Living in Switzerland. The version not made for television. In 2006, American Chantal Panozzo moved to a spa town near Zurich, ready for a glamorous life as an expatriate. She wanted to eat chocolate, climb mountains, and order cheese in four languages. Instead, she lived a life that aligned more with reality than with fantasy. Contrary to the widespread American belief, Switzerland is not just the setting of a fairy tale called Heidi. It is a real place where someone with a master's degree in communication can't even make a phone call, where you can be hired in one language and fired in another, and where small talk does not exist – but phrases like residence categories for third-country nationals do. Swiss Life: 30 Things I Wish I Had Known is a collection of both published and new essays in which Chantal discovers that no matter how hard she tries to get her geraniums to bloom properly, she will never be a glamorous American expatriate – or Swiss.