Why the Swiss? Hopefully, I will spend the rest of my life in Switzerland, pondering and answering that question. (Meanwhile, though, for those of you who might not want to stick around that long, I thought I might conjure up some quick insights, right here and now.) Perhaps, for example, I chose them just to playfully provoke my friends from other countries--the same friends who try to gently provoke me about it with questions suggestive but not quite impolite like, "So, did the women in Appenzell get the vote yet?" (They did, by the way.) Perhaps it's just the way true love works (with these people, this place): sure, I can see a few faults that on somebody else or in someplace else might get on my nerves, but here, somehow, I just don't mind. I know, simply (as I often state to my friends from other places in a tone that suggests a prison sentence), that "I am going to spend the rest of my life with these people." It could be I've decided this solely on the basis of the fact that these people make me laugh.

So, with my life's choice of the Swiss people formally stated, I will now try to sell you on their idiosyncracies, starting by naming this whimsical project after a local bee-keeper. (Everybody asks me why I named this after Otto. Well, come on! Calling a guidebook "A Guidebook..." is boring, but Otto's not boring. There have been some really good times here with him and his people, and there have been some lousy times, too, but boring? Uh-uh. Never. And I don't expect the yawn-fest to start anytime soon.)

Admittedly, for every kind of personality I've known at home, there's one to match it here in Switzerland. In the vast scheme of things, there really isn't a whole lot of difference between the English-speakers and the Swiss. No, I can't say I'm drawn to these people for their vast exoticism. Yet there are some subtle twists in their perspective that surprised me, at first, then afterwards made me, well, cackle hysterically.

For starters, I see all around me instances of the lock-the-door-and-hang-the-key-next-to-it mentality. If it has a key. When I lived in Interlaken, our apartment didn't even lock, and it was never a problem. For a long time, thought this was an isolated example, but I see now that lots of people don't lock up their houses. (Mind you, this is the Berner Oberland we're talking about, not Zürich.) Conversely, when I lived with friends in San Diego, our Swiss exchange student had a hard time grasping that she had to lock not only all the doors but also all the windows, when she went out. If I were walking home alone at 3:00 AM in Mürren and saw somebody coming towards me in the street, I'd say, "Sälü." At "home" in the U.S., I'd never be so crazy as to be walking around alone in the middle of the night. Here, when the stores close for lunch, all the sidewalk sale items remain outside in their bins, unguarded. I'd like to see the same Swiss merchants move to my home town and try to do this because their merchandise would be gone, vamoose, verschwunden one millisecond after they turned their backs.

The Swiss are not only honest but irrepressibly and sometimes almost unbearably clean. In Switzerland, I've been cajoled into cleaning in places that I never would've cleaned at home; indeed, the laughter would've rung throughout the hills of Pennsylvania just as the yodelling echoes through the Alps, if I'd been caught dusting out the insides of the light fixtures. (That stuff just lives there, right?) Here, however, I've been called upon to polish ceilings and wash the outside walls of houses, and my suggestion that maybe it would be easier to just paint was always met with shock and horror. In the Swiss hotels and hostels where I've worked, seasonal cleaning was always taken to the extreme, sometimes with whole days devoted merely to the digging out of grime from the crevices in the bottoms of the cooking pots. There are also certain small details of hotel organization that, though seemingly unimportant, are recognized nationwide, such as the use of a cleaning rag of one color for the kitchen and another color for the dining room. Of course these two things would never, never, ever, ever, ever, ever get switched, and there'd be hell to pay if they did. Same with bartender aprons verses dishwasher aprons. You get used to it.

The Swiss German dialects spoken in the Berner Oberland, while much closer to English than High German, have some superficial differences that mirror similar twists in our respective perspectives. The Swiss, for example, use the word Du (you) in a way that would be thought of as rude at home, but it's more or less affectionate, here, and so prevalent that some of the resident English-speakers can't shake it when they are speaking English. For example, "Du, Patty, what are you eating? You shouldn't eat so much chocolate, Du." There can also be some confusion (and embarassment) for us, when we are trying to master some of the commonest expressions. Jesus Gott can be used in polite conversation in Mürren, and it would be no big surprise if your boss or your friend's grandmother suddenly exclaimed, "Läck doch mir--weischt wie!" (Lick me--you know how!). However, the expression wi'n'e more (literally, like a mother pig, or, loosely, like crazy) is best used only among friends and not when talking to people you just met.

Yeah, they simply look at things a little bit differently, the Swiss. Things that make me laugh till I'm crying often evoke a reaction of "Huh?" from the locals, and vice versa. Once someone wrote on a menu board in the

hotel where I was working Kartoffelwurst mit Bratsalat instead of Bratwurst mit Kartoffelsalat. Let me tell you, this was high hilarity. And, though the Swiss and the English speakers share a common love of gossip, the Swiss men definitely throw themselves right into it with perhaps more fervor than even the women do. Once again, the topics differ, though. Whereas we would be all hung up about some old-fashioned moralistic issue, the Swiss can be almost overly accepting. (What people do when they're drunk is still fair game, though, for sure.) Want to hear an example of a first-rate piece of Mürren gossip? A motorcycle went by in the street. That provided talk for an entire day, believe it or not. Yet, when a helicopter landed next to our house and took away a small yellow barn, do you think anybody noticed? No way.

Last, but not least, I'd like to call attention to Swiss fashions. Or, more specifically, Swiss colors. If you could say there were such a thing as Swiss colors, they would be purple and chartreuse, no doubt. But it's not their bright colors that strike me as much as the fact that the men, who traditionally make a more subdued fashion statement in the Enlish-speaking countries, do nothing to avoid bright colors but in fact seem to virtually embrace them, without once considering any of our antiquated ideas that dressing like a rainbow might somehow threaten their masculinity. Here, unusually cheery color pairings, as well as innovative combinations of stripes, patterns and plaids are used by men and women alike. While one Swiss friend suggested this was a manifestation of a deeper spirituality on the part of the Swiss as a whole, I prefer to think of it more in terms of a kind of men's fashion liberation. There is one division of the Berner Oberland train employees that provide a perfect example. A somewhat macho division, too, I might add, yet contentedly and efficiently overseeing the transport of goods in their bright turquoise jackets and bright orange pants. Meanwhile, back in the supposedly modern English-speaking lands, people of both sexes are required to be wearing a conservative blue suit before we can do a job right!

The talk around the planet is that the Swiss are too clean, they're cold, hard to get to know, and they run their country like some kind of a giant-sized precision timepiece. Starting with the fact that I've been on at least half a dozen different modes of transportation in this country that didn't run on time, I can genuinely attest that none of that--ehem...except the first one--applies. (They're anal wi'n'e more, yes, and the only country I've ever seen with special yards just for dogs to do their business in!) But you can't take everything the world says seriously, anyway, because the world is simply jealous. With few exceptions--Needle Park acknowledged among them--the Swiss are a fairy tale people, heads full of sweet, strange legends, who have worked with nature as best they could to create a fairy tale country.

And in the end there's just Otto: "You should come with me to see the bees sometime." "Okay. Maybe," I reply. "You aren't afraid of bees, are you?" he asks me. "No, but I'm afraid of you." He laughs, "Oh, it's okay. I don't 'stick' anybody anymore!"

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