EN: Quartiertreff Enge in Zürich – our Local Gateway to Swiss Culture

Recently, I have made my first contribution to the activities at Quartiertreff Enge, our neighbourhood association here in Zürich. On the first occasion, together with number of Swiss (and one German, who sometimes had to act as an interpreter for me…) I helped out in putting up a large tent. Just a few days later, I lent a hand inside the same tent. Here the residents of this district – above all the children – are now hand dipping candles, something that seems to be hugely popular in Switzerland.

The agenda at Quartiertreff Enge is an ideal base when our family begins to discover Swiss culture. Last weekend, for example, this association organized our local Räbeliechtliumzug - a tradition where children parade with decorated lanterns, made from turnips. And exactly as I had hoped, the events here give us the opportunity to learn to know new people and thereby start to really form part of the place where we live.

As a bonus, you get a huge amount of absolutely free training in dialect (Mundart), more precisely the Zurich variant of Swiss German, for obvious reasons. No, I still do not understand everything that people are trying to say to me, but far more than what I would have done as late as two months ago...

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Deutsche Version
Svensk version