July 4, Swiss Style

Surprising- ly, we saw more fireworks than expected during our first July 4 in Switz- erland, i.e., exactly one. Some loony American ex-pat in the next town over blasted off a doozy, of which we observed only the bright red crest over the eastern city hillside from our evening patio vantage. Considerably more entertaining was a weekend visit from our frequent European partner in crime, our fifth rendezvous in eight months with Steph's college roommate, M. Sadly for us, this second visit to Zürich marked her final Euro weekend trip as her Fulbright teaching grant reaches its conclusion in mid-July and she leaves Germany after nine months to return home to the U.S.

Our July activities with M--already familiar with Zürich city from a January tour--focused more on the outskirts. As we like to do with guests, we ran her ragged and then fed her well. Steph lacks a true road bike and M wasn't moving hers back to the U.S., so they had bargained and wheeled and sealed a deal for M to transport her bike from Essen (not easy, even on Euro trains) to Zürich for Steph's discounted purchase. We celebrated M's arrival and the deal's consummation with a group ride after work on Friday, the same 13-mile round trip that Steph and I had blundered into (but now we're pros) featuring unexpected vineyard, lake and mountain views. We relaxed that evening, drinking wine and grilling pizza from scratch (have you ever grilled pizza? Slightly challenging but fun.).

Saturday we hopped the train 90 minutes south to the new-favorite Vierwaldstättersee area for a day hike from little town Küssnacht am Rigi to Lucerne. The area sits at the Alps' foot--before the mountains get too serious--featuring excellent views of peaks above lakes. We hiked about about three hours and 7.5 miles from Küssnacht under Mt. Rigi, up through a network of forested nature trails and back down to destination Lucerne under Mt. Pilatus (we visited Lucerne and Pilatus with my parents in June). I love maps and also thus Google Earth, so above is a representation of the hike from bottom-left to upper-right (click to enlarge). After emerging from the forest, rather than hoofing it another mile or two directly to downtown Lucerne, we elected the more reasonable option of pausing for Kaffee + Kuchen at a tiny village bakery and then relaxing in a lakeside park waiting for the ferry to shuttle us across the lake and ultimately deliver us downtown. We found Lake Lucerne equally as charming on this beautiful summer day as on our introduction. After several tries at finagling in German (finagling isn't easy when you're not fluent), we managed an early outdoor dinner seating at our Old Town Lucerne restaurant of choice, the brasserie that served Steph her 2008 MOY-to-date in June; everything was again excellent.

Waking from Sunday sleep-in saw clouds and light rain roll into Zürich (summers are rainier here than Chicago, but also not as hot and humid) and we took it relatively easy, consuming ourselves with cooking all day prepping for the homemade Mexican food fiesta we had promised M for her birthday the prior week; authentic Mexican is as difficult to obtain in Germany as in Switzerland (probably all of Europe). I really usually avoid tooting the horn, but sometimes the combo of Swiss ingredient quality and our practiced preparation yields fantastic results--perhaps the best Mexican dinner we've ever made, bite-for-bite like Chicago's Frontera Grill, source of most of the recipes. Corn tortillas, roasted salsa, poached chicken and guacamole, all from scratch among other condiments and side dishes. A truly gut-busting good time.

Steph sadly escorted M to the train station the following morning on the way to work. We'll miss her dearly, since her proximity in Europe and our frequent excursions together provided that hardest-to-attain and most valuable missing element from home, that is, a close friend at hand with which to share adventures and experiences. We're anxiously anticipating her return trip to Europe!

Pics from the weekend here: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=2hd8fyj.3lpztl1n&x=0&y=1xy94p&localeid=en_US

The Secret Life of Hans

Although I fairly recently updated the peanut gallery on the SOTD (State of the Dog), we accum- ulated several more pictures for a brief post. You may remember Hobbes--alias Hans--battling swans for position some mornings in the Zürichsee. On less combative days, rather than downhill to the lake we occasionally head uphill via tram to a stream feeding it. Zürich's attention to green space is superb, so a ten minute trip from our front door grants access to several miles of rolling, forested streamside path that feels more like North Carolina wilderness than a metropolitan periphery. Hobbes of course has "discovered" and committed to memory (that oh-so-selective canine memory) several excellent stream access points near which he now can't be contained.

So here are some extra pictures of tennis ball fetch in his favorite waterfall lagoon, just an average day in the super secret and spoiled life of Hans. http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=2hd8fyj.ciho81u3&x=0&y=8o2fv5&localeid=en_US

Happy Belated July 4!

Happy belated 4th of July to all you patriots! Or as nobody says in German because it's not a holiday over here, Frohe vierte Juli! Looks like the weather cooperated for the long weekend in Chicago at least.

Keeping with the theme, I'll share two pieces of Euro-Americana from the past few weeks. To facilitate complete study, please feel free to click on either picture to examine more detail. Americana Exhibit A lies as close as our neighborhood grocery store, another inimitable U.S. contribution to cuisine--that's right, the bun! You might think that ubiquitous corner bakeries and a huge variety of freshly baked artisinal items in every grocery would have snuffed out the standard U.S. white bread hamburger bun long ago. Well, think again! It's BBQ season and while some fancy Kaiser roll or potato roll or whatever might seem more interesting, the world acknowledges that with most grilled protein, bleached spongy white bread remains a necessary accompaniment--topped with sesame seeds, of course.

Exhibit B comes from a Swedish bar bathroom poster, an exciting Southern U.S. themed July 4 "Day at the Races". The poster's ample English promises delights appealing to grease monkeys (Cadillac, Corvette, hot rods and Harley Davidson) among other highbrow evening entertainment elements (line dancing, Jack Daniels and rockabilly music featuring the band 'Rednex') with ever-popular American cuisine and sport (hickory smoked spareribs and football). Alas, the poster's Swedish words are mostly unintelligible (I'm learning German after all) but Galopplöpningar must be horse racing, although Elektrisk tjur (guitar?), Appaloosa, Westernprylar and Curly are beyond me. One should mean 'mint julep'. The event also boasts och mycket mycket mer!, but I can't fathom what more I'd like to see. Who'd imagine Sweden could host an Americana event where we'd feel like foreigners??

It just proves that given today's rapidly shrinking globe, home is closer than ever even 4,000 miles away. Returning to the U.S. later this month, we wouldn't bat an eye to discover the hip new trends include dried cod, dill schnapps Älplermagronen and yodeling.

Germany on our Power

Strange how the more things change the more they stay the same, eh? Just as Chicago's reticent yet inevitable summer eventually does each year, Zürich's has already justified our 7-1/2 month wait. And although my ADD certainly doesn't need another addiction to add to my/our existing list of traveling, cooking, running, swimming, hiking, learning German, blogging, looking for employment and acting as daily tour guide for the golden furball, that's too bad because I've got a new one--biking!

Since my Nov/Dec near-daily townie-biking to the grocery store in Kloten, which didn't exactly count as much exertion, I'd only road-biked once this spring and Steph not at all. The sketchy weather combined with lingering disorganization since our move(s)--because road biking unlike running or swimming requires a modicum of organization--not to mention a zillion other things going on blunted any progress on two wheels. Moreover, although we enjoy it OK, biking was admittedly never a great love in Chicago; perhaps blame the urban concrete jungle with its only viable extended bike path along the lakefront usually crammed to the gills with moving and stationary human obstacles in all forms, sizes and speeds. But now...Enter: Switzerland.

As its countless guidesigns make apparent, Switzerland is not only a hiker's but also a biker's paradise, a fact registered somewhere in our brains but as yet unexploited. So last week Tuesday, I finally organized the bike equipment (living on the sixth floor doesn't help) and Steph and I rolled outside with no particular destination on a nice evening after work. Within five minutes, we bumped into a roadsign for a regional biking path and followed it out of Zürich. An hour later we returned home wide-eyed from our first-ever European biking experience--brutal climbs (for us), rapid descents, cobblestones, quaint churches, vineyards and awesome lake views. Yes, just like that we're hooked.

Newly armed with a highly-detailed regional Velokarte (biking map), we decided to up the ante for the following weekend. But where to go? As our various short train trips to northeasterly Schaffhausen had indicated, Germany lies nearby just over the Rhine, but we didn't expect the map to show the river dipping so close to Zürich to the northwest. So that's it! An international biking daytrip! The official route guide measured the trip one-way at 19 miles and an 'easy' grade (of choices 'easy', 'medium' or 'difficult').

Unsure if we had the legs to make it to Germany and back (19 miles isn't too bad but 38 is fairly significant), our peloton of two hit the road mid-morning on an already hot sunny Saturday.

A hundred sweaty minutes, 23 miles and more hills than we'd seen in 13 years (above) later, after taking only one wrong turn that cost some time to correct, we coasted down through tiny Kaiserstuhl am Rhein, Schweiz, over the Rhine river, past a lackadaisical German border patrolman who barely spared us a glance and up into little Hohentengen an Hochrhein, Deutschland! (Click on the top Google Earth map to enlarge the whole path.)

We picked one of the several local restaurants with an outdoor patio, parked the bikes and shuffled our tired legs to a table. We ordered two grosse Biere and merrily perused the German menu and prices in Euros instead of Swiss CHF. Gigantic mixed salads, double schnitzel with fries and a huge omelette hit the spot nicely. The food tasted the same, the ambience felt the same, the local accent sounded the same, but the relatively inexpensive bill was a welcome foreign element indeed.

Chuckling at the prospect of biking our distended stomachs 23 miles back to Zürich (we never really thought we'd make it anyway), we pedaled back across the river to the Kaiserstuhl station and kicked back with espresso at a neighboring café waiting for the train (my exercise recovery drink used to be Gatorade, but when in Rome, etc.). Funnily enough, the less-direct train ride home took almost as long as our bicycle jaunt. So as I'm sure will gratify all the pundits out there, Europe's summertime benefits are finally, rapidly and gratefully erasing the horrible vestiges of culture shock and months of frustrating readjustment from our winter move. But no, it doesn't mean we'll be biking to France or Italy anytime soon.

A few Saturday biking pics are here. Sunday was the Europameister final game, Germany v. Spain, with final pics as well: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=2hd8fyj.9kl12zsr&x=0&y=dtb5y1&localeid=en_US