Yesterday, Niko and I picked up our brand new B permits at the post office. Yes, B permits. Even though we have been in Zurich for five years, we do not get to cross over into the illustrious C category, which normally happens for US passport holders after five years living in Switzerland.

So why did we miss out on the upgrade? Simple. Not all B permits are equal, especially the ones granted to PhD students and their spouses. When you are a PhD student in Switzerland, the years accrued while working on your PhD do not count towards the requisite time for a C permit. That means the C permit ticker starts only after you have completed your graduate studies. If Niko and I wanted to get on the C permit track, we would have to stay in Switzerland for another five years after his defense.

I really shouldn’t complain. At least the Cantonal Authorities granted us B permits. We could have received the dreaded L permit, colloquially known amongst us expats as the Loser permit. And they granted us our new permits in a relatively short amount of time, considering how one year I had to wait six months for my new permit. Woo hoo, eine neue B-Bewilligung fuer mich!

When you think of massive prehistoric stone structures in Europe, the first thing that usually comes to mind is Stonehenge. Don’t get me wrong. Stonehenge is a great site to visit in the UK, but the place pales in comparison with the Megalithic Temples of Malta. First of all, the Maltese temples are both bigger and older by at least a thousand years. If those weren’t reason enough for them to be more famous than Stonehenge, then the superb seaside location of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra should clinch the title of Europe’s must-see megalithic site. Seriously, does the sky ever look like that in England?

As you can see, the once-roofed entrance to the Hagar Qim temple complex is high enough to accommodate Niko’s 6′1″ frame.

In postcards, you can get an idea how these temples looked from the air, but since 2009 the structures have been covered with a protective tent. I can see why five thousand year old stone temples need some sort of shielding from the elements, but unfortunately, these shells really take away any money-shot photography. Fortunately, wikipedia has a picture that really gives you an idea why Hagar Qim and its sisters temples were more complex than Stonehenge.

Like Stonehenge, some of these temples also have a clear link to important days in the solar calendar. 500 meters from Hagar Qim stands the ruins of Mnajdra. The temple’s west-facing doorway is aligned so that sunlight passes directly through it to the center of the temple on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Here’s Niko illustrating the sunlight’s path:

To sum up, the Maltese temples are both bigger and older while possessing solar significance. Eat your heart out, Stonehenge.

Major props to Niko. He alerted me to the fact March 4th is National Grammar Day. I must admit to feeling gooey inside at the idea of celebrating language, and my fingers tingle at the thought of good writing. Language is such a beautiful thing. It starts out with a finite set of sounds that fit together to form meaning and infinite possibilities. Language is deliciously irrational. Unlike math, words and meanings don’t have to have one-to-one mappings. Ideas can overlap, and descriptions like “not good” don’t necessarily mean “bad”.

And grammar, the glue that holds words together. It’s too bad grammar gets such a bad rep. Most people probably don’t realize that it’s the prescriptive, not descriptive, type of grammar that irks them. Let’s face it. You need to have nouns (or, depending on the language, noun morphemes) and verbs to form sentences, and that’s what grammar is. That said, as discussed on Motivated Grammar, it can be great fun to debunk some prescriptive grammar rules. Here are my three favorites from this year’s MG top ten list:

—Singular they is standard English. What’s wrong with the sentence Everyone celebrates today in their own way? Historical usage, contemporary usage, the usage of revered writers, acceptance by language authorities, analogous constructions, and issues of ambiguity all agree: absolutely nothing.

—You can eat healthy food. This meaning was fine for 300 years, and then Alfred Ayers came along and declared it wrong. Of course, it was he who was wrong, but his edict has stuck around at the edges of prescriptivism ever since.

—I’m good is good. Every once in a while, someone gives me guff about my careful avoidance of the phrase I’m well when I am asked how I am. There’s nothing wrong with I’m well, but it isn’t what I mean to say. There is also nothing wrong with I’m good, and it is what I mean to say.

Don’t get me wrong. Clean writing is something to strive for, but language is at its chaotic best whenever you can bend, break or create new rules.

One more thing. I think this t-shirt would make a great National Grammar Day gift. Maybe I should give Niko a little hint.

Last night, when I was on my way home from the gym, the tram was really crowded. I was quite lucky to get a seat and immediately stuck my nose inside a book. As interesting as my book was, I could not help noticing the two young men standing next to me were speaking British English. (Gotta love having a language filter!) The tram was still really crowded when it was time for me to get off, so I said “excuse me” to them in order to make it to the exit. Even though they could have heard that I was also a native speaker, well a native speaker of an English dialect, they answered me back with “Entschuldigung.” I love living in a place where several languages get mixed together.

Museums and beautiful days can pose a dilemma. You are only in place X for a limited amount of time, and you would like to see its cultural treasures, but then you are blessed with a blue, cloud-less sky, and suddenly the pull of sunshine can trump all of your good intentions. That’s why I like open-air museums. You can get all your cultural delights while still enjoying some Vitamin D.

As you can see from the sun hats, Göreme’s Open-Air Museum did not disappoint in the good weather department. Nor did it let us down on the cultural front. A group of Byzantine monks first came to the area and slowly started carving churches out the rock. The site grew from there for several hundred years, thriving during and after the iconoclastic period in the Byzantine Church before the Ottomans came through the area. The outside of these soft lava-rock churches look pretty unimposing, well-camouflaged to blend to the landscape. But then you walk inside, and you are astounded by the remarkably intricate thousand year old frescos.

Of course, the churches did not all start with this kind of ornamentation. in the Apple Church, you can see both the frescos and the simpler ochre paintings that served as the first set of church decorations.

In this day and age, I have trouble finding spirituality in modern organized religion, but strolling around the paths that connect this old monastic settlement, I can see how Cappadocia’s landscape could induce a religious experience.

During the 6th and 7th centuries, the Anatolian Plateau was right in the path of any marauding army who wanted to head west to Constantinople and wreak havoc on its way. In fact, there was a set of beacon placed at interval to warn the citizens of that great city of impending trouble. But what about the locals? How did they deals with the relatively frequent stream of invaders? Simple. They built downwards, creating a network of underground cities invisible to outsiders. In those days, there were over a hundred of these underground settlements. We only had time to visit one, the 85 meter(278 feet) deep underground city Derinkuyu.

Derinkuyu was once home to 10,000 people and sometimes these people wouldn’t go above ground for several months, which astounds me since I thrive on sunlight. Of course, there was no air-conditioning in the 6th and 7th centuries, so the cooler temperatures may have been a big draw for staying underdoors. Also, the constant temperature was ideal for making wine, so maybe the atmosphere was also ideal for making parties, as a good German friend of mine would say. In any case, the city was equipped with stables, housing, churches, storages facilities, as well as wine and oil presses.

Derinkuyu and its counterpart underground cities were serious about defense. They disguised many city air shafts as wells, and they kept huge roll-out doors made out of stone ready to block out any intruders who got wise to their underground lifestyle.

And if your neighbors started to get on your nerves in such close, claustrophobic quarters, never fear. No matter who was overfoot, you could always follow one of the underground passages to another underground city for a change of scenery and company. As much as these cities are worth visiting, I would prefer to stay above ground and soak in the sunshine. Of course, we didn’t have any marauding armies to contend with during our visit to Turkey, just other groups of tourists.

The Winter Olympics are here again, and it recently occurred to me that I have been in Europe for the past three sets of winter games. (In case you are curious, I was living in Lille for the 2002 Salt Lake City games, we were already Zurich-based for the 2006 Torino games, and we are still in Zurich for the 2010 Vancouver games.) We were lucky in 2006. Torino is about a five hour drive from Zurich, so we decided to make the trip to Italy to see some of the events live. I was particularly excited about seeing some men’s hockey. As you can see from the above photo, we got great seats to see one of the round robin games. And what a treat it was to not only see Olympic hockey, but to see it at a convenient hour!

In 2002, when I was living in Lille, I had a television in the furnished apartment provided by my school. However, the eight-hour time zone difference made for some crazy hours. Most of the round robin games were broadcast live, but that meant they were shown in the middle of the night. Of course, I stayed up for all the US games, and the US-Russia match (which the US won on the anniversary of the Miracle on Ice) was so exciting that I may have woken up my neighbors.

The 2010 Vancouver schedule is unfortunately comparable. This morning the Slovakia-Czech Republic game was on at 6AM, which meant that I saw some of the second period at the gym, but again, not an ideal time. By chance, Tuesday’s US-Switzerland game was played at 9PM Swiss time. I had to skip my dance class to watch the game, but that is nothing compared to the broadcast time of the next US game: midnight tonight. I’ll probably stay up for it. After all, the Olympics are only every four years. I just hope the Swiss will have better hockey coverage than the French. In 2002, I was horrified that they not only did not broadcast the gold medal game live, the stupid French coverage preempted the game with a montage of ice dancers. Two words for you, France: La Honte!

… he sends you this lovely valentine:

Actually, this site, someecards, has some really funny stuff. In particular, I love the tagline: when you care enough to hit send

There are few things that I feel more passionate about than travel, and one of them is food. Thus, it should come as no surprise that having a special meal to top off my 30th birthday was high priority.

On that day, and the days surrounding it, Niko and I were in Göreme, right in the heart of the Cappadocia region. My wonderful husband did some restaurant research and found this place called Dibek. The restaurant is housed in a four hundred year old building with some charming decor. Just the right amount of traditional without falling prey to kitsch. Instead of the standard upright table and chairs, there were little booths filled with cushions and carpets. You had to take your shoes off, but who cares when you are getting cuteness like this. Check out our booth:

Looking at this place, you can understand why Niko made a reservation for us. In fact, if you wanted to order the traditional slow-cooked pottery kebabs (testi kebabi in Turkish), you needed to order that in advance as well. We made our reservation the day before my birthday, and we both order the vegetarian pottery kebabs for our meal as well. So these pottery kebabs, their names are somewhat self explanatory, as in it is a dish that is cooked in pottery. The term kebab does throw me off a bit, since I normally associate kebabs with skewers, not stews that are cooked for several hours in a clay pot over fire. But who am I to argue with the locals over the nomenclature of their traditional foods?

They brought us plates of rice at the same time as our steaming clay pots. I must admit that I forgot to take a picture of the moment when our waiter opened the pots and poured our “kebabs” onto our plates, but it looked lovelier on the plate than in the pot.

So what did it taste like? A bit like briam, a bit like tajine. Overall, delicious. I couldn’t ask for a better meal to mark my birthday. And a little Turkish raki (the whitish liquid in the above picture) really rounded the evening.

Istanbul is a mega-city to rival Tokyo and Mexico City in size, and Paris and Rome in cultural offerings. Of course, no first time visit to the city formerly known as Constantinople* would be complete without seeing two of its most famous landmarks: Agia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. Fortunately, especially for such a massive metropolis, they are right across from each other. You can even get a decent view of the Blue Mosque from the upper levels of Agia Sophia:

A green-space of park separates the two, but as you can see the Blue Mosque dwarfs Agia Sophia is size and current state of outdoor splendor.

Agia Sophia:

The Blue Mosque:

One of my friend’s described Agia Sophia as an “old barn”, a sadly apt label considering how Justinian’s church was once the most magnificent in all of Christendom. Despite its shortcomings, Agia Sophia is still an architectural wonder. The Byzantines were excellent dome builders. Justinian’s architects found a way to create a lightweight dome and then hide the support pillars inside the church’s interior walls, a feat that Mehmet’s more modern* architects were unable to repeat for the Blue Mosque’s dome. Aside from the floating feel of the dome, there is very little left from the church’s original interior. The building was converted into a mosque after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, and the resplendent Byzantine mosaics were covered with plaster and/or destroyed in subsequent earthquakes.

The Blue Mosque is still a house of worship (Agia Sophia has been a museum since 1935), and as such, the interior is beautifully kept up. I wouldn’t call it Istanbul’s most beautiful moque (in my opinion, that title goes to oddly-named Blue Mosque. Odd because the mosque is 400 years old) but it was still visually stunning. My Lonely Planet guide referred to the dome’s support pillars as “elephant feet”. I must admit that epithet suits them well.

That same friend who pointed out Agia Sophia’s shortcomings directed me to Chora Church, a little Byzantine-era church in the Western Districts of the city. It is a bit of a trek from the center of town, but its mosaics…

…its sparkling mosaics…

…are easily amongst the most beautiful things to see in Istanbul. After seeing Chora Church, I can only imagine what Agia Sophia must have been like when Justianian walked through her doors for the first time 1500 years ago.

*Did you know that the word “Istanbul” comes from Greek words “stin poli” which literally means “in the city” or “to the city”?

** I use the term “modern” loosely, since the Blue Mosque was constructed in the 17th Century, 1100 years after Agia Sophia, which was finished in 537.