Buffet

I complain a lot about the heat and no air conditioning. I am told my complaining will only last a few weeks. The nights are cooler. I leave the windows wide open, hoping to catch a breeze. We're high enough off the ground to not worry about possible intruders, and the Swiss believe in their very low crime rate. A couple of nights have been almost as warm as the day, and in the evenings we swam in the lake to cool off, or I took a cold shower before bed. This must be how my grandparents lived as children, before central air conditioning was widely available.

The first day we left our apartment with our windows open and a light on, we came back to a scary movie scene. We spent the next 20 minutes vacuuming live bugs off the ceiling, chasing moths around the rooms. I don't see "screens" on homes here. Just these enormous windows with big sturdy hinges. I'm guessing 9 months out of the year it's just too cold and rainy for the bugs to grow in numbers to be any more than a minor nuisance.

I've actually been considering investing in mosquito nets, but that would follow an expectation that these bugs are an ongoing problem. At the moment, my mosquito bites have mosquito bites. Either there's a really really fat and happy mosquito family in Ruschlikon, or one of these things told a whole bunch of its friends where there's a free buffet.