“A bottle of Skype or a joint of Facebook?” Have you had your hourly fix?

Thursday night, 9:30pm: Home at last after 6 hours of lectures and 2 hours of Salsa dancing. Starving, sweaty and beyond exhausted, what is the first thing I reach for? My laptop, of course.

9:35pm: A little red cross at the bottom right hand corner of the screen catches my eye. No internet connection. A wave of panic rises in my chest. Refresh. Refresh again. Nothing. Ok, I’ll just restart my computer. That will reboot the internet. Right?

9:40pm: ...wrong. The wave swirls higher. No, it’s ok, this has happened before. Worst case scenario, I go to bed tonight without internet. But come tomorrow morning, the world will be spinning back on its axis. Right?

9:50pm: ...(you know what to insert here). I come to the sad realisation that reading the sign on my roommate’s door for a fifth time will not actually change its (horrific) meaning.

9:55pm: My roommates and I make a pact to buy a new one if it cannot be fixed by tomorrow. A weekend without internet? Ha, that’s a good one!

10:00pm: Faced with my first internet-free evening in...too long, and already lost for things to do after five minutes, I realise just how tangled I have become in this sticky web.

Before tonight, I wouldn’t have said that I use my computer too much. Twenty hours of uni and eight hours of sport/dance a week, plus homework, going out, travelling and eating chocolate (oh, and sleeping) doesn’t leave much time for anything else. But if my reaction tonight is anything to go by, I should be changing my name to “Geeky Bi”.

Guess it’s time for me to pick up my violin or a good book! That’s right, dear reader, “book” without the “e–”.

Pork Perfection

A few days ago, I bought some pork.

No biggy, right? Wrong. Meat is excruciatingly expensive here in Switzerland. However, with a stroke of luck (more specifically, a ‘50% off’ sticker), I walked out of the supermarket with a kilo of pork under my arm and a plethora of recipes running through my head.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I also bought some (ridiculously overpriced) soy sauce and sesame oil. Yep, time to get cooking!

Simple Sesame-Soy Stirfry
~ Serves 2 ~

Ingredients:

·         Pork (200g, diced)

·         Celery

·         Carrot

·         Onion

·         Soy sauce

·         Sesame oil

·         Rice

Method:

1.    Cook rice (according to instructions on packet). Personally, I like a drizzle of sesame oil in mine.

2.    Throw pork and veggies in a wok on high heat. Add a pinch of salt and pepper.

3.    Stirfry until pork is cooked through. Drizzle with sesame oil and soy sauce, mix well.

4.    Serve with rice and enjoy! Told you it was simple.

This next one is from my mother – with a few of my own improvisations, of course. I hope I’ve done her recipe justice! Although I could not smell the end result due to my blocked nose, my roommate assured me (between burning mouthfuls and exclamations of “très bon!” and “c’est vraiment delicieux!”) that it smelled just fine.

Pork Roast, Sunday-Style
(and ‘every night for the rest of the week’-style)
~ Serves 4 ~

You’ll need:

·         Pork (500g)

·         Onion (2)

·         Carrot (2)

·         Pumpkin (500g)

·         Potato (4 medium)

·         Tomato (2, or a handful of the cherry variety)

·         Zucchini (1)

To prepare/cook:

1.       Preheat oven to 200ᵒC

2.       Dice all ingredients into 2cm x 2cm ‘cubes’

3.       Put everything in a large freezer/clean plastic bag 

4.       Add a drizzle of oil, salt and pepper (and herbs as you wish)

5.       Shake (gently), mix (thoroughly)

6.       Pour into a baking tray/dish, cover with foil

7.       Cook at 200ᵒC for around 60 minutes. When the meat is cooked through, your roast is ready!

Bon appétit!

Here We Go...

Just when I thought my life in Switzerland couldn't get any busier, uni started.

My first week was...HECTIC. Trying to take full advantage of my exchange, I attended almost every French class on offer (only with Hermione's time-turner could I have achieved more) and as many sports classes as I could squeeze in in between. Then, I was faced the difficult task of picking which ones to keep. In the end, I decided on eight. It's two more than I require credit for, but I couldn’t cull more than that, I just couldn’t.

And now, I am looking at my brand new, neatly ruled and brightly colour-coded timetable. It makes me happy.

·      Culture of Peace; Human Rights.

·      Analysis and Practise.

·      Grammar.

·      Linguistics.

·      French Songs.

·      Translation from English.

·      Literature and Culture.

·      And last, but definitely not least, Intercultural Interaction.

Plus one Discofit, one Step, one Rock ‘n Roll, one Salsa and one Pilates class to follow.

Oh, and let’s not forget my weekly Tandem meeting. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is a language exchange program. Simple and very effective. For me, it involves meeting for two hours over coffee (or preferably, hot chocolate and rhubarb tart) with a lovely French girl. One hour spoken in English, the other in French: an excellent cure for “Franglais”.

I have also cunningly kept my Fridays and Monday mornings free... It would be a shame not to travel when Switzerland is so conveniently located, don’t you think, dear reader?

So, it looks like I have quite a semester ahead of me. And with a little luck, and lots of chocolate, it may just be my best one yet!

La Gruyère

Last weekend, I got my first taste of the Swiss countryside. And it tasted good. The peaceful village we visited was not too hot or too cold; neither too large nor too small. La Gruyère was just right. 

As our train chugged into the countryside from Lausanne, cities evolved into towns into villages and cows began to outnumber human beings. Ninety minutes and eight hundred (vertical) metres later, we arrived at our first destination: Le Château de Gruyère.

Having spent most of my life in Australia and America, both “baby nations”, flying to Europe was like travelling through a time machine. While locals nonchalantly point to this five-hundred-year-old building and that thousand-year-old cathedral, I marvel, wide-eyed, at history. Firsthand. Not through a television screen, nor on the page of a text book. Walking around Gruyère Castle, I almost expected to see Macbeth standing on the balcony, mid-soliloquy, and to hear J.S. Bach’s music floating through the Baroque-style garden.

La Gruyère is also renowned for its Fantastic Art – a genre that I am a very big fan of. The exhibition at the castle was imagination and creation at its best. The vivid colours and otherworldly creatures wove through the castle like a magic spell, adding to its charm. Simply enchanting.

After lunch, we decided to make the most of the beautiful weather and take a walk through the countryside. Needless to say, it was beautiful. I love being blown away by the little things. Mountains (Australians, you know what I mean). Cows, with big brown spots. The way a railroad curves around a village like in a toy train set... We also made a few new friends. Of the equine variety. They neighed pleasantly in response to our greetings; evidently as multilingual as their Swiss human counterparts.

Next stop: La Maison du Gruyère, fromagerie. A little too commercial for my liking, but still very cheesy. In a good way. I was very impressed by the cheese ‘cave’. Ok, so ‘cave’ translates to ‘cellar’ in English, but it is actually the more appropriate term here. See?

Enough for one day? Not without my chocolate! Ten minutes from La Gruyère, in the little village of Broc is Cailler Chocolate Factory – also known as Nestlé, I’m just a little ashamed of supporting a company infamous for not supporting fair-trade. But I was in Switzerland, standing in front of chocolate heaven... So, I vowed to buy lots of Cadbury once I was back in Australia (huge sacrifice), and in we went.

There was a great tour of the facility – learning the history, seeing the machinery at work, trying cacao beans from around the world, all that jazz – but let’s face it, our minds were only on one thing: chocolate tasting. And it was worth the wait. Cheese isn’t really my thing (don’t look at me like that), but I more than make up for it with chocolate. 

Ok, now I’m eating dark chocolate as I type. But hey, got to get in the blogging mood, right? And I’m sure that’s a technique for good writing!

I am proud to admit that I tried every type of dark chocolate on offer at Cailler, plus quite a few of the milk variety. Truffles, pralines, caramels...nutty, crispy, creamy...
A chocoholic’s dream.  

So, that’s La Gruyère! So sweet. So Swiss.

Love is in the Air

Valentine’s.

Despite having a Valentine this year, I completely sympathise with the singles on this day. I’ve been there. Actually, by bad luck and even worse timing, I have always been there. And being half-way across the world this year doesn’t make it much better. No matter how “happily single” you may be, witnessing PDAs around every corner, watching men rush home with chocolates and roses, and being strangled by the pink and red streamers of commercialism cannot be fun. It’s like being hit in the face by a heart-shaped pillow. Repeatedly. And hard.

Or at least, that’s what I thought when I left my apartment on Valentine’s Day.

I had had a lovely conversation with the boy on Skype earlier that morning, but now, the signs on buses flashed obnoxiously with “JOYEUX ST VALENTIN” and “♥ LES AMOUREUX”. And it seemed that everyone had received the memo to carry around a single red rose. Everyone but me. In class, a project on the tradition of chocolate-giving on Valentine’s Day followed. Was there no end to this taunting? And I even had a Valentine. A wonderful, wonderful one... Or maybe that was the problem? That I knew exactly what I was missing? Well, I was missing it, alright.

But five hours later, I took back every bad thought I had directed toward St Valentine that morning. Because I came home to this:

Of course, I would’ve liked the man behind them, but the sentiment alone had me grinning like an idiot for the rest of the night. Organising the delivery of my favourite flowers (actually, they are white lilies, not Arum...but that’s another story!) from florists offering only French, German and Italian could not have been easy.

After that, I did exactly what I would’ve frowned upon that morning: I plastered a photo of the flowers, complete with a caption of my gushing, straight onto Facebook.

Sorry, my dear readers, I guess love does make you do crazy things after all...

Dreaming of Lac Leman

I’m sick. Not the ‘I have a bit of a headache and sneezed a couple of times this morning’ kind of sick. Well, that technically wouldn’t be incorrect. But, right now, I’m talking about the ‘my head is thirty degrees hotter than the rest of my body, and I’m really glad I bought three boxes of tissues yesterday’ kind of sick. You’d think five litres of water, honey, Lemsip, Panadol, fresh oranges and twenty-two hours sleep in the past twenty-four would help, right? But no, I still managed to miss a morning of uni and a class excursion to eat cheese fondue. CHEESE FONDUE! And being angry only makes my headache worse. 

Maybe I should have taken it easier this first week, but even now, sick in bed, I know I wouldn’t have done it any other way...

When Lac Leman is practically at your door step, it’s hard to resist pulling on your boots and going for a walk by the water. In fact, it is usually too hard to resist. 

Dawn: As the sun creeps slowly over the Alps, everything is tinted by pastel hues. Mist swirls over the lake and obscures the horizon, entrancing and mysterious. It’s almost too easy to believe that the faint splash heard in the distance was made by a mermaid’s tail. 

Morning: The delicious bite of the crisp winter air. I can only relate the sensation to sinking my teeth into a cold, crunchy apple – Pink Lady, to be precise. Rays of sunlight dance across the lake’s surface. The enticing perfume of fresh coffee and croissants from nearby boulangerie stalls lighten my purse.

Midday: The town of Ouchy, with its quaint little bridges and water features, is home to the Port of Lausanne and a wonderful crêperie. Try the crêpes with raspberry jam, or the local specialty Crêpe à la Raisinée. I did, and they made me very happy.

Afternoon: The sunset is spectacular. Every photo taken here is postcard-worthy. The swans are also out to play, but all dressed in white. Ironically, they seem to possess a much fiercer nature than the black ones in Australia. A final glance over the silhouettes of hundreds of sailboat masts against the flaming sky. Magnifique.

So, this is why I have found it so difficult to stay in my apartment!

I will write more about my Swiss adventures next time, dear reader, but now, it’s time to return to my koala-inspired lifestyle... Good night!

A Taste of Beauty

I have finally finished my homework, put my washing in the dryer, and made myself a steaming cup of chai tea with honey. Now, where do I begin?

It has been ten days since I landed on Swiss soil. Jet lag? A little. Snow? Not yet. New friends? Many. Chocolate? A lot!

For the first three weeks, I am taking the Cours de Vacances – an intensive winter language course – at the University of Lausanne (more affectionately known as l’Unil). Along with hundreds of other students, young and old, from Brazil to Korea and Russia to South Africa, I am diving beanie-first into the nuances and intricacies of the French language.

Living in a French-speaking environment has its advantages...and also its difficulties. Sure, it’s exhilarating and confidence-boosting to be able to ask for (and comprehend) directions from a policeman in French. And I love leisurely surfing the French channels on TV. But at the same time, asking the cashier to repeat the sum slowly while rummaging through foreign coins doesn’t make me very popular with local customers!

A few things I have already grown to love about Switzerland?

The precision (unsurprisingly). It is not a stereotype; it is a fact. A bus is “late” if it arrives two minutes behind schedule. No need to fear frostbite here! 

The chocolate. It’s true, even the Swiss “Black & Gold” equivalent is better than Cadbury’s...and much cheaper. Great news for my taste buds, but not so good for my weight!

And the signs. On bus stops, in front of shops, by the road, on top of buildings... In fact, my new favourite pastime on the bus and metro is trying to read every sign we pass. No, not simply reading – savouring. Devouring. Rolling the words around on my tongue, tasting the sounds, hearing the colours they create. A delicious melange of senses that swirl together to create this beautiful language. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have read these signs aloud once or twice...but that doesn’t bother me much. It would be as if I accidentally began singing out loud, or started dancing in the street. It is simply an expression of joy and an appreciation for beauty. And that could never be a bad thing.