As it turns out, Olivia's 'sensibly employed' Australian persona was all a bit of a con and in fact she is kind of bonkers. One of the first people we met (and I use that term loosely) was Foster the pig:
Foster isn't just some garden-variety Swiss pig. He was brought, deliberately, all the way from Australia as hand luggage. Admittedly he is extremely squashable, and Olivia likes to pretend that he doubles as a pillow on aeroplanes, but frankly I suspect that Fostie would never have to suffer the indignity of having a tired head smush him into the shoulder of a stranger in economy class. Actually, I think that Fostie is to Olivia what my parents' cat Sammy is to my parents. Sometime I think my parents treat Sammy better than they treat me (for example - no one ever gets me a birthday present any more, but Sammy routinely gets prawns on his birthday).
Fosty may be adorable but he is not particularly self sufficient, so one afternoon when Olivia was busy carousing around town, Reto and I forced her to let us babysit him (which I suspect she didn't really want us to do because she didn't think we would keep him out of trouble):
Apart from assorted Fosty-related fun and revelling in all the english-speaking with someone who is doing practically the same sort of stuff I am doing, we mainly spent the weekend walking around the shore of Lake Geneva and eating ice cream. Olivia and I had a brief adventure on a pedalo (a pedal-powered boaty thing) on the lake.
We made a small attempt to go to the Olympic museum in Lausanne, which ended up only really involving walking around the gardens and the shop there and not actually going into the museum itself (I might like the Olympics, but really, I'm not that interested in sport that I am willing to pay to find out about it). We all ate a huge amount of scary looking easter eggs, we loafed around a lot, we slept in a lot, and we all managed to avoind being killed by the ceiling in Olivia's flat (which is kind of falling down). We were entertained by the excellent garden-based statues in Montreux 
(Montreux being home to the well known jazz festival, hence the musical garden sculpture theme). I made two attempts to steal books from youth hostels, only to be met with failure both times (there was nothing on offer at all in Vevey, and the best I could find in Montreux was christian propaganda about a Chinese communist who found Jesus, but not even at Easter was that particularly appealing).
We made a small attempt to go to the Olympic museum in Lausanne, which ended up only really involving walking around the gardens and the shop there and not actually going into the museum itself (I might like the Olympics, but really, I'm not that interested in sport that I am willing to pay to find out about it). We all ate a huge amount of scary looking easter eggs, we loafed around a lot, we slept in a lot, and we all managed to avoind being killed by the ceiling in Olivia's flat (which is kind of falling down). We were entertained by the excellent garden-based statues in Montreux (Montreux being home to the well known jazz festival, hence the musical garden sculpture theme). I made two attempts to steal books from youth hostels, only to be met with failure both times (there was nothing on offer at all in Vevey, and the best I could find in Montreux was christian propaganda about a Chinese communist who found Jesus, but not even at Easter was that particularly appealing). All in all it was a really lovely weekend, but be warned, people. If you ever find yourself in possession of small children, think twice before you let Olivia be in charge of them because she may well entrust them to other (untrustworthy) people to look after, use them as pillows on planes, or coerce them into potentially dangerous (yet entertaining) photo opportunities. 
(No animals were harmed during the making of this post. None that are actually alive, anyway. Fosty survived mostly unmangled)
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