40-50km/hr faster. I sped up to nearly 130km/hr, but cars were still passing me with ease – they were doing at least 150km/hr or more. And I’m surprised. This is Switzerland, not a German autobahn! I would have thought that the conservative, rules-obsessed Swiss would have had a strict speed limit, of maybe no more than 120km/hr. And apparently, that’s actually correct; according to Wikipedia, Switzerland’s speed limit is 120km/hr. That’s a lot of Swiss breaking the rules.
Boris bikes at docking station in Hyde Park
Image: ZanMan, WikiMedia Commons

If you can’t drive, there’s always bikes. It seems that most people in Switzerland own one, and a few of my colleagues get to work on a bike. But maybe Geneva needs to take a leaf out of London’s book. I recently spent a week in London. A lot of people there rides bikes to work too, but some with a difference; they have public bikes for hire, nicknamed Boris bikes. It seemed that one out of three bikes on the road was a Boris bike. Boris bikes, by the way, were nicknamed after London’s Lord Mayor, Boris Johnson, a bit of a London personality, and are a public bicycle sharing system where the bikes get docked at stations all over the city. I hired one on a sunny Sunday morning and took it through Hyde Park. It was one of the best things I did in London; they’re loads of fun.
Velopass bike sharing station in Morges

It’s something they should do in Geneva, and I can’t see an excuse for them not to do it. There are good bicycle paths in the city and there is even an example close to home, with a few towns in the neighbouring canton of Vaud having a bike sharing system, though on a much smaller scale. The city of Lausanne, and surrounding towns of Morges and Rolle, have the scheme. If they’re cheap to use and run, environmentally friendly, and get people out of cars and off public transport – as well as getting them doing something healthy – then why can’t Switzerland’s second biggest city, Geneva, do it too? Genevoise unite and get on yer bikes!

Update: turns out there is a bike hire system in Geneva, but it's not quite on the same scale as London, and it's suggested that the one in Morges and Lausanne is a trial to see how it runs. I hope it gets to Geneva in it's full capacity soon - Geneva is made for cycling!

Monday, April 11, 2011

Lessons in moving

So admittedly I’ve been a bit radio silent lately. You could hardly blame me after the constant moving about of the last four weeks though. What a debacle. We’ve certainly learnt lessons along the way – and so you can profit from them, I’ve listed them in gory detail below – but the important thing is that we’ve finally moved into our permanent apartment, and don’t intend on moving anywhere for a rather long time!

Lesson #1: If you think you think you need to extend your sublease, then do so!
So our problems started when we realised that our new apartment (which is just that – brand new, therefore under construction) wasn’t going to be ready as soon as we’d hoped. We’d signed a lease in early February and were told we could probably move in mid/late March, although our lease, to be on the safe side, was dated from 1 April. Our sublease in Sticksville ran out on 21 March and we thought we’d probably be safe. Wrong. When we realised that we needed a place to stay for an extra week, thinking we could move in on 27 March, it was too late to extend our sublease.

So we had to move out and we spent the next week shifting between friends’ place in Nyon and a temporary sublease for a few days in Geneva. Then on the Thursday before we were due to move in, I got the bad news that it was pushed back by an extra week to 1 April, April Fool’s Day. I wish it had been a joke. It wasn’t.

Not able to stay where we were, we had no choice but to find a hotel for the week, an expensive prospect to say the least. After an ultimately fruitless search in which neither the web, asking in hotels directly, or just asking at the tourist office – where we discovered there was not a hotel room in Geneva to be had for love nor (anything less than an exorbitant amount of) money – we gave up and headed for Lausanne for three nights, before finding a bed in Geneva for the last two before finally moving in. Glad to be in our own place at last, but the fun had only just begun.

Lesson #2: Don’t buy IKEA furniture in bulk
Of course, a brand new apartment is usually unfurnished, so we needed furniture. Ergo, like any good expat in Switzerland who needs furniture, we took ourselves off on a trip to IKEA.

To kit out our apartment, we needed to buy up big. BIG mistake. I love IKEA and - most of the time - their furniture. I have this mild obsession with anything Scandinavian, so usually that's enough to ensure my favour - the price, functionality and design is a bonus.

But good things need to come in small doses. I've spent the better part of the last 10 days on the floor putting things together - dining table, chairs, tv cabinet, lamp, bedside table, bed, bathroom cabinet, and joy of joys, a Manstad fold out sofa. We usually don't have problems putting together IKEA stuff, but this sofa is proving to be a nightmare.

You can have the chaise lounge left or right; they provide the instructions for first right, then left. We've chosen to put ours on the left, so it's meant that a couple of times we've put bolts on the wrong side and had to take them out again because we've looked at the right-side instructions first, which are wrong.

Then there's the end part which we're supposed to fasten to the seat, but the part in the hole that the screw goes into fell into the end part, rendering it useless. We took another trip to IKEA to get a replacement part, but that hasn't worked either, so we now have a half-finished sofa lying in pieces all over the living room. After two phone calls and two more visits to IKEA, it’s still not fixed. I’m not impressed at the lack of Swissifficiency (a hack word of Swiss + efficiency that I’m claiming I coined). I love IKEA but I've learnt a good lesson - don't buy it and put it together in bulk!

Lesson #3: Be prepared to fit your apartment out with just about everything – except the kitchen sink
So the above may be a slight exaggeration, but I was nonetheless startled to find that we need to fit our own light fittings in our new place, plus things like curtains. I thought the bare light bulbs (or no light bulbs, in the case of the kitchen) were going to be replaced, but it turns out that if you rent an apartment, you often have to bring or buy your own light fittings and curtains, etc. Each to their own, but I was a little surprised; that’s just not The Done Thing at home in Australia.
View from my new apartment - Alps
in the distance!

Lesson #4: Be prepared to sit back and allow your amazing surroundings to sink in
After all the hassles and stress, it’s important to stop for a moment and let things sink in. A couple of days after moving in, I stopped for lunch out on the balcony. It was gloriously sunny and (for early April) ridiculously warm. I was finally in my new apartment – it dawned on me that I won’t have to move again for a very long time. It’s brand new, so it’s a blank canvas, complete with shiny new kitchen toys, including a dishwasher (hello Empress Eats blog!). And then I looked up – and saw the French Alps, rising above Lake Geneva. No matter how long we live here, I don’t think that’s something I’ll ever get tired of.