Berlin or Bust

As the title indicates, we're planning a trip Wednesday afternoon to Berlin to coincide with Barack Obama's speech there this Thursday. Truth be told, this was Josh's brainchild. We may try to blog live from Berlin, so stay tuned! We hope to get there early enough to get good seats. Josh read an article speculating that anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 people may be in attendance. If we don't get to see Barack, at least we'll spend a weekend in Berlin.

This past week and weekend saw us slowing down and getting more comfortable with our surroundings (read: we did lots of laundry and grocery shopping). Thursday, I took the kids to Zurich's tram museum, where there is a kid-scale tram that kids can power themselves. See video below. At the end of the video, Maya's slight distress is caused by her fear that I was in danger of being run over.




Friday morning, the kids and I went to the farmer's market closest to us, in Helvetia Platz. One of the bakers gave free rolls to Russell and Maya. When we got back home, I had five kinds of cheese in the fridge, including fresh goat cheese so mild that it tasted like cream cheese. A cheese I bought at the supermarket by mistake turned out to be amazing. It was a round of goat cheese surrounded by a layer of brie. Who thinks this stuff up? Cardiologists? I may be eating too much cheese. I may need to balance this out by eating more chocolate....

A note about shopping: you bag all your own groceries in bags you bring to the store. Grocery stores charge you for paper bags ($.30) and durable plastic handle bags ($2), so people are incentivized to reuse these bags. I am learning to bring bags with me when I go to the store, and our kids are learning how to bag groceries so that the pears make it home on the tram without getting too bruised.

Friday night, we had a lovely dinner with one of Josh's colleagues and his family. Saturday, we set out to Appenzellerland, in the Northeast of Switzerland. There, in Jakobsbad, we rode luges on rails down a mountain...




and played at another playground with a zip line, but this one also had a trampoline.




We also walked part of the Barefoot Trail through meadows and a special river area to clean off your feet. According to Rick Steve's Switzerland guide, the walk follows the philosophy of a 19th-century therapist who sought to treat medical conditions with water of different temperatures and pressures. Actually, only Josh and Maya did it barefoot, but I couldn't resist the family photo op at the river.





Another laundry note: I am realizing that in the daytime, the cafe in our building also utilizes our washing machine and dryer. (Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think this would happen in America.) I met a nice female employee of the cafe in the laundry room this afternoon and asked her how much it costs to do a load of laundry since I'm still getting inconsistent amounts of change back from the machine. She said it depends on which wash cycle you use - the hotter the temperature, the more it costs. (I appreciate the energy-conciousness of the Swiss.) Then I asked her how much the hottest wash costs. Her answer: "I don't know. We just put money in, and the machine always gives us money back." This evening, the machine returned to me the entire amount I had fed it to do a load of laundry.