Old World Charm and Moon Boots: Stories From the Land of Cheese

By the time my birthday rolled around, Brad and I were feeling up to a mini get away. We were still living without light fixtures, but, we now had our furniture and we were finally feeling human again. After ruling out Paris (not a good idea with a four-month old), we settled on a day-trip to Annecy in France. Annecy is about an hour drive from our home outside of Geneva and we’d heard rumors of its beauty. Nestled in the Alps and on a beautiful lake, it can’t but be beautiful, right? Ok, so it’s no Paris, but hey, it’s still the French Alps. I mean, come on!

We decided that Tycho would not be accompanying us on this trip, so we set out to find him a nice “doggie-camp” to attend. A friend of mine recommended a place in the next town over called Gland (yes, the “d” is silent, but I prefer to pronounce it the English way and say the “d” on the end. “Hi, I’m from Gland and this is my sister, she’s from Cyst.” Okay, I digress.) Brad asked a colleague to arrange a rendezvous, as the owner of the kennel does not speak a lick of English. She is the other Swiss person that isn’t bilingual.

On the day in question, I took Tycho to camp. I rang the bell and the owner, a pretty and gruff woman, wearing the most enormous shit-kicking boots I’d ever seen, came to the gate. I gave my standard greeting but couldn’t keep my eyes off her boots. On closer inspection, I determined that they were moon boots (moon boots!!), wow! Struggling to maintain eye contact, I ceremoniously fanned out Tycho’s health records, including his brand new Swiss passport. Oh yes, our dog is the only member of the family with a Swiss passport. In Switzerland, you need a passport for your dog—with his microchip number and vaccination record—in order to cross the border.

I was hoping that displaying Tycho’s documentation would spare me an awkward and painful conversation about the well-being of my dog. No such luck. I got through the name and address part without a hitch and then it came to the gender questions. She asked if Tycho was male or female. I responded “male” and she drew a big male symbol on the sheet. I remembered that they paired up the dogs according to gender, so I wanted to make sure that she knew Tycho was neutered. I didn’t want him hanging out with any aggressive Alpha dogs for the day, picking up bad habits.

I had conveniently learned the word for neutered on a chance encounter with a dog with an Elizabethan collar (you know, the cone thing) around its neck. That owner tried to explain that her dog had been neutered and used the word châtré, which sounds like castrated. I produced my random vocab word for the kennel owner (hoping I wouldn’t have to resort to sign language), and she must have understood my horrid pronunciation, because she crossed out the male sign. Poor Tycho.

With Tycho safely tucked away, we started out for Annecy.