Let It Stop Snowing/Isn't It Pretty?

Over the last few days I've been taking photos of the snow on our balcony in order to impress you all with the arctic conditions of my life.

(I can't believe I ever thought this was impressive)

(Getting better/worse, depending on which side of the wall you're standing on)

(That's more like it. Or not)

Snowy!

So cold and so pretty!
Although it is sort of wreaking havoc with our pram, which has very small and uncooperative wheels that tend to get all clogged up and stop rolling whenever they are faced with mud or fallen leaves or even humid air. Or snow, as it turns out. I may stay indoors for the next few months.

The Calm Before The Snow

What delightful weather we've been having lately, especially on the weekends! Last Saturday we went on an excursion to look at the Eiger, and had a lovely time forcing our extremely urban pram to cope with dirt roads (!), puddles (!!) and patches of snow (oh, the horror!). We were also accosted by tourists (I'm kinda loath to say they were Japanese, because it seems like such a cliche, but they were so there you go) who were so swept away by No's cuteness that they insisted on taking her photo a lot, which was hilarious and weird and lovely.

(The pram endures the outdoors)

Oh, and we ate fantastic Swiss mountainy food (lots of potato and meat and things. We resisted the call of dessert, but really, you should have seen the meringue on offer. It was topped with what was described in the menu as "viel schlagrahm" (=lots of whipped cream. The menu was mostly translated into english as well, but the english translation for this bit left off the "lots". Maybe tourists in Switzerland will think that that is the standard amount of whipped cream on any dessert. Hmm), and they weren't kidding. The finished product was easily the size of my head, and every time one was brought out by a waiter, everyone turned and stared and giggled a bit. Which was nice.

And then this Saturday we wasted the nice morning by doing a bit of Christmas reconnaissance in Bern (we've decided to put up christmas decorations for the first time ever, which means we have to buy some christmas decorations. R had very firm and surprisingly conservative ideas about what is and isn't acceptable in a christmas decoration, but I won him over in the end and now it seems I am going to have to talk him out of buying all the revolting jokey cat head/psycho squirrel/doughnut/ostrich-on-a-tropical-holiday type baubles that we saw. For crying out loud. He still refuses to consider tinsel, though. And I think he secretly wants real live candles with flame to put on the tree, but refuses to take responsibility if our house burns down) and then went to Thun and had a delightful time in the afternoon sun with the mountains and the lake and the apple strudel. How much longer can this last?

(Dwindling afternoon sun near Thun)

Grr

Me: Grr, it's so hot.
Everyone Else: But you're Australian, you must love it.
Me: If I loved the heat I wouldn't have moved to Switzerland. Grr.

Flying

Yesterday I was worrying about getting sunburnt at the beach and the dilemma of having to potentially pack wet swimmers in my suitcase for the flight back to Switzerland (you'll all be pleased to know they dried in about 2 seconds after I hung them on the line), today I struggled not to fall over in the snow slush on the way home from the train station with my giganto suitcase and in my summery shoes. Sigh.

In other news, when we were going through the metal detectors in Dubai, one of the staff asked me "are you pregnant?". I said yes, and she directed me around the side of the machines and over to some woman who took me into a cubicle and frisked me (in lieu of being metal detected). I think most options are better than being frisked (including those nudie scanners that are causing such controversy lately), but this was the first I've heard of avoiding metal detectors during pregnancy. Which is possibly not ideal, since I've gone through at least 4 of them in the last few weeks.

Serious

Yesterday I saw a blurb stuck on a tram window about how not to get swine flu (or any sort of flu, I suppose, but I guess swine flu was what inspired it), an ad on telly about how not to get (swine) flu, and a 12-step set of instructions in a museum toilet on how to wash my hands thoroughly.

Other than that I had a delightful day that was in no way blighted by the spectre of disease and death. We went to the Tinguely museum in Basel (which was sort of bad timing because it's mostly closed at the moment, preparing for new exhibitions which are opening next week. Still better that going to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, though, because oh my goodness there was a massive ticket queue there both times we went past. Reto and I saw the exhibition on the easter weekend, which you would think would be a moronic time to go to something like that, and it was pretty crowded when we were there, but apparently the last weeks before it closes are much worse.), the high point of which was a toss up between this (the Meta-Harmonie 2, a giganto machine with all sorts of drums and keyboards and cymbals attached which, unsurprisingly, makes a bit of a racket when you press the "go" button and not in a delightfully musical way, either, in case you were getting your hopes up. More in a random banging of drums way) and lunch, which was veal with proscuitto and parmesan cheese and a red wine risotto, and although in general I completely disapprove of the mixing of meat (as in two or more types at once), this was ridiculously delicious. And the salad was great, and the coffee was great, and the restaurant itself was also charming. And then we went for a pleasant stroll along the river in the afternoon sun and watched children and dogs and the occasional adult frolicking in the water, and then we almost froze to death in our bed overnight when the temperature suddenly dropped about 45 degrees (possible exaggeration. I was forced to close the window, though, which I normally never ever do). So that was mostly delightful.

Actually Still Summer

In spite of what I said the other day about it being like autumn these days, it's not really. I'm still happily getting around in tshirts and putting on sunscreen and not feeling cold. So imagine my surprise when I went to Coop today to buy an avocado and saw VAST QUANTITIES of christmassy biscuits offering themselves up to me in the biscuit aisle (actually it was the chocolate aisle. They always put the seasonal biscuits there instead of in the biscuit aisle, which seems odd)! Yes yes, everyone knows that supermarkets go mental putting out their hot cross buns in January, but really! It's still [here in crazy upside-down world where the seasons are not only at the wrong time of year but they don't even change on the right days either] summer! And not in a sensible summery Australian christmas (where seasonal biscuits are not invited) kind of way, either!

Anyway, all these giganto bags of my favourite version of pfeffernusse (the ones without the crappy chocolate coating on the bottom) were gazing out at me from the chocolate aisle and I thought to myself "This is ridiculous! It's still summer! That's half a kilo of biscuits that Reto doesn't like (he only likes the zimtsternen and I think they suck) and I'm never going to be able to restrain myself from scoffing the whole packet and feeling sick" and passed stoically on by with only my avocado to console me. Which I think was the right decision, but if I end up with a repeat of last year's debacle, where they eventually stopped selling my biscuits and only sold the crappy chocolate-bottomed ones before I had managed to have a scoffathon, I'm going to be VERY ANNOYED.

Hello Autumn!

The temperature is no longer in the 30s (it was really only last week that that happened), I noticed some trees turning autumny the other day, and the idea of a fondue is positively appealing. Yay for the end of summer! I realise that I whined constantly for 4 months or so about being cold and how I was looking forward to seeing the sun again, but I can't kid myself for long. I hate summer, and good riddance to it (although these ridiculous season-changing dates here means we do still have a few more weeks to go).

Cool

Sunday mornings at our place are normally a pleasant non-frenzy of watching 3 solid hours of old episodes of Top Gear on BBC somethingorother, and of getting absolutely all the food out of our kitchen, eating half of it, and putting the rest of it back. This week, though, we pulled ourselves together surprisingly early (I am fed up with eating cheese and gherkins for breakfast, which are usually the Sunday-morning brekky staples. Remind me to rant about the Switzy idea of brunch later. And the second episode of Top Gear was one that was on last weekend) and we went and wandered around some gorge instead.

Summer seems to have appeared all of a sudden. I mean, as well as having officially appeared (it started yesterday or something. Possibly the day before. Or even the day after, I don't know any more. What's wrong with starting seasons on the first of the month, like in sensible countries, I say?), it also manifested itself by bringing some actual hot weather, a change from the relentless weeks of rain and temperatures in the teens that we've had lately, not necessarily in a good way. Anyway, we decided to go and do something cool (obviously I mean literally cool, as in with lower temperatures, not cool like "cool, man" because we're not really like that) and we ended up at the Aareschlucht, which is this gorge thing that the Aare (river. As in Aarau, as eagle-eyed readers might recognise as my former home or something) goes through, in the general vicinity of Meiringen, where the nerdier of you will know that Sherlock Holmes would have met his watery end had he not not really existed.

Anyway, it was super! And cool! It was a good 10 degrees* cooler in that gorge thingie than it was out of it. It basically involved walking along this walkway thing that had been built on the side of a rockface, and occasionally through rock, by the river. Which looked very cold. Sadly, nothing very interesting happened, so I'm just going to bung up a few photos and leave it at that.

* total guess

In Case You Were Wondering About My Feet

Yesterday I spent a while sitting in the sun. Now my feet are sunburnt.

I hate weather.

In other news, I also ate more meat this weekend than I have in the last several months combined (possibly). I went to the housewarming party of some friends on Saturday and had a frenzy of eating ostrich and chicken and assorted types of pig product, and then on Sunday we had another barbecue with the in-laws, and ate kebabs (on sticks) made of bits of chicken interspersed with bits of cheese, which was just as weird as it sounds. And yet also quite nice.

Yay For The Weather!

Well, depending on whose opinion you listen to, it's either not summer any more (yay! That's my opinion), or it's still winter (also yay! That's Reto). And then on Thursday, when we're back in Switzy, it will still be winter/not summer! Yay!

Life's A Beach

I went swimming at the beach this morning (for the second time since we have been back in Aus, which is more times than I have been to the beach in the last five years or so) and apart from the weather being ridiculously hot and the water ridiculously cold, it was really super. It was quite striking last week when I was at the beach how much I enjoyed it, actually. Usually all the heat and sand and sunscreen and crowds and threat of skin cancer and having to get changed in horrible beachy toilets and stuff drives me bonkers. I think my new non-hating of the beach comes mainly from my enthusiastic embrace of using a parasol every time the sun even threatens to shine (and my lack of concern at being laughed at by sunburnt morons. Let's see how much they're laughing in 20 years when they look like old leather handbags and they spend their holidays at the doctor's office having their melanomas removed. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Actually, the sad truth is that me with my hopeless skin that burns in an instant is far more likely to turn cancerous even though I've spent my entire life putting on sunscreen and hiding under trees. I suspect it might be my dermatological destiny to be a european).

Now I just need to find a way to be able to surgically attach my sunglasses to my face (so I can wear them in the ocean and they don't fall off at the first sign of waves) and I will be all set.

No Snow, But ...

... look what it looks like here! Grimly grey and depressing, yes, but for the last few days there has been relentless frost that never melts and just gets frostier every day. It's really lovely, actually, because it's so much more delicate and interesting-looking than snow.

It also means that it's ridiculously freezing, to the extent that I might not go outside again until it becomes absolutely essential (which really means for a week and a half, which is when I leave for Australia! Hello summer!). I'm pretty sure there's enough food in the house to sustain me..

Hello Autumn

Finally it's autumn. It even feels like autumn. I saw a squirrel frolicking in a tree the other day, trying to hide what seemed to be an discarded sandwich crust. Reto was attacked by some walnuts that were blown out of their tree by a gust of wind (he then brought them home and gave to me and I ate them. Aah, sweet revenge). I saw a father/daughter team grubbing around in some shrubbery. Reto suggested they might have been collecting chestnuts. This is all very topsy-turvy-Enid-Blyton-style alterno-world, but I'm sure they are all good solid signs of autumn. In this backward hemisphere, anyway. Plus leaves are turning funny colours and/or falling off trees, and it was all cold and foggy this morning, and I have recently been considering turning the heating on in our flat because it's starting to get quite cold at night. Although possibly that is because I always insist on having all the windows open. Anyway, hello autumn.

My official aims for the season are to 1) eat a whole lot of fondue on the balcony (I am going to wait until it is properly cold before I do this. For some reason being freezing seems to help the cheese-digesting process), and 2) come up with the perfect gluhwein recipe. Happily, both of these aims seem extremely achievable.

Not Summer

Well, because these crazy Europeans don't know their arses from their elbows (sorry, Europeans, but you can't deny it) it's still summer (until the 20th), but it's kind of freezing outside (in the sense that when I go outside these days I tend to wear socks and a jumper as well as all the rest of it), Migros is full of pre-packaged fondue cheese (mmm, cheese) and the autumn seasonal yoghurt (wildberry, grape and something else which I think is apricot. That is three separate yoghurts, by the way) and I am constantly tempted to spend all my time in a nice warm bath.

Flooding And Not

As I said I would some time in the far distant past, I am putting up some comparative shots of the river here (the Aare), when it was in flood (in August) and now (when it seems to be lower than normal, but if I don't mention that it will make it all the more dramatic).

(looking upstream towards the footbridge to bird island. Incidentally, that's not the real name of the island, and I'm only putting these captions in to break up the photos in a sensible manner)

(standing on bird island and looking down the river)

(the overflow from the electricity station)

Water,Water, Everywhere

As you may know, Switzerland is aflood. I actually didn't know this until yesterday, since I did not hear/read/see any news the whole time that I was in Samedan, until yesterday morning when Reto looked at the nzz and found out about it. We came back to Aarau yesterday and I took a few photos.

I'm planning to go and take more photos for comparative purposes next week (or whenever the water is at its normal level again). The damage that the water has caused in Aarau seems to have been mainly related to the flooding of some of the houses along the edge of the river (I saw a few people taking their muddy belongings out of their flooded cellars and garages and then pumping the water out and back into the river, but most seemed to be fine), the accumulation of masses of trees and branches at bridges and weirs and the electricity station thing that is built across the river (as seen below),and the potentially disastrous flooding of the local athletics field, soon to be home of the stone-throwing competition part of the Schwing- und Älplerfest that you will no doubt read all about here in a few weeks (click on the bit in that link that says "Offnen Sie unseren Trailer HIER" etc.. for a blurb (possibly incomprehensible) and some pictures (entertaining) of what to expect). The ducks and swans seem to be enjoying paddling around in the newly-formed shallows in the grass, though.

Birthday in 8 Parts

Well, Reto's birthday is finally over, and various points can be made.

1. I am an excellent and thoughtful girlfriend. I got him an excellent present (it's a board game, which is testament to my powers of patience and self-sacrifice, because I don't really like board games. Or are they called bored games? Hmm. Anyway, it seems quite a good one and I don't hate it yet, although it is only a day later and we have only played 3 times) and I made him a birthday cake. Which was both delicious and fairly childish (and as you can see I didn't make enough icing to cover all the sides. Note also that he did not turn 5. My boyfriend is a sensible age, but I didn't want to turn the cake into an angry echidna with all the candles we would have needed to make it numerically accurate. Actually, I don't think we would have had enough candles, hahaha).

2. Mountains are nice. We went bushwalking on some mountain near here and it was lovely. The weather was nice (sunny but a bit cloudy and with a bit of wind so it wasn't too hot), the view was super, the whole thing was invigorating and outdoorsy and wholesome.

3. Mountainy Switzerland looks a bit like mountainy Australia (if you squint a bit and don't pay too much attention to what the altitude is. It also helps if you are above the tree line in both countries). Sadly I don't have the photos of our trip to Mt Kosciuszko here to prove it, but I might look into adding some later. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it, unlikely though it seems.

4. The Swiss are very civilised. While up on this mountain (and we spent basically the whole day at a higher altitude than the highest point in Australia) we went to two restaurants. There was another that we could have gone to, but we couldn't be bothered walking the few hundred vertical metres to get to it, and so we missed out on another overpriced coffee and piece of cake or sausage or similar). It actually reminded me quite a lot of many of Reto's stories of being in the army ("We went for a 6 hour hike. Well, it was 3 hours to a restaurant on top of a mountain and then we had lunch for an hour and then we walked back. The next day we went to a water-slide park").

5. Orthodox Jewish people are funnier than you might imagine. They always seem to wear such sensible hats for not-getting-sunburnt purposes, but up on the mountain apparently baseball caps are the headwear of choice. As well as white sneakers (which was sensible), plus all the normal orthodox Jewish attire. Possibly there were some undercover orthodox Jews up there too, but they weren't as noticeable as the ones who only traded in the hats and shoes.

6. I have unfortunate skin. I embraced my usual "spending time in the sun" ensemble (which basically means an umbrella and long pants, as well as several generous slatherings of 30+ sunscreen. "Australian standard" according to the bottle)

and still ended up kind of red at the end of the day. Sigh.

7. Samedan is tiny

(which wasn't news, but it was reaffirmed with a semi-aerial view) but the airport is super. It's just over the river from the bulk of the town (as you can perhaps tell from the pic) and there aren't really any fences keeping you from wandering about in it. In fact, there is a walking path leading to it and a bench so that you can sit there and look at it. We watched a few planes take off and land there the other day (which is NOWHERE NEAR AS NERDY AS IT SOUNDS, because they were all small planes and gliders, which was unusual and wobbly and fraught with potential danger), which was a welcome change from the mini golf debacle.

8. And finally, Swiss cows are very shiny and clean. And apparently potentially dangerous.

Turning Into A Lizard

Apparently I have absolutely no powers of homeostasis.

Just a few days ago I was sittting on the couch having breakfast in the living room of where I live in Sydney when I realised that my toes had turned a numb-ish and deathly sort of grey from the cold (which is a shade never seen before. Interestingly, when I was young my extremities used to turn sort of purple and orange, then later it was more like blue, and now apparently my toes turn grey and my fingers turn white).

Fast forward a few days and I am back in Switzy where it has been something around 30-ish degrees for the last few days (ie. hot but not ridiculously so) and Reto complains every time I lay a finger on him because I am so ludicrously warm all the time. I had to put my feet under the cold tap the other night before I went to bed because otherwise I end up lying in bed feeling like they are about to spontaneously combust or something (which is not conducive to falling asleep, not even for someone just back from 30 hours of air-travel-based sleep deprivation). This whole cold-tap-foot thing is not new, but normally it is something I only had to do when I was visiting my parents in their former home in one of the more tropical parts of NSW, where Christmas day was known to be in the 40s.

Anyway, it seems I am turning into some sort of cold-blooded reptile type. Expect to see me lying on the roads in the winter months, trying to suck all the warmth I can find out of the bitumen.

Thorpey's Retirement

It's good to see that Our Thorpey, now that he has given up on swimming, has something else to occupy his time. He has become an eco-warrior (possibly not news to anyone else in Australia, but I hadn't heard). No doubt he is doing other things too, but this arvo while in a frenzy of telly-viewing, I have been told by Thorpey about ways to build a good compost heap, and about how to make my workplace greener. Which is all well and good, except that I am unemployed and I live in a small apartment on the 9th floor (or is it not the 9th floor? Good lord, I have been away for a month and suddenly I might not be able to get home again. Reto, if you are reading this you have to come and collect me at the airport. Or at least at the train station). Plus of course I am ludicrously green anyway, if you don't count all the flying back and forth across the globe (sigh).