CH-USA: Return journey across two generations

Back in 1997, my father Daniel Soller trav­eled to the USA from Switzer­land for the first time in his entire life. He was not just vis­it­ing on hol­i­day:  he was there to start a new life. He had no idea about what would come, but when he got there, he loved most of what he found. 24  years after his move, I made the same jour­ney in the oppo­site direc­tion on an exchange and even though the same two coun­tries are involved, our expe­ri­ences have been quite different. 

Daniel expe­ri­enced quite a lot of cul­ture shock. He was struck by the dif­fer­ences in the edu­ca­tion sys­tems, the fact that the mil­i­tary is not manda­to­ry for all men in the USA, and the much short­er paid vaca­tions he said. In Switzer­land there are a min­i­mum of four weeks of vaca­tion per year and if you are under 20, you are enti­tled to five weeks. Accord­ing to the fed­er­al rules of paid vaca­tion the U.S. In the U.S. you get ten vaca­tion days per year. But he also noticed that the social safe­ty net is much stronger in Switzer­land than in Amer­i­ca. This means that the Swiss employ­er pro­tec­tion rules are much stronger, so you can­not just be fired from one day to the next. This can, of course, also work against the employ­ee because it means you can­not just quit a job with­out giv­ing notice. This is also true about some jobs in the U.S. but in Switzer­land it real­ly can’t be avoided. 

This social safe­ty also applies to health insur­ance, which is not manda­to­ry in the US – but if you do not have it, you could eas­i­ly go bank­rupt because of health insur­ance claims, even if you make a decent salary and are liv­ing well.The trade off for Swiss peo­ple is that they have to pay for it but from that they get peace of mind The oth­er big dif­fer­ence that impressed him was the gap in pay between low­er class jobs and high­er class jobs. Man­u­al work­ers tend to be treat­ed bet­ter in Switzer­land. Daniel says “I am still very shocked about some of these dif­fer­ences even after liv­ing in the U.S. for over 20 years”. 

After my jour­ney in the oppo­site direc­tion to spend an exchange year in Switzer­land, I imme­di­ate­ly noticed how peo­ple my age tend­ed to be much more open. An exam­ple of this was on my first day of school: many peo­ple greet­ed me with a hug. This type of friend­li­ness was not some­thing I had real­ly expe­ri­enced before. I also expe­ri­enced a sub­stan­tial change in my wardrobe. In the US we tend to dress in sweat­pants and hood­ies, but here most peo­ple wear trousers every day. This can affect the way you feel in school and if you are com­fort­able or not depend­ing on your style . Arriv­ing in Switzer­land and hear­ing my Swiss friends speak Swiss Ger­man, stan­dard Ger­man, French and oth­er lan­guages was the most shock­ing dif­fer­ence for me. 

In Switzer­land, every­body my age seems to be mul­ti­lin­gual. At my school in Switzer­land every­body learns at least two for­eign lan­guages. In the U.S. it is a huge deal if you can speak any oth­er lan­guage than Eng­lish, here is a quote from the “cdt.ch” “two out of three Swiss peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly speak sev­er­al lan­guages” and “more than two thirds of the swiss res­i­dent pop­u­la­tion aged 15 or over reg­u­lar­ly uses more than one lan­guage” .  Mov­ing to Switzer­land was no doubt the best and most chal­leng­ing thing I have ever done, and I would do it again if I could – and despite these down­sides there are many upsides, such as its size, its oppor­tu­ni­ties, and its diver­si­ty.  My father feels just the same about his move across the Atlantic to New York.