One year and 5 weeks - Visitors!

Mary and Jack touring Neuchâtel

Last weekend, we had our second set of visitors arrive in Switzerland.  We picked up Mary and Jack, friends from California, at the Geneva airport last Saturday night and had a dinner at Les Brasseurs (the local brewpub).

Sunday, we gave them a mini-tour of the canton.  We walked down the hill and then back up to the chateau and the collegiale.  Then we strolled through town past Neuchatel's famous painted fountains.  We walked along the lake and enjoyed the views and played on the dangerous playground equipment.   In the late afternoon, we drove up to the Creux du Van for a short hike.  The weather wasn't great; it was cloudy and rainy which meant that it was quite muddy.  But we enjoyed our walk, especially when we got to see the chamois mountain goats.  There were two adult females and two yearling goats.  The goats were primarily interested in eating grass at the cliff edge and seemed unconcerned with our presence; they let us come within only a couple meters from them.   It was wonderful to be able to watch them from such a close vantage point.  Sunday night, we had fondue at home.

Monday morning we tried to visit an absinthe distillery in the Val de Travers but had neglected to see that we needed to book in advance.  We did, however, have a nice drive through the hills and valley.  Next, we took our visitors to Gruyères where we visited the fromagerie and the Nestle/Cailler chocolate factory.  We decided to skip the castle this time but did drive up to the town of Gruyères to souvenir shop and to walk along the old ramparts.  This time at the chocolate factory we arrived early enough that we were able to take advantage of the chocolate tasting at the end of the tour.  M was the only one that powered through all the samples, but, needless to say, she had a belly-ache later.  After returning to Neuchâtel in the evening, we headed up to the local peak, Chaumont, and the observation tower, to look over the valley de les trois-Lacs.

Luzern, L to R: Mary & Jack at Verkehrshaus, Swans in front of the
Hofkirche, Kapellbrücke & Wasserturm

Tuesday, we went to Luzern (Lucerne in French).  We started the day with a trip to the Verkehrshaus, also known as the Swiss Transport Museum.  Though the entrance fee was steep, the museum was pretty amazing especially for four inquisitive engineers (though M is slightly less inquisitive than the other 3).  The museum was comprised of multiple buildings, each filled with a mode of transport: trains, cars, boats, and aircraft.  It had cut-aways of a train and a steamer boat, a car crash-test demonstration, flight simulators, a giant photo map of Switzerland, and a courtyard with razor scooters to play with.  It wasn't quite as awesome as the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but it was close. After the museum, we parked in the city and walked to the lake.  We then threaded back and forth over the Reuss River on the series of bridges, one of which was the Kapellbrücke, or Chapel Bridge, originally built in the 1300s and restored after a fire in 1993.  Next to the bridge is the Wasserturm, or Water tower, dating from the 1200s.  The town is quite pretty, particularly with Mount Pilatus towering over the lake, but Luzern is also full of tourists.  We stopped at an English pub by the river and enjoyed the late afternoon.

Geneva, T to B: CERN building,
Yvette and Sean

Wednesday, we headed to Geneva, but first stopped for a tour at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherce Nucléaire, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research).  Things got rather technical in talking about particle colliders, and, well, M got kinda bored.  (In her defense, there was a group of Dutch teenagers that wouldn't shut up making it pretty hard to follow the technical explanations.) K, Mary, and Jack were enthralled.

  In the afternoon, we met up with Sean and Yvette, more friends from California, now currently living in Wisconsin, who had arrived for a day in Switzerland to accompany Mary and Jack to Italy on the next leg of their journey.  After we had everyone in tow, we walked around the city a bit to see the Flower Clock and the Ile Rousseau.  We were also able to see the Jet d'Eau this time, which had been off during our last visit.  Since we didn't have enough room in the car for 6 people, we split up.  The girls took the train back to Neuchatel, and the guys drove.  The final meal of the visit was another fondue.  There was lots of fun conversation and laughter so it was with reluctance that we turned in close to midnight.

Thursday morning, we bid "adieu" to the gang at the Neuchatel train station as they caught their train to Italy.  Then, we headed to work for a short week.

This Saturday, we had a somewhat unexpected guest.  We learned midweek that a friend from California, Joseph, now living in Chicago, was in Zurich for business.  We invited him to Neuchâtel and gave him a tour of the town.  The weather was wonderful (t-shirt weather), and we walked by the lake and through the market which was full with people out enjoying the sunshine and warm temperatures.  In the late afternoon, we decided to head up to Creux du Van for the second time in a week.  Though we saw no chamois this time, the view was awesome.  The skies were blue, and we could see the Alps behind us, as well as part of Ile St. Pierre in Lac de Bienne.  We got back to Neuchatel just in time for Joseph to catch the 7:30 train back to Zurich and for us to get ready for a colleague's birthday party.   We had an interesting time at the party.  M primarily stuck with the English and Spanish speakers, but K chatted up some of the francophone guests.

Sunday, we took the bikes out to enjoy the gorgeous weather.  We decided to go easy, so we made it a relatively short bike ride to La Tène.  Everybody else in Neuchatel seemed to think that being outside was an excellent idea too, and all the grassy areas we passed were brimming with people grilling, sun bathing or playing volleyball.

Lessons learned:
1)  So figured out why we haven't gotten our residence permits.  Apparently, the commune was missing some paperwork from our company that justifies why they need to employ us, non-EU/Swiss citizens.  And apparently, the commune had asked the law firm that had handled the paperwork for our original application to provide this paperwork.  The law firm ignored the requests, so the commune threatened our company that if they didn't get the paperwork in 10 days, we'd be deported.  Fortunately, it appears that HR was able to clear things up so that we will not be kicked out of the country.  However, we won't be convinced that everything is alright until we get our new permits.
2) CERN was founded in 1954 and straddles the French/Swiss border.

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.