One year and 26 weeks - Favorable exchange rates and hiking to Chaumont

K after his 2011 swim in Lake Neuchâtel

Two weekends ago, we walked into town for the 22nd annual Neuchatel Buskers festival.  Unlike last year, when M got drafted as an audience volunteer, this year, we just watched all of the performances.  One of the best was an Indian troupe that had tightrope walking and pole-climbing.  But we also enjoyed seeing musicians from the U.S. to Africa to Italy.  We were a bit disappointed to have missed the big brass hip hop band this year that some colleagues had seen.  Also, that weekend, K did his second annual swim in Lake Neuchatel.  He managed to get the swim in just before the sky opened up and there was a downpour.

During the week, we attended a Jazz/Dixieland concert.  One of our coworkers is the keyboard player in the band.  Nice night with lots of good music.  Not at all what we expected from a "Jazz evening", but very enjoyable.

Last weekend, Ken had to spend Saturday morning at work.  While K was out, M was called on by a visitor she'd never seen before: Mr. Fox.  She noticed a furry, cat-like object on the patio.  On further inspection, she saw that it was, in fact, a red fox trying to catch a nap on the sunny patio.  She tried to get some pictures and a video, but the fox wasn't really interested in performing, so most of the videos just focus on a large curled-up hairball that only moves every 30 seconds to swat at the flies buzzing around it.  On Sunday, there was more animal excitement to be had at the local ecofair up in the hills at Cressier.  We got to pet goats, sheep, and cows, and we got to see llamas, pigs, chickens, alpine cows, and rabbits.  There were demonstrations on fiber carding and barn bowling.  We enjoyed walking around to all the stalls to see the organic wares for sale.  We even got in a little bit of wine tasting.  For lunch, M had a solar-cooked crepe with cheese and tomato.

Our neighbor, Mr. Fox

As you may be aware at the moment, if you've been following global finance, the Swiss franc is incredibly strong at the moment.  While the US dollar and the euro get hammered by the economic crises, people have been buying up the Swiss franc.  This, in turn, has caused the Swiss currency to became very strong, to the detriment of local Swiss exporters.  In the mean time, contrary to logic, Swiss prices for goods, including imports, have remained high.  This means now is an excellent time to go shopping across the border. (Note: K complains that this will screw-up our US taxes; but M thinks he's a silly bugger)

Therefore, this past weekend, we tried to get in a little bit of sight-seeing, as well as stimulating the French economy in the French alpine cities of Grenoble and Chambery.   We drove almost three hours to get to Grenoble first, the "capital of the French Alps", a medium size city with a gritty French charm.  One of the main reasons we had chosen Grenoble was due to a particular store that sells travel bags, but as luck would have it, the store was closed due to the owner's month long vacation.  (That's as irritating as it sounds.)  We tried to let it go and spent most of the morning and afternoon strolling through the city, popping into stores every now and then, in fact, buying very little considering a good part of the reason for the trip was to shop.  What we were able to take advantage of was the weather which turned mostly sunny as opposed to the gloomy rain in Neuchatel.  We had a pleasant lunch outside, not far from one of the town's fountains.

Elephant  Fountain, Chambery, France

We decided to take the country roads to our next destination, Chambery, which turned the journey from a half hour to an hour, but saved us road tolls and allowed us to see some amazing scenery.  There were beautiful views of the French Alps, and the scenery switched back and forth between cute little villages, pasture land, and forested gullies.  Before entering Chambery, we had some fun picking out products to try in a local supermarket.  After the supermarket, our destination inside Chambery (randomly picked from GPS selections) was the Elephant Fountain, one of the most famous attractions in Chambery.  The fountain was built in the 1800s to commemorate native son Benoît de Boigne's exploits in India.  After the fountain, we wandered through town to see what there was to see.  Both Chambery and Grenoble have good sized pedestrian areas so they were pretty easy to walk through.  On our walk we found the castle, with it's semi-circle tower, and a petanque court adjacent to it. After walking around town, we went in search of dinner.  We decided on an Indian restaurant which we sorely miss from the US.  K got a prix fixe menu with tandoori quail, and M got the veggie menu with a korma curry.  We were stuffed, and as we walked to the car for the long and late drive home, we agreed we would have to do some exercise the next day.

Therefore, we decided to go for a hike in the area. We settled on heading for Chaumont, the local peak where we had gone with Mary and Jack to show them the views over the Three Lakes.  2.4-hour hike up, a lovely picnic in the sun, and then 1.5-hour walk back down (much less strenuous than the walk up); a great way to spend Sunday.

View from about halfway up our hike

We crossed the Sentier du Temps trail, a sculptural rendition of the history of the life on Earth.  From reading local tourist brochures, M was looking for Dinosaurs; but all we saw was a tree-stump carving of  stromatolites (blue-green-algae nodules), as we didn't follow the "paleohistoric path" but just crossed it from time to time.

Lessons learned:
1)  It only takes a month and a half to get a duplicate, replacement Swiss residence card from the Neuchatel Controle des Habitants.  And, we got our replacement VW car key!
2) M likes Wheat beers; the "introductory woman's beer" per craftbeertemple.com (our new source of beer-tainment)
3) Lightning storms over the lake are quite excellent! (Bill & Ted Rule!)  Last week, the hot weather came to an end and storms rolled into Switzerland (the same bad weather we were looking to avoid by spending a weekend in France).
4) Since we moved to Neuchatel, we have noticed that our fellow Neuchatelois have shopping trolleys (big fabric/plastic bags on wheels; like hiking-backpack big, but they pull along the ground on wheels).  Locally, they cost 80-130 CHF.  In Grenoble, we scored one for 30 Euro.  K spent the rest of the day dragging it around with a grin on his face!
5) K will now spend the rest of his time in Neuchatel dragging the afore-mentioned shopping trolley up the darn hill to the apartment.  Let's see how much he smiles then.  Sucka!!!!

One year and 23 weeks - Business trip to Hamburg and Swiss National Day

Following our not-a-complete-disaster-but-nearly trip to Spain, we were quite keen to be homebodies.  On the weekends, we just hung around the apartment and walked down to town to do errands.  During the week, we started the process to replace the items in the stolen bag.  M went to the US Embassy in Bern to submit the application for her new passport to replace the emergency one she got at the Consulate in Barcelona.   She applied for a replacement drivers license and her Swiss residence permit card. We ordered new car keys and got new credit cards.

Less than two weeks after we'd gotten back, M had to fly to Hamburg, Germany for a training at a sister site.  She was completely stressed and guarded on the trip, sneaking glances at her luggage every 3 minutes.  Unfortunately, it was not possible to get down to the city of Hamburg during the trip, so visiting the city will just have to happen on the next trip (whenever that may be).

M came back to Neuchatel for the start of a 3-day weekend, Monday being the Swiss National Day.  Because of the holiday weekend, some coworkers had gone out of town and had asked the Boltons to pet-sit.  They left early, so Ken started caring for the animals Thursday night.  The menagerie included two black labs, one old kitty, and an aquarium full of fish.

For Swiss National Day, there were lots of festivities by the lake:  beach soccer, an American football demonstration, tight rope walking, a bmx track and games for the kids going on all weekend. The actual night of Swiss National Day, there were fireworks displays going off all around the lake.

Lessons Learned:
1. Germans eat some pretty odd dishes.  One lunch dish in Hamburg consisted of a small plate of boiled potatoes and a large plate covered in herbed cream.  It was reminiscent of the cauliflower "incident" on our honeymoon.