Swiss staring

We are already proactively nostalgic about Switzerland's lovelier qualities (the on-time trams! the hiking/biking/skiing/swimming possibilities! the cleanliness of city streets! the fondue!), but there is plenty that gets our proverbial goat. One of the weirdest and most annoying attributes of the Swiss, and something I will most definitely NOT miss, is their blatant staring.

Generally, you can divide the staring into two types. The first is the Nosy Neighbour variety: people openly (flagrantly! unabashedly!) stare at you for extended periods of time while you, say, have a quiet-volume chat on your cell phone on the train, or consider your purchases while in line at the grocery store, or maybe even just sit on a tram...doing nothing. The staring is not broken by eye contact (friendly or otherwise) from the Stare-ee. In fact, I think that sort of acknowledgment only encourages the Stare-er -- it's as though you are confirming that he or she really has found the public sphere equivalent of must-see TV.

All of this attention is incredibly unnerving for the Stare-ee. "What have I done wrong?" you think to yourself. "Have I committed some kind of egregious cultural faux pas? Is my foreigner-ness that apparent/interesting/offensive? Is there a chicken wing stuck to my face?" I get so flustered by the staring (which can last 10 or 20 minutes straight on train journeys!) that I lose all ability to respond or retaliate: I am so flustered that I can't return the eye contact for more than a few seconds, and I am too self-conscious to bust out a "What the f*ck are you looking at?" in broken German.

The second kind of staring is much like the first, but instead of you, the Stare-ee, being viewed as a lab rat or retarded circus clown, it's more like you, the Stare-ee, are being viewed as a serial killer's next victim. We'll call it the Creepy Stalker Stare. It comes from young to middle-aged men, and it's usually accompanied by a smirk that seems to say, "I think your torso would make an excellent lampshade." This type of Stare-er is even more persistent than his Nosy Neighbour counterpart, and will continue to stare at you even if you switch seats on the train to avoid the gaze. I have literally run out of trains to avoid Creepy Stalker Stare-ers, which makes me feel like the crazy one -- "But he was looking at me funny!" Yeah, right.

To a certain degree, I can understand train staring (after all, you've got to look at something), but pedestrian staring is even weirder, and both Nosy Neighbour and Creepy Stalker examples are in abundance on the streets of Zurich. I have had people stop and stare as I walk by. Walk by, normally, in regular clothes. Or jog by on a jogging run populated by lots of other joggers. Without a chicken wing on my face, to my knowledge.

On a more positive note, I seem to have figured out how to resize YouTube videos for this blog!

And is Eric Carmen Swiss?