1.5 years

I can't say it enough, time is FLYING!!! Hard to believe its ben over a year and a half that I've lived in Switzerland. In the third six months of my stay, I travelled a bunch (summertime allows for that). Here is an update on my "countries I've visited" tally:

First 6 months:
1. Switzerland
2. U.S. (2 trips home and Minneapolis for work)
3. Germany (Konstanz and 2 trips to Munich)
4. Liechtenstein
5. Holland (Amsterdam)
6. Ireland
7. UK (Belfast)
8. Czech Republic (Prague)
9. Spain (Barcelona)

Second 6 months:
10. Jersey
11. France (St. Malo and Rennes)
12. U.S. (Home, NY, NJ, PA, OH, CO, TX)
13. Austria (Vienna)
14. Italy (Milan)
15. Germany (Berlin)

Third 6 months:
16. Belgium
17. Germany (Munich two times)
18. Austria (Salzburg & Innsbruck)
19. Liechtenstein
20. Sweden
21. France (Cote D'Azur and Reims)
22. Spain (Madrid)
23. Portugal
24. Poland
25. Turkey

thanksgiving

This year for the first time in my life I cooked a full Thanksgiving feast for some of my closest friends in Switzerland. As it was their first Thanksgiving, it was a lot of fun. And the food was delicious (finding the same ingredients as in the US was difficult, so there were some minor substitutions)! My biggest accomplishment though was ordering a turkey from a butcher who didn't speak English! And when I told my friends the story they especially liked my "Swiss German accent"!!

 

 

The menu was:

Turkey

Dressing

Mashed Potatoes & Gravy

Sweet Potato Casserole

Green Bean Casserole, and

Pumpkin Pie

 

 

 

Adrian, Piotr, Daniela, Jelena, & Claudia

 

We had our Thanksgiving feast on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. On the actual day of Thanksgiving, I met some friends after work and we went to the movies. My dinner on Thanksgiving day was a raclette pretzel on the train home from work - doesn't get more Swiss than that!

 

swiss exploration day

My friend Matt and I went for a random Sunday exploring. We are maximizing our "GA's", our annual Swiss train passes that allow us to travel on any Swiss public transportation. On this exploration day we visited Fribourg, Neuchatel, and Canton Jura for a random festival. It's a lot of fun for me to be in the French speaking part of Switzerland. My French is only slightly better than my German since I've forgotten so much since college, but its like visiting a different country and it's only a couple hours away!

Fribourg

 

Neuchatel

 

We had crepes and cider for lunch!

 

Small town in the canton of Jura

 

Random festival we went to celebrating the pig slaughter apparently

istanbul

Jelena and I went to Istanbul, Turkey for a weekend in November. We had a great time and managed to see everything we wanted in a short amount of time.

 

We flew into the airport which is on the Asian side of Istanbul. We were both very excited to be in Asia for the first time. Getting me into the country proved to be slightly more than difficult, but I finally got the necessary visa and met up with Jelena at baggage claim.

 

 

This is a horrible picture of us going across the bridge from Asia to Europe:

 

On Friday night, we had dinner and took went to the Turkish bath at our hotel.

 

The weather was amazing. On Saturday we first walked along the water on our way to the palace.

 

Hagia Sophia (mosque)

 

Topkapi Palace

 

 

Look at the smog in this picture. I've never seen anything like this before.

 

We spent a lot of time at the spice market. Everyone was really nice. We tried and bought some teas to bring home.

 

Jelena and some yummy baklava

 

 

After the spice market we walked through the tiny and packed streets towards the Grand Bazaar.

 

In the Grand Bazaar we shopped for scarves and gold. Shopping at the stores and talking to the people was really fun.

 

After the Grand Bazaar, we went into the New Mosque. We had to take off our shoes and cover our hair in order to enter. It was an interesting experience and the mosque was beautiful inside.

 

We drank some fresh pomegranate juice from one of the many guys making fresh squeezed juice on the street.

Our last stop of the day was the Blue Mosque. We also went inside this mosque.

 

 

On Sunday morning, we left early. I was pleasantly surprised by the Arby's at the airport. This is the first Arby's I've seen in Europe. Curly fries for breakfast? Sure, why not?!

 

 

Istanbul was great. It was much different from the other European cities I've visited which made it so intriguing. Also, the people we met were some of the nicest I've met while traveling which also made our experience so great.

 

champagne

In early November, three girlfriends and I went on the ultimate girls weekend (in my opinion). We rented a car for the weekend (see the sexy Nissan picture below), and I drove (was nice after not driving for such a long time!) for our little weekend getaway. We left on Friday night after work and the drive to Reims, France took about 5 hours, so we got in really late Friday night/early Saturday morning.

 

 

Saturday morning, we woke up and walked the 20 minutes or so into the heart of the champagne region.

 

Our first tour was at Taittinger champagne "maison". Our guide's English had a heavy French accent, so between the 4 of us (me being the only native English speaker), we got the gist of the champagne making process. The caves were really neat to see as well. 

 

 

But we all know the reason I went to champagne for the weekend was not to discuss champagne-making and tour caves, it was for the tasting! 

 

Claudia, Jelena, Jenna & Daniela

 

After a successful first tour and tasting at Taittinger (we concluded champagne tastes better in the champagne region of France), we walked to lunch with a random stop at this beautiful basilica on the way.

 

For the afternoon, we had a tour booked at Pommery.

 

The tour of the caves was much the same as the first one, but our guide's English was much more understandable this time, so we caught on a little more.

 

Champagne bottles as old as 1874:

 

 

With two tours under our belt and three glasses of champagne in our bellies, we were now considering ourselves champagne experts and changed our strategy to skip the tours and go directly to the tasting. Our next stop was Demoiselle. Here we enjoyed a glass of bubbly on the outdoor patio.

 

 

 

Our final stop and tasting of the day was at Veuve Clicquot.

 

After our exciting day, we walked back to the hotel and were enjoying girl talk and relaxing in PJ's so much that we decided to call it a night and got pizza and cheap wine for dinner and ate it in our room.

 

 

The next morning we toured the city a bit more. We walked through the beautiful cathedral and had brunch at a really cute café.

While we were at breakfast, everyone wrote a postcard (or 2). Of the 5 postcards we were mailing (some were being sent to the US and we only had EU stamps), they were written in 5 different languages. I obviously contributed the English one, but pretty cool!

 

After brunch, we drove around to a couple of our favorite maisons and made some large purchases for our own champagne inventory/upcoming new year's eve parties.

 

Then we drove back to Zurich. Daniela didn't think this trip was do-able in one weekend, but as shown, and as I've recommended to several other since we went, this is the perfect weekend getaway!