Weeks 11 and 12-Around the Lake and Hike around Creux du Van

Despite two long weekends in a row, we haven't done a whole lot. Mostly, we've just hung out in Neuchâtel. Last weekend, we walked down to the lake and walked along the edge. We just on the west edge of town, to continue to follow the lake you have to go onto this grassy path next to a pebbly beach. It's very tranquil and very scenic.

During this past week, we met up with a new (one week new) expat couple who will be living in the Neuchâtel area. Jenny and Luke just moved out from Colorado, and they have a two-year-old with them. We're hoping they might turn out to be dinner/game night buddies. We met at the Cafe du Cerf and then walked along the lake until the two-year-old had had enough. (In all fairness, the family had spent the day apartment hunting, and the little guy had gotten neither a proper nap nor lunch that day.)

This past weekend, we got in the European spirit and actually exercised outside. On Sunday, we biked down to the lake and, as before, headed west. We biked several kilometers but eventually found the cycling path headed away from the lake. We decided to turn around and stopped for a picnic lunch near one of the many little marinas along the lake.

On Monday (it being a long weekend due to Whit Monday), we met up with an

American couple from work, Drew and Tonya, and drove over to Creux du Van, a hugely impressive geologic feature. The rocky, circular cliff was created by water erosion from a local glacier; there is about a 150 m (almost 500 ft) fall from the edge. We did a "short" hike up to the ridge and then walked along the ridge. It was gorgeous, but it certainly wasn't someplace you'd go to be alone; it was crawling with people. After exploring the ridge, we hiked back down to the car which was parked pretty close to a little restaurant with a patio. We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon snacking and drinking our beer/tea/cider and chatting.

In addition to out-and-about activities, Ken has put the Bolton brewery back in "bidness." After almost two months in CH, we were settled enough to try this hobby here. Plus, K was really getting tired of the crappy Swiss beer. Of course, restarting the hobby has not been trivial. In CA, M had purchased a new gas stove, so it was no problem to boil 5gal (US gallons, not Imperial gallons) of wort (malty, hoppy, watery goodness) on the giant, Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor's More Power grunt, gas burner. However, the CH stove is much smaller than the CA stove, so there was some uncertainty whether the CH electric stove could do it.

Test 1: Place 5 gal beer pot on the CH stove. Would it fit? Yes and No. Yes: The pot is not bigger than the entire stove-top, so it does fit on the stove. No: The pot is much bigger than even the largest burner, so we'll only be able to heat part of the pot bottom.
Test 2: Put 5 gal of water on the stove to boil, without a lid (worst case test). Would it boil? Not even close. After 3 hours the water was hot but definitely not boiling.
At this point, K began investigating outdoor propane burners (used in the US to heat turkey fryers), but M insisted on another test. She muttered something about boys with their toys...
Test 3: Put 3.5gal of water on the stove to boil, with a lid (less water than I'd prefer to use, but we have a friend in CA who homebrews with a ~3.5gal pot with perfectly acceptable results). Would it boil? Oh it boiled alright. It is definitely homebrewing time!

Now, we needed ingredients. All of the Swiss homebrew stores we could find seemed to be in the German-speaking part of the country (which could be as close as 15 minutes away, but these stores are all near Zurich, the other end of the country, so about 3 hours away by car), so this became a web-based effort. After, reviewing (and translating) many webpages, K felt he understood things enough to place an order. After a few days, the box arrived in the mail, and everything was recognizable.

Two weekends ago, K boiled up Swiss batch number 1. And he had his first Swiss boil-over (hoppy, malty, watery mess all over the stove). Everthing went fine, fermentation started fine and bubbled away.

The next challenge was to package the beer. In CA, K used kegs, with a CO2 rig to dispense the beer. After some research, CO2 cylinders are available in CH, but the cylinders have a different outlet thread pattern, so K's US CO2 regulator was useless....Useless until we found that we could simply replace the nut that connects the regulator to the tank. We picked up a CO2 cylinder last weekend, and the CO2 cylinder nut arrived from the UK this weekend. Et voila! The first Swiss Bolton homebrew batch is kegged and pressurized.

Week 10 - Cheese- and Chocolate-Stravaganza

This past week was alright, although Margaret was feeling a bit under the weather. Fortunately, she was able to make enough of a recovery so that we could finally go to Gruyère.

The day started with cheese making at the Maison du Gruyère, a working cheese factory where they make up to 48 enormous wheels of cheese per day. We got to see them boil the milk, add the renet, and pour the concotion into cheese molds roughly 2 feet in diameter. After most of the whey (the liquidy part) drains out, they place an identification number on the top of the cheese and put a disk on top of the curds to compress them. After they're compressed, the wheels of cheese are put in a salt water bath to soak for about a day. After the salt water soaking, the long and tedious part takes place. The cheese is aged in a cellar smelling of ammonia for 6-15+ months on, depending on how smelly and flavorful you want your cheese. The cheese is not left completely by itself, however; every now and then it is pulled down from its aging spot and is scrubbed with more salt water, which encourages the formation of the cheese rind. (This is performed by a robot, so Ken was pretty jazzed)

After an hour and a half of ogling giant wheels of cheese, the only proper thing to do was to go get some of the melty stuff for lunch in the cheese's name-sake town, Gruyères (yep...the town has an "s" on the end; the cheese and region known as La Gruyère do not). We headed to one of the many establishments (practically any place that serves food) in Gruyères to get the local dish. As anticipated, it was cheesy heaven. Somehow, the locals manage to make it really creamy, not clumpy like when we make it; they say the secret is in the Gruyère cheese which melts smoothly. We had it served with pieces of bread and boiled potatoes (though apparently, Margaret was not eating the potatoes correctly according to our waitress...the french explanation on how to properly eat the fondue and potatoes went over our heads...regardless, it was delicious!).

After gorging ourselves on molten cheese and following with an ice cream/ meringue/Gruyère cream dessert, we trudged up the hill to the famous castle of Gruyères. The castle itself was neat, but the best part was the grounds and the view of the surrounding countryside. It was particularly fun listening to the bells tied around the necks of the cows which rang gently through the hills.

The day ended with a trip to the Cailler/Nestlé Chocolate Centre of Excellence in Broc. The Broc facility includes a factory, a chocolate research and development center, a chocolate museum, and, of course, a chocolate store. The museum was quite interesting and included a rather theatrical interpretive tour of the origins of Nestlé/Cailler chocolate. (Not recommended for people with a heart condition.) The end of the museum tour included an introduction to the raw materials of chocolate and a view of one of the plants assembly lines (complete with a tasty sample, "hot" off of the assembly line).

After a day full of cheese and chocolate, we had a nice meal of hummus, bread, and a banana, and turned in rather early.

Sunday was much more leisurely than Saturday but included a walk to the Neuchatel botanical garden, which was having a special event which included a plant sale. Margaret bought a tomato plant and some basil with hopes of being able to have a small fraction of the produce she grew with minimal effort in California. Her baby step goal is to keep it alive at least for the next week.

Lessons Learned:

1) Switzerland is in a unique situation when it comes to road signage. Whereas in the US, we can just say "Slippery" or "Bridge out" or "High wind area", it's much more difficult for this Swiss who have three official languages. Therefore, the Swiss rely heavily on pictographs to try to convey their messages. Unfortunately, sometimes it comes across a little like an episode of "Lassie"..."What is it, Lassie? You say Timmy's playing with a windsock?...What the **** are you trying to say, Lassie?!?"

One of the first questionable traffic signs we observed was the windsock sign. A Google search on traffic windsocks shows that traffic windsocks are not unique to Switzerland or Europe. Regardless, this is the first time either of us had encountered a wind sock sign. (For those who don't know, this sign indicates that the area you are about to drive through is susceptible to gusts of wind. If the actual windsock that follows this sign is billowing out, you should slow down.)

Other examples of Swiss traffic signs can be found at http://www.astra.admin.ch/dienstleistungen/00127/00634/index.html?lang=fr . I have included some favorite ones below:

a)House planted too close to tree

b)Emergency outdoor space heaters

c)French horns forbidden in this area

d) Ultrasonic canon firing range nearby


2) Swiss teens can be jerks just as big as U.S. teens can be. (Only, being bilingual seems to make them think they are cooler.) This is a bad combination when paired with an irritated American woman trying to get shopping done before the stores close in 10 minutes.

Week 9

Last weekend, we were planning to go to Gruyères to see the castle there, sample the local cheese (Gruyère, of course), and also visit a local chocolate factory. However, as previously mentioned, we learned that the weekend we were planning to go that the entire area surrounding Gruyères was being shut down to automobile traffic. So instead, we hung around Neuchâtel on Saturday, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Everybody was out enjoying the good weather, and everything seemed to be in bloom. While we were in town, we saw that the local military bands were having a "march-off". The bands rotated around the town, stopping in large spaces to perform a few songs (which included "The Bear Necessities" and "Copa Cabana") before moving on to the next location. It was a lot of fun. The streets were crowded with tables of people enjoying lunch or a drink in the fresh air. It was completely picturesque, and it almost felt like we were on some Euopean vacation.

On Sunday, still jonesing for a castle visit, we decided to go to the town of Pontarlier about an hour from Neuchâtel just past the French border. We visited an awesome castle (the Chateau de Joux, www.chateaudejoux.com) in the little town of La Cluse-et-Mijoux. It was built in the 11th century and was in perpetual construction through the 1800s. The highlights of the castle included a spiral staircase that could induce vertigo in just about anyone and a well (un puits) dug from within an underground chamber. The well is about 13 feet in diameter and almost 500 feet deep; to demonstrate how deep the well was, the guide poured a glass of water into the well from the top, and there was at least 10 seconds between when we saw the pour and we heard the splash of water. It was really neat. After the castle tour, we had lunch in and walked around Pontarlier. (Ken would like to take the opportunity to mock Margaret's decisions to visit the local area museums, which appear to curate anything that they can link to the area whether it is actually interesting or not.)

At the end of the week, we learned that our registration in Neuchâtel had finally been finalized and that we needed to go pay the reregistration fee. While we were out, we were also able to change our address for the car registration to Neuchâtel. This meant that we could finally give proof of our address in Neuchâtel so we can get the parking sticker to put on our car to park in front of our apartment. Of course, they couldn't give the sticker to us in person. Swiss efficiency dictates that it be sent to us in the mail.

This past weekend was not as nice as the previous one. It was gray and rainy, and the temperature dropped considerably. There wasn't much going on in town anyway because almost everything was closed for Labor Day. We did have a pleasant weekend lounging about in the apartment, however.

Lessons Learned:
1) Frozen green beans and green peas swap rankings in Switzerland. Although I detest the rubbery frozen green beans in the US (unless they are cut French style), the frozen green beans here are delicious. They're tender and quite flavorful. Unfortunately, however, the usually sweet, tender morsels of the US frozen peas are starchy, hard bits here. The cheap bag of frozen peas has each pea coated with butter or margarine making for a greasy, starchy unpleasantness.

2) A falafel wrap to-go is great lunch to eat while running between city bureaucratic offices. Mmmm...falafel....