Swiss (Cheese) Adventures!

**Thanks to everyone who reached out over the last few days with all of the horrible events in France last week. I never felt unsafe here in Lyon, but I can only imagine how the French, especially those living in Paris and the surrounding countryside, were/are feeling.**

On a different note, I have so much to tell you and so many pictures to share from my trip with Drew over winter break that it's a little bit overwhelming! We had three big parts: Switzerland, Alsace, and Germany, so I'm breaking this into a couple of posts. Be prepared, though. This is still a long one!

Lyon

After Drew arrived in mid-December, we spent the first few days in Lyon while I finished up my last week of classes before winter break. He was pretty wiped -- jet lag + post-law school finals fatigue -- and it was cold and rainy, so we mostly just took it easy. We did, however, make it out to dinner at one of Lyon's bouchons for dinner!

Lyon is known as the gastronomic capital of France (and by extension, the world) and, in particular, is famous for its bouchons. This type of restaurant is unique to Lyon and dates back to the Renaissance period, when Lyon dominated the silk trade in France. Historically, the silk workers (aka the Canuts) in the city would stop in these restaurants on their way to work, and traders would stop there for a meal when they came through town. Today, the bouchons still serve more or less the traditional Lyonnais dishes that the silk workers ate. The food tends to be very hearty, meat-heavy, fatty, and flat-out delicious.

It was tough to pick a restaurant to try since no one seems to be able to agree on what makes a bouchon "authentic" or which are the best, but in the end we chose Chez Mounier. We each got to pick an entree, a main dish, a cheese course, and a dessert, and our waitress helpfully told us which wine we should order with our meal. Every dish was fantastic...my mouth is starting to water again just looking at the photos!

The dish in front is called "quenelles" and is a very typical dish in a bouchon

Sleepy but happy!

Fun fact: the word "bouchon" refers to the cork in a bottle of wine and to traffic!

Switzerland

Our first stop in Switzerland was Lausanne, and we didn't waste any time getting started. Arriving just before dusk, we began our adventure with a walk to a nearby park overlooking the lake to catch a view of the sunset!

  

Afterwards, we strolled around the center of Lausanne, admiring the lights and the Christmas markets, stopping at Ladurée so Drew could try their famous macaroons, and learning our way around the city. One of the really neat things about Lausanne is the way it's built. It's multi-layered, with buildings that almost seem to grow on top of each other and staircases and bridges going every which way.

 

See the layers?

Having seen what we wanted to see in Lausanne the night before, on Saturday morning we hopped on a train to Montreux, which is more or less directly opposite Geneva on Lac Léman. Several people had raved about Montreux, and when we arrived we immediately understood why. The view of the mountains across the lake is magnificent!
 

Taking about a billion pictures as we went, we strolled through the Christmas market in the center of town (we might as well call this trip Jess and Drew's European Christmas Market Tour 2014) and then continued along the lake for about 45 minutes until we arrived at Chillon Castle.

Freddie Mercury statute on the Montreux waterfront!

The castle was definitely an early highlight of the trip! They happened to be having a festival that weekend, complete with people in medieval costume, storytellers, dancers, and musicians! It was a lot of fun, and it was super informative. We learned all about the history of that region of Switzerland, got to climb way up into the castle's Keep, and even ate some soup and freshly-baked bread in the former banquet hall of the castle. On a chilly, damp day in a chilly, damp castle, that soup totally hit the spot!

 

 

Leaving Montreux, we stopped back in Lausanne briefly to pick up our bags and then continued on our way to Bern, which is in the northern, German-speaking part of Switzerland. After just an hour on the train, we found ourselves in a completely different culture. I have no idea how the Swiss government operates with four official languages!

Arriving around dinner time, we decided that it felt like the right kind of night for Swiss fondue. One of my favorite memories from my semester abroad in 2007 is having cheese fondue in the Latin quarter in Paris, but I don't think I'd had it again since that trip. And since Drew had never had cheese fondue before, it was on our must-taste list! I'm still not sure exactly what combination of cheeses it contained, but oh man was that fondue delicious. The best part was the crispy, cheesy crust on the bottom of the fondue pot. Mmm...

Cheese fondue with fresh bread and fingerling potatoes to dip.

The next morning, the church bells across the river from our room woke us up, announcing that it was time to start exploring Bern. We began the day by hiking up to the Rose Garden, which has a lovely panorama over the old city and the river that curls around it. I'm sure that it's gorgeous in warmer weather too, but I actually appreciated the bare trees because it meant we had a clear view!

Afterwards, we spent several hours in the old city, walking through the charming city center, visiting the clock tour, the cathedral, and the Parliament building, and, of course, perusing each Christmas market that we passed. Even though Bern is the capital of Switzerland, it felt cozy and town-like. It is beautiful and has lots of museums and other hallmarks of a world-class city, but in the end it really seemed like a normal, down-to-earth place where people live and work. I could definitely live there!

Bears are the symbol of Bern. The real ones were inside hibernating, so we took a picture with the statute instead!

Feeling like we were on a sightseeing roll, we decided to take a somewhat spur-of-the-moment side trip to Lucerne that afternoon. That's when we hit our first snag of the trip. The automatic ticket machine at the train station rejected my French bank card. And so did the two subsequent machines that we tried. Worried that my card had been cancelled since I was using it outside of France, I called the bank, but the representative I spoke with (er, tried to speak with -- it's so hard to understand over the telephone in French!) didn't know why my card wasn't working. She suggested finding an open branch when I crossed back into France, which was a less-than-satisfying response during the holiday season!

I was pretty frustrated, but Drew convinced me that it wasn't worth worrying about the card when we couldn't do anything until we got to Strasbourg anyway. He was still able to buy us the tickets to Lucerne from the ticket office (just not the automatic machines), so we continued on with our plan for the night, making a mental note to keep an eye out for any branches of my bank we saw on the way.

Located right on the lake and surrounded by mountains, Lucerne is like a picture-perfect postcard. With just a few hours to spend there, we stopped first at (another) Christmas market to warm up with some mulled wine, and then we just wandered through the little cobblestone streets, crisscrossing from one side of the river to the other. One of the bridges that we crossed, Chapel Bridge, is Europe's oldest covered bridge. Drew and I saw some covered bridges in Pennsylvania earlier this year, but this one was designed very differently and was at least three times as long -- pretty cool!

 

When we had first arrived in Lucerne, we had noticed there was an event getting started just outside the train station, so after exploring the city for a while, we decided to head over to check it out. We found a stage with live bands playing to a crowd of people, including some who were gliding in circles around an outdoor ice skating rink in the middle of the area! We got there just in time to hear the next band, which seemed to us to be a Swiss boy band, judging from the number of pre-teens screaming excitedly up in front. 

When it was time to buy our tickets back to Bern, I decided to try using my card again in the off-chance that it had been a weird fluke earlier in the day. And magically, it worked! It seems that, in true French spirit, my bank card had merely decided to go on strike. Needless to say, I was relieved that the problem was resolved. 

The next morning, we woke up early to catch a train to the Interlaken area to get a closer look at the Alps. After some research online and looking at some maps, we decided to get a train ticket to Grindelwald and to play it by ear a bit. Following advice from the tourist office there, we ended up buying a cable car ticket that goes up to the top of First Mountain to go for a short hike. However, since neither of us had on great shoes for hiking with snow on the ground -- and by "not great shoes" I mean my wimpy sneakers had zero tread on them whatsoever -- we decided to get off at one of the lower lift stops and to hike up as far as we could. It would have been fun to go higher, but the view was pretty spectacular nonetheless!
 

See Grindelwald circled in red?

 

 

 
 

 

 

Sliding Hiking back down the mountain and approaching the main part of town, we came across a little refrigerator on the side of the road full of cheese for sale. A sign explained that you could pay by leaving money in the coin box. Seeing (and smelling) the cows on the farm a few meters away, we couldn't pass up buying fresh cheese in the Swiss Alps!

 

Finally reaching the bottom, we stopped for dinner in Grindelwald before taking the train back to Bern for a last night. While we were eating, we noticed that the TV in the restaurant was showing live coverage of the same event we'd been at the night before in Lucerne! It must have been a multi-day concert!

The next morning, our last one in Switzerland, we decided to squeeze in a quick trip on the funicular to Gurten Park, which overlooks all of Bern and the mountains. I'm so, so glad that we decided to make the trek up there because it was stunning. I think we were both ready to move to Bern just so that we could go running and biking through the park whenever we want.

Finally, our time in Switzerland ended on a really lovely note. After the park, Drew and I stopped in a little bakery to grab some bread to go with our Swiss Alps cheese (Alpkäse = Alps Cheese) and two croissants for a late breakfast. But when I started to hand my card to the saleswoman, she indicated that we could only pay in cash. With a sinking feeling, we started counting out the few Swiss Francs that we had left. It turned out that we had done a little too well trying to use up our Francs because we were a little bit short. Noticing us trying to decide which item to leave behind, the man who had ordered after us went ahead and paid for everything! And when we tried to give him the cash we had left, he just said "It's Christmas," and wouldn't let us give him a cent. How nice is that? We're on the lookout for a Pay it Forward opportunity!

All in all, we had a fabulous time in Switzerland, but we were ready to move on to the next part of the trip...Alsace!