The Raincoat

Last summer, I decided to go to India during the monsoons; a season most tourists avoid because streets flood, cities stop, and mosquitoes rapidly breed. But, I needed an excuse to buy a beautiful new sunburt orange Pategonia raincoat. It is the most expensive coat I’ve ever purchased, but it blocks wind & rain and folds up into a ping-pong sized ball, while looking stunningly travel chic. It turns out, it’s useful in Switzerland too, where the weather is crummy about 93.4% of the time. However, unlike India where women wear bright corals, fuchsias, roseates, and salmons all days of the week, Swiss women wear only black. Black boots, black leggings, black socks, black dresses, black belts, black cardigans, black gloves, black scarves, black hats, black sunglasses, and even black rain coats. In a sunburnt orange Pategonia raincoat, I stand out. So much so, that most locals know I’m a foreigner and automatically speak to me in English. This can be helpful; like when I get lost in the train station, or can’t open the front door of my building, or when I can’t tell the difference between flour and powdered sugar at the grocery store. But last Saturday it happened; I was mistaken for a native when a little kid approached me speaking in French.

On the first Saturday of each month, the museums of Lausanne open their doors for free. Because it was grey and raining, Jordan, Sharon and I decided to see how many we could cram into a day. We began at the Olympic Museum since Lausanne is the home to the Olympics. It’s not like the Olympics were invented here, or house the torch like in Athens, but the administrative offices are here, so of course, there is a museum. The grounds themselves are quite lovely, located on a lakeside hill, they have trim flowerbeds, lavish fountains, and artistically placed sculptures dotting the lawn. In honor of the Vancouver Games, there is a giant totem pole from a northwestern Native American tribe that looks out of place in a Victorian garden. Being from North America myself, it was only appropriate for me to add my head to the bottom of the cedar totem where Sharon snapped a photo. (Note: I am wearing the lovely sunburnt orange Pategonia raincoat.)

We attempted to enter the Olympic Museum for free, since it was February 6th, the first Saturday of the month. But we were stopped by one of the administrators who informed us that because the Olympic Museum is a private museum, admission isn’t ever free. Unwilling to pay 10 CHF (= $9.28) to see Shawn Johnson’s (Sheila Jones…who?) leotard for the third time, I chose to browse through the magnets in the overpriced gift store.

Next stop was the History Museum in the heart of old town Lausanne. Here, there are many exhibits ranging from anthropologic history, to modern local art, to geology. My favorite exhibits were in the Musée cantonal de zoologie or the animal section. It reminded me of a hallway I visited it only once when I was probably six or seven years old at the University of Iowa. I don’t know where or why I was on campus, but I distinctly remember walking through the musty basement of a falling apart building, peering into cases of stuffed pigeons and falcons, memorized and terrified by the tiny glass eyes staring back at me. Immediately reminded of my love for taxidermy, I found a chair by a radiator of the alligator area to sit and watch the many children at the museum explore exotic wildlife staring at them from behind the glass cases. Shrieks of joy and fright encircled me as child after child pulled parents along oogling at the flamingos, tapping at the bullfrogs, and petting at the moose.

Another favorite of the day was Oh My God: Darwin et l’évolution, an exhibit teaching kids and adults alike about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It was very simple, explaining natural selection, adaptation to environments, and the slow evolution of species. Using video, fossils, games and stuffed animals, the exhibit explained evolution better than any of my elementary school teachers ever did.

This is where my “you don’t look like a foreigner” moment happened. While I was playing the “match the right skeleton to the right animal” game, a little boy walked up to me, tugged on my sunburnt orange Pategonia raincoat and said “Madame, Madame!” He then went on to explain that I was matching the wrong skeleton to the wrong animal and that the frog skeleton went with the frog, not with the snake. I was so overjoyed at being approached in French (…and by an adorable Swiss child!) that I didn’t even mind when I asked Jordan for help translating, because apparently, my French vocabulary still needs work. I left the first two museums of my first, first Saturday quite ecstatic as I pulled up the hood of my sunburnt orange Pategonia raincoat. It was still raining.