Seth and Claire

Hello all,

Claire and I have updated to a new version of WordPress and placed the continuation of this blog at a new address.  The address of the new site is:

 http://new.sethandclaire.com 

Due to silly and frustrating limitations of the 1and1 hosting package that we have, we are unable to easily migrate the old blog to the new version of WordPress.  1and1 has been quite unhelpful in this regard! If you have questions about this issue, please leave a comment and I’ll contact you.  Needless to say I’m not very happy with 1and1 right now!

Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy our new blog!

Seth

I am writing this post from Winterthur, our one day stop on the trip back to Canada.  So this is it.  The last post from an amazing eight and a half months in Europe.  Enjoy and Claire and I will see you all soon!

We just finished one week in the south of Turkey in the town Fethiye.  Our family friends Tom and Robyn have a place in the city and invited us to stay there.  This was actually one of the deciding factors for our trip to Turkey.  Being surrounded in Europe by places that we have never been, having a location with a home base and a good recommendation went a long way.

The bus trip from Marmaris to Fethiye was a painless 3 hour trip.  We arrived and were picked up by the Tom and Robyn’s caretaker – a real privilege for us hard-line budget travelers!  She drove us through town, pointing out destinations that would be important, like the fish market, minibus station and restaurant district.  We arrived at the apartment and as we walked in the door, my jaw dropped at what a wonderful place we had been offered.  After a week of hostels (and 8 months in a shared apartment) we had a place to ourselves, with a large, fully equipped kitchen and wrap around deck that overlooked the town of Fethiye, the bay and the mountains behind.

Claire on the deck looking north at the cloud shrouded mountains.

Fethiye was far more to our liking than Marmaris.  Marmaris was a rich town, with very little in the way of authentic feel left.  It was glitz and glamour and most of the tourists looked like they arrived by yacht.  Fethiye on the other hand had a much more down to earth feel.  While it is still very touristy, but it didn’t have the 25 m all wooden yachts lined one after the other, and most restaurants didn’t have food at 30 lira a plate (as a comparison, the normal kebab price is 3 lira).

Seth wearing an “authentic” shepherds hat.  I don’t know how you could watch a flock through this thing!
An improvised dock at the ship yard.  Three sunken boats tied together.
A really cool natural sculpture from eight small trees.

Fethiye hosts a market every Tuesday and Friday.  The Tuesday market is veggies and “stuff” (like knockoff purses, t-shirts, etc) and the Friday one is just veggies.  We walked through the Tuesday market and found the the majority of the ‘stuff’ to be very, well, kind of crappy.  Many of the prices were marked in British Pounds, and as a result were way too high.  On top of that, it looked like it was all made in China.  Needless to say we bought nothing.  The veggie part of the market is another thing entirely.

Turkey has some of the most wonderful and delicious fruits and vegetables that I have had in a very long time.  Claire and I splurged and spent 25 Lyra and ended up with more as much food as we could carry.  Eggplant, peppers, onions, potatoes, peaches, strawberries, fresh figs, tomatoes, cucumbers, the list goes on, but it was all local and some would have been hard to find in North America at all.

A view of about 1% of the veggie market.  Yum, yum!

We had only a couple days where we did anything of note (I love holiday), but one of them was a “12 Islands Boat Tour”.  We booked with a company called Popeye and took the Olive Oyl to three of the islands and steamed passed the other nine.  The boat was 28 Brits, two Turks, and us.  We spent the day just messing around in confined quarters, sunbathing, and swimming.  Overall it was quite pleasant, with a tasty lunch and friendly staff.

Claire standing at the bow of the Olive Oyl.
The ice cream man makes his round of the yachts.
One of the sailors on our boat prepares lunch on the on-board bbq.

The other thing that we did that is worth mentioning was a hike along the Lycian Way.  This is a multi-leg, multi-day trip along the southern coast of Turkey and is the first trail of its kind here.  We did a pretty short section from Faralya to Kabak Valley.  It was a three hour hike and that seemed like plenty in the nearly 30 deg temperatures.  The landscape alternated between pine forest and open, terraced farm land, that was at this time of year dry and unused.  The views along the coast and down into the amazing Butterfly Valley were breathtaking.  The gem of the hike though was the end.  We arrived at Kabak Valley and expected to find another tourist beach, but what we found instead was closer to a secluded hippie commune.  There were about 15 people at the beach with 4 rustic sun huts that were free to use setup along the sand (compare to previous post).  It was deep in a valley and not a single person offered to sell us anything while we were there.  This was the Turkey that Claire and I had hoped to find.

What are you hiding under here?
Claire standing over Butterfly Valley.

Parting shot of Turkey
Claire resting from the sun in Kabak Valley.

It’s spring time, and you know what that means!  Well, normally showers and flowers, but here it apparently means that Jesus was very active dieing, rising and doing all sorts of very holy traveling. As a consequence, in modern Europe we have all sorts of holidays! Yippi!

To take advantage of this illustrious time of year I decided to take a rather unholy trip to München and then follow it by a trip to Nürnberg. München has been one of the towns that I’ve wanted to visit my whole time here and I really had a good time.

The weather in Marienplatz may not have been warm, but but the beer gardens sure were.

I was in München for the a large, biannual religious festival that is held in a different city every time. It drew huge crowds to the city and every square in the old town had a stage with music being played in it. It was totally crazy, but many of the festival goers were young and they were all in an inexplicably good mood.

The downfall of the religious holiday was that the bar in my hostel was closed, so I had to visit the famous Hofbräuhaus alone. As it turned out this wasn’t a problem as I quickly found a table of English speakers that I got along quite well with – a group of PhD students and a computer scientist from the Southern European Observatory! I had instant streetcred when I dropped The Big Bang Theory (the TV show, that is) and PhD Comics. We had a great time and after two, 1L beers we went to a club and I didn’t get back to my hostel until nearly 6 in the morning. Wow!

I am now the owner of that mug. When you serve that much beer at a time, people tent to act out of character.  Also, that photo is an uncanny reconstruction of that beer garden…

The crew from SEO

The next day I met Tim and Franzie at the train station and we went for a trip around the city, having lunch with some of their friends (I was rather unsocial, owing to my three hours of sleep, sorry guys) and then went out to the Olympic park and saw more of the religious festival.  That included stopping by the tents that T&F’s scout troop had set up. After that we went back to their home town of Erlangen, about 1.5 hours north of München.

The really cool construction of the canopy at the Olympic park was amazing even to my bleary eyes.

Tim and Franzie at the scout camp

The next day Tim and I took a trip into Nürnberg and checked out the local famous brewery, the Nürnberg Schöner Brunnen (literally ‘beautiful fountain’) and the Deutsche Bahn Museum (aka The Traffic Museum). The DB museum was only €2 if you had a train ticket on you and was well worth the visit. Very interesting stuff.

The Schöner Brunnen.  There’s a loose ring in the fountain gate, and myth has it that it brings good luck to turn it once – but only once!

All aboard!  I can’t believe they let me drive that antique.

On the last day of the trip Tim and I went for some hiking (very nice) and caught the train home (which was very bad). Our plan was: leave Erlangen at 5pm, and be home at 10:30pm. Unfortunately, our first train was 20 min late and we missed our connection by 2 min. When we went to the help desk they gave us our new schedule – arriving in Winterthur at 5:38 am, the next day! Naturally we were livid, but nichts zu tun, and we started on our way. In the end, 3.5 hours of that were waiting in Zürich for the first train in the morning, and three of us (we met another disenfranchised traveler on the train) ended up taking a $100 cab from Zürich to Winti, which Tim is trying to claim from the German rain company.

A nice waterfall – all I really wanted though at this point was a drink of water. I was coming down with the flu but thought it was the Bavarian beer that had done me in!  That flu was another factor that made that train ride so rosy…

Even the gnomes here had had a bit too much to drink!

Overall it was an action packed four days and a lot of fun as a last bash in Europe. The Bavarians were friendly, foreigners were fun (all the physicists were foreign), and the landscape was really beautiful. Good stuff.

Chill’n on the beach in Erlangen. No worries about that landlocked ‘problem’.

Well, that’s it. I believe that the end of the ski season has just passed. It came faster than I actually expected (it always does) but it marks this year a rather important landmark. Claire and I have moved to Europe for the winter, and that’s now over. It really makes it feel that the end of this trip is closing in on me. As part of this auspicious event I wanted to post some photos from the last few big trips and fun weekends that Claire and I have had together, and a few notes from a few solo adventures.

One of the most fun trips that we haven’t written about yet was our excursion to the Netherlands. A good friend of ours (and many of you), Elaine, was finishing her internship and much to our enjoyment she invited us to stay with her on her last weekend in Utrecht. Patrick (Elaine’s bf.) was arriving and the four of us were planning on hanging for the weekend before they headed off to Asia for 5-6 months of travelling (their blog – written in English and German – can be found at: http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/PandE/). The trip was amazing! The Netherlands was a real gem of Europe, harbouring a population that I really felt a kinship with. They bike everywhere their friendliness was almost unparalleled. Apparently, around 50% of population in Amsterdam bikes to work on a daily basis and we were never made to feel anything except totally welcome.

The perfect family transport :)

Us in Utrecht

Elaine Patrick and Claire in the bar at about 3am…only in Europe.

A long, Dutch beer list – Wow!

Claire and me at the very creative University in Utrecht

After this trip ended I wend back to Winti and Claire wend to Brussels to visit her cousin Kate. The photo below is from their attempt to try all the beers in Brussels – which is an even longer list than in Amsterdam!

Kate and Claire

Dinner in Brussels

Following that trip was a visit by Claire to Winterthur. She came, as normal, on Friday evening and we had a fun packed weekend. Saturday we took a trip to Säntis Park in St. Gallen. Säntis is a hot-springs pool. It is not really hot like a hot tub, but it is basically a big indoor/outdoor pool with water slides, and a wave maker. It was really cool to see and a fun relaxing trip, but Claire and I didn’t fit the typical demographic of either 1) a family or 2) a dating teenage couple. While I did my best to appear to fit #2, there’s just something about sitting in a public pool and making out for hours on end that I just seem to have lost the desire for. Strange.

Claire at Säntis park

Me at Säntis

The next day Claire and I went with my friend Lucie and one of her friends to Laax ski area in southeastern Switzerland. While Laax was a very impressive mountain, in size and and view it was shockingly expensive, blowing everyplace that I had been in France or Switzerland out of the water for cost. For me, this is a deal breaker on being labelled a must do for European skiing, however, it was obvious that there was one place where this resort could shine – the terrain park. It had both the fun little ones for Claire and me (which included a huge inflated mat after a jump that people with no experience could try anything they wanted on) to enormous jumps were we saw people doing inverted helicopters, back flips and spins – all on the same jump together! Very cool.

Claire at Laax

Lucie’s friend, Claire and Lucie at Laax

This brings me to this weekend. I went to Grenoble and visited Claire last weekend and we spend the weekend together, just hanging out and allowing me to get a feel for what her life has been like in the last few months (she has been to Winti twice since Christmas, while I had not yet gone that way). I was then planning on going on a trip to Germany over Easter, but a tragedy changed my plans.

The passing of our good friend Tom Bennett made me want to be near family and friends, and for this reason I travelled back to Grenoble this weekend and from there travelled to the 3 Vallees ski areas with Claire to see Hermione. The three of us were good friends with Tom and felt that one of the best ways to remember him would be to ski hard and spend time together.

This one’s for you Tom. You were taken from us too soon, but you will live on in our memories and hearts.

Seth and Hermione at the top

Finally I want to just share a few photos from Switzerland.

A Swiss luftseilbahn, this form of transport shares a root with “Autobahn”…seems to be giving it a lot of credit to me!

Ronja, Adam and me riding up

We didn’t end up skiing on this trip…

As you are all aware, Claire gets so much holiday that she feels guilty about it.  That’s a lot of holiday!  However, this post is just so that she doesn’t feel quite so bad, showing what I have gotten up to in the time between her last couple of holiday breaks :)

In the last month I have made a bit of a habit of going night skiing with my friends Daniel and Lucie.  Night skiing hasn’t always been my cup of tea, but with limited time it seems to be a great way to hit the slopes at least once a week and still have your days free to do other things…like work.

The closest night skiing to us is in Wildhaus in the Toggenberg valley about an hour away.  This is on the northern edge of the Swiss Alps and provides lots of the talent that we saw kick butt in the Winter Olympics.

The mountain is small and has a bar right at the bottom of the lift.  After their first win in ski jumping, the Swiss started to really get excited and on the next weekend they had set up a full-on party at the bottom of the lift, with an ice bar, bratwurst stand, big screen TV and local television coverage.

The Swiss showing some pride after their first win.

The party at the bottom of the ski run, the dome is the bar, and they set up a huge TV to watch the show.

I have also been seeing the inside of a climbing gym pretty regularly.  Winterthur has one of the best publicly subsidized sports facilities I’ve ever seen.  They have a pool (actually make that 3 pools: outdoor and indoor Olympic size pools and a 30deg C, adjustable depth, 25 m warm-up pool with a water slide), an indoor sand volleyball court, an indoor skate park, and of course, a climbing wall.  All of this is accessible for less than $50/mo and if you can commit to a 1 year membership it’s more like $30/mo.  Pretty sweet.

Climbing here was kind of funny at first.  You go in and pay your fee, sign a release and they hand you a rope, and harness and say ‘viel Spass’!  No instruction, no talk about edict, nothing.  Then the real shock…this is a lead-climb only gym!  There are no top ropes, so you just have to sack up and lead the climb if you want to do it.  And it gets better, they provide all the gear, minus a belay device.  So not only is it lead only, but you have to belay with a Munter hitch!  These guys are hardcore.

Hardcore food at the climbing wall.  This Coke and…well…hot dog-dick can be yours for only CDN$ 8.50!

As Claire pointed out to me the other day, doing things I like has lead to finding more friends.  I met Daniel and Lucie by going skiing and then, in the same way, I met my friend Tim. I went with the Coop Ski Express to Davos, and as a telemarker was one of the first people back to the bus. The only other person at the bus was also a telemarker (go figure) and we shared some beers and got to talking. Tim has since become my weekly climbing and skiing partner.

As a group of fun people Daniel, Lucie, Tim and I had a pretty good time last weekend doing the Winterthur ethnic bar crawl, starting at the rasta bar and ending at the surprisingly authentic Thai karaoke bar where the local Thai population gathers to sing love songs in their native language and drink Chang beer.

I think that the Vancouverites will know that the weather has been pretty screwy this year.  In Winterthur we got basically the opposite of Vancouver.  January was frigging freezing and even now it continues to be pretty cold.  That said, last week was a glimpse of spring.  The mercury hit 10deg C and with longer days it was making me ready for summer.  However there was one last push at winter waiting for me this weekend…

Saturday was a total snow day here and thankfully I had gone out on a limb in the warm weather last week and planned on skiing.  Good idea.  Sunday was one of the best in-resort powder days I’ve had in years.  Off-piste isn’t a European specialty and Daniel, Tim and I were able to rip up some sweet powder right off the lift!

Daniel in the pow.  That is the lift at the top of the photo and this was at almost 10am…

Me and Tim about to hit the sicknar.

Tim, Daniel, me and Lucie at lunch.

  Planning my 007 escape.

Beers in the parking lot waiting for the bus.  Now a regular event – and legal here.

View from the bus on the way home.

I haven’t ever talked much about work because it isn’t really the point of this blog.  However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun in its own way.  The people that I work with are a good group. The tribology and polymers groups are6 full time engineers and 2 interns (including me).  We sit on the 4th floor and generally have quite a bit of fun. Below are some photos.

Zimmer ski day at Pizol.  Daniel in the middle with my boss Thorsten on the right in the blue and red jacket.

Look at that!  Only 8,300 km home!

My colleagues Eik and Christine on the way back down to Pizol.

Making my American colleague feel at home during his visit by building him a cubicle (we don’t have them here).

Maria (the other intern) and me doing Zimmer’s dirty work.  Literally.

So this post is kind of late in coming, but that should not diminish it’s importance!  For two weekends in a row I was given the great pleasure of hosting not only Claire (yes, twice in one fortnight :) but also my parents!

The weekend of Dec 5th and 6th was Claire and Seth time.  We pretty much just hung out together and did romantic things such as go to the pool, and drink beer with friends.  Daniel, who has featured on this blog before, has become a regular drinking buddy and generally comes out with us to find a watering hole.  At our new favorite place – a bar with a 4 page beer menu – Daniel acts as translator of the various drink descriptions.  This is a great thing, but we have learned that having a translation is not really a guarantee of ordering success…

The week after Claire left my parents arrived.  I managed to find a really nice B&B in the old town of Winterthur called Bagels, just above a coffee house of the same name.  The people there were really friendly and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for accommodation in Winterthur (link – opens new window).  Funny thing though is that they don’t really eat bagels in Switzerland and we heard more than once someone asking what a “bag-el” is…  In German, the English pronunciation would be obtained from Bägel, which we thought might be a good change of name for the coffee shop.

The first few days of their visit were Seth and mom time.  My dad had work in Düsseldorf and flew there Tuesday, returning Thursday.  I worked most of the time, but got to spend evenings with my mom, practicing German (generally embarrassing both of us), watching German TV, eating and drinking.  We spent some time in the Christmas markets, but those are for the most part seen one, seen ’em all.

Not much changed in that routine when my dad returned.  We went out, ate food, and walked around the old town of Winterthur.  On the Friday I took my parents into my work and showed them around.  They got to see the production facility and also meet my colleagues.  Unbeknownst to us, the Research Dept Christmas party was the night before and my normally social work group was acting elusive…I later found out that they were pretty much all hung over!

Claire arrived on Friday night and on Saturday we spent the day in Zürich.  I really like Zürich and with the help of my parents I found another reason why: Kunsthaus (link): the city art gallery.  As a lover of modern art I felt like a kid in a candy store.  We went in, had a bit to eat and then scattered to cover as much ground as possible.  Claire and I stuck together, but we didn’t see my parents again for about 2 hours while we walked around gaping at the collection.  Magritte, Picasso, Kandinsky, Rothko, awesome.

Alas, all good things come to an end and on Saturday night I had to say goodbye to my parents.  They flew out on Sunday morning, but I look forward to seeing them when they return for their 10 day bike trip in June (it’s blogged, now it’s official!).  The next day Claire went home and I returned to my normal routine, but somehow better…

Claire, Bob and Seth in Zürich

Politzei keeping those Amnesty international hooligans in order in Zürich

German Santa and his totally sinister buddy. In Switzerland he has two sidekicks, both whom carry clubs to f*ck up bad kids! (I’m not kidding)

Winterthur house of stars.

Claire and Seth after a visit from Mr. Blobby (Gilchrist family version of Santa)!

Claire and Seth in Zürich.

Sadly, as the official family photographer, there are no photos of my mom in Switzerland, so I’m putting in the following Photo-shopped (actually GIMPed link) image to give you the idea.  Claire and I were really happy to haver her around.

Seth, Sally and Claire in the Swiss equivalent of FAO Schwartz.

So I wanted to share a few things that have alternately made me smile and cringe since I’ve been in Switzerland:

First to smile:
For your cold-blooded furry friend!


Next to cringe, (and maybe cry a little):
I don’t think I need to translate this one…  It’s from a right-wing political party and basically promotes religious and racial profiling in immigration.  These posters are everywhere, from major train stations, to barn doors in the country – where I took this photo.


And finally to laugh again:
Have you ever wondered where your recycling goes?  Well, in Winterthur they have no secrets!

This last weekend I decided it was time to go find the mountains in Switzerland.  I had originally planned on going the weekend before,  but the weather was predicted to be bad so I stayed home and scrubbed the floor and worked on my PhD.  A good time until the weather turned out to be 180 degrees from the forecast and it was one of the best days I have seen since I’ve been here!

Again, as the weekend approached the weather report was not very good.  This time I thought, “Maybe their trains run to the minute, but the Swiss are as good at weather prediction as the Canadians.  I’m going for it!”  Well this time they were right and I was in Grindelwald for the first snow of the season…

Grindelwald after the snow.

Grindelwald is a small town in the Swiss Alps that is basically at the base of the Eiger.  It’s no wonder that it is snowing there in mid November and even with the poor weather the views were stunning.  Kind of like an attractive woman in sweat clothes, generally there’s not much to see, but every once in a while…wow!

The north wall of the Eiger.  If you look closely you can see the peak in the clouds.  Oh yeah, that’s it…mmmm.

Not wanting to miss out on the fun of being at the Eiger, I was determined to do something.  Since a round trip to the top of Jungfrau (the highest peak in the Alps) cost CHF 170 (!!!!!!) I decided that come hell or 8 cm of snow I was going hiking.  I couldn’t convince any of the other tourists at the hostel to go with me…so I headed out alone.  This isn’t as foolish as it sounds. It is Europe, so pretty much every inch has people and I was headed for the town of Kleine Scheidegg (map), so I could follow the railroad the whole way.  As an experienced adventurer I was sure to go properly prepared, so I strapped on my running shoes, put on my jeans and headed in to the winter.

Me with a hole in the clouds.

Four and a half hours of this led to some pretty wet socks.

I got to the town of K.S. about 12:30’30”.  The train back down leaves at 12:30, 1:30, 2:30… Damn their punctuality! I looked into the conductor’s eyes as the train left and walked inside to buy my ticket for the 1:30 train.  I was fairly cold at this point, so I just hid my head and waited for the next train.  Hey, at least I wasn’t walking down!

The cog-rail of salvation.

The trip down was really cool.  The track steep, and always that feeling of, “man I hope these engineers knew what they were doing.”  Of course the trip down went smoothly and I found myself back at the train station 3 min before the train back to Interlaken.  This would have been sweet except that my bags were stashed in the ski storage at the hostel (which was now closed for a month for renovations) and the next train wasn’t for an hour.  Had I known that Claire was sailing around France in a free car at this point I would have known just where my luck was being siphoned off to!

Never mind.  I went back to the hostel and collected my bags before heading to the local sports center and into the pool.  I didn’t have a swimsuit, but they had hot showers and that was all I really wanted. The showers turned out to be a room with no door, open to the co-ed change room, so walked to the last stall and just stood in the water, all modesty frozen with my still wet feet.  As my feet thawed, so did my modesty and I retreated to my soggy trousers, but dry socks.  A quick watch check told me I had 40 more minutes, so much to the displeasure of the other patrons I spent 20+ of them standing at the hairdryer with my wet shoes.  Worked like a charm and I had dry feet for my trip home.  And that was sweet.

I wandered back to the train and my trip home was very smooth.  The law of averages was working in my favor and I never waited more than 5 minutes for a connection.

The trip from Gridelwald to Interlaken.

I will come back to this area, but next time there will be MORE SNOW, and I will be prepared with plastic footwear, two planks and waterproof clothing :)

Two weekends ago Claire made her first visit to Winterthur.  She arrived late on Friday night after a 6 hour train ride from Grenoble and I met her at the station with my friend Daniel, who lives downstairs.  We went straight back to my place and I introduced her to the Africana, which I have been slowly molding into something more comfortable than the old brothel it used to be (no joke!).  The land lord was kind enough to drop off an extra mattress, blanket and a mega-sized pillow for her to use while she was here.

The next day I thought I’d give Claire the run down on how to live in Switzerland on a budget.  This is a pricey country, and like all countries they pay their intern’s like temporary immigrant labor (…which I guess I am), and thus I have learned the ways of ‘shopping the deals’ in Winterthur.  Normally this isn’t such a big thing, but with no car and no U-pass (UBC’s budget transit pass for students) we were forced to do the shopping by bike.  And we hit it all – Brokenhaus (this is actually the name of the local Salvation Army-type store!), all the different kinds of budget food stores and the mall.

Seth and Claire in Winterthur, the home of Falkor (link)

One thing that was a theme for the weekend was looking at rings in jewelry shops…this is something that I have not learned to do on a shoestring.  We looked at every shop in the city and the cheapest, even-okay ring was in the range of $700 each! Feeling the the old ‘thur wasn’t going to do it for us, on Sunday we took our search to Zürich where we managed to find the perfect one – only it cost CHF50,500 (~$50k).  You know what they say, “How else can two year’s salary live forever?”

Lunch in good Euro fashion – bread, meat, cheese and the water bottle contains wine :)

We also went by the Rhine Falls on Sunday – the largest in Europe – and were sort of disappointed.  For the largest waterfall on the continent we kind of expected more (see photo).

Seth at Rhine Falls. Sweet! Now let’s kayak it.

On the way back to the train station we had a tour through the local town and found what may be the most fightening place I have ever been.  There were very few people, but plenty of cats (with cleverly constructed ramps for getting in and out of their houses) and a den of gnomes, frolicking in a hot spring or something.  No doubt breeding like rabbits behind the bushes.

Cat house

Gnomes relaxing, unaware that we were watching them. Someone must stop them!

Monday I had off, and we spent the time enjoying the company.  Running in the woods, Skyping, etc. I was really glad to have Claire here and to get to show her my town, work place, living quarters and all that good stuff.  I look forward to having her back, with more local knowledge and more activities up my sleeve!  But first – it’s of to the French quarter for me.  I’ll be headed to Grenoble next weekend to see Claire and her diggs.  Looks pretty sweet from the photos!

Auf wiedersehen!

I just wanted to add some of my own thoughts and photos to Claire’s post about Geneva.

Geneva was a really beautiful city.  Even if it out prices you to the point where all you can do is walk around, as long as you are in good company I guarantee that you will have a good time.  It was alternately pouring rain and sunny while we were there, prompting me to buy an umbrella from our hostel…one of the many rain-proof items that I have to acquire while I’m here.  Why didn’t anybody tell me that Switzerland had such temperamental fall weather?

We stayed at the City Hostel in Geneva which was nice but small.  My only complaint is that after advertising that they had a full kitchen on each floor, there was no coffee pot!  We got lucky and found an old, handle-less one on another floor, but I loath to buy coffee from their Nestle machine or from Starbucks (German lesson: ein Tall ist sechs francs, fünfzig rappen).

We spent time wandering thought the old city and also looking for the green space.  While Europeans my drive less than North Americans, their smaller streets mean that they fill their space just as efficiently and you end up feeling like you are walking on the side of a highway where ever you go.

Claire in the Megachess part of the park.  Not for the faint of heart!

Claire in the cheese and sausage market.  Yum!

Being attracted to useless information of all kinds (there must be a term for that), Claire and I were drawn to the Natural History Museum, where we spent time in the minerals and rare animals sections.  One of the most shocking exhibits was the Darwin one, where they so accurately captured the chain of evolution.  However, the labeling was poor and I couldn’t tell which was the final product and which was the proposed “missing link”.  See if you can.

On Saturday night we sought out traditional Swiss fondue and managed to find the best place in town.  Right on the lake…actually almost in the lake…with a laid back atmosphere and inexpensive (20 CHF/Stück) pots of pure melted cheese and wine.  Does it get any better?

  Seth with his pot of fondue.  Actually we shared the pot, but I really wanted my own.

Finally, we spent time roaming around the Botanical Gardens and lake wall.  The Sunday was beautiful and the lake was alive with activity.  Nature was frolicking and the local jets of water were spraying almost totally vertical. A calm, sunny day.

Swan on the lake.

Beautiful Claire and the creatively named “Jet d’eau”.

Just out of curiosity I visited the Wikipedia site for the Jet and found that they run it with a set of two pumps consuming an impressive megawatt of electricity.  Yes, after doing some easy research, I found that – for our viewing pleasure – the city of Geneva spews water and a justifiable ton and a half of carbon into the atmosphere every day!  Sorry Hermione, I did buy those high efficiency bulbs, but I’m afraid that just admiring this monster for a few seconds undid years worth of my carbon savings (for those reading this – go to www.justsaving.org to carbon-sponsor Hermione on her cycle from London to Morocco and lets see if we can undo some of this.  Her target sponsorship is 15 tonnes and last I saw she had exceeded that goal – lets see if we can smash it!).

For now it’s back to the work week.  Wow, it’s already half over again – that’s 2 of 35 weeks gone!