Off to the good ol' US and A

We're leaving in the morning for San Francisco. I'm so excited I could pop! We planned this visit - a week in SF and a week in Phoenix to see my folks - at the last minute. We were going to hold out on returning to the US because we were only supposed to be in Zurich for a year, but it looks like we'll be staying here longer. Yipee!

I can't believe we'll be back in our old town tomorrow - our old apartment even, which is now inhabited by friends. I've been having dreams about SF for a couple weeks now. Here's what's on the agenda.

1) Sing-along Sound of Music at the Castro - This is an annual SF event that I never did when I lived there but always wanted to. I'm so psyched about it. Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens....

2) HoopGirl - Apparently hula hooping is the newest fitness craze. Some girlfriends have promised to get me hooping. I can't wait!

3) Waxing - I guess I'm something of a masochist in that I love getting my body hair torn out with hot wax. It feels so good! It's too pricey here in Zurich, but SF is a waxing mecca.

4) Food! I plan on consuming sushi, dim sum and mexican food in generous quantities.

5) The deYoung Museum - This fine arts museum in Golden Gate Park was controversial when it re-opened last year because of its cutting-edge architecture. It was designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron. I went once for work but never made it back to get a better look.

6) The hubby's company holiday party - They always throw an amazing bash. This year's theme is the Greek gods. I dig the pagan connection.

7) DMV - this isn't so exiting but I really miss my driver's license since it disappeared along with the rest of my wallet in a Paris train station.

I'll be back Dec. 12, but will try to blog from the road...

Food and fashion in Milan

One thing I love about living in Zurich is that you can do things like dash off to Milan for your birthday, which is exactly what we did this past weekend. We even had our own personal Milan tour guides, Jul and Scott, who used to live there and planned all our meals. The food was fabulous and included everthing from perfect, brick-oven pizzas to a four-hour, seven-course marathon of haute vegetarian cuisine. The mozzarella bar, which we visited twice, was also a treat.

The shopping was just as exciting, and I was a woman on a mission. With winter nearly upon us, I sorely need to beef up my whimpy California wardrobe. And unless you're in the market for chocolate, the shops in Zurich are mostly unremarkable and overpriced.

So I was in fashion heaven in Milan. I drooled over the window displays in the famous designer district around Via della Spiga and Via Monte Napoleone, but the only thing I bought in that area was a cappuccino at the Armani Cafe. The cafe is part of a huge Armani complex that takes up a whole city block, and sells Armani-brand flowers, chocolates, and cosmetics, in addition to all the clothes. It was there that Jul introduced me to caffè marocchino, an espresso drink with a policitally incorrect name meaning "little Moroccan." It's a shot of espresso with a dash of milk and cocoa powder. Despite the name, it's delicious.

For actual shopping, I spent most of my time browsing the more affordable boutiques across town on Corso di Porta Ticinese and Corsa Genova. My best purchase was a wool coat with big buttons and a big, floppy collar (yay, 60s!) in off-white and forest green. I couldn't refuse the matching green, cowl-neck sweater, which was on sale.

In almost every clothing shop I came across the same scrumptious colors - royal purple, violet, mossy green, and turqouise. It was like candy, and I wanted something in every color but settled for another sweater, a funky purple number with pom-poms that tie around the waist. I am a very spoiled b-day girl.

Kaffee & Kuchen 101

My in-laws came over yesterday for afternoon kaffee & kuchen. I'm still getting used to this German tradition (the cake, not the in-laws!). It's a nice way to get together but the timing always throws me off. It's usually in the late afternoon around the time I start thinking about pouring a glass of wine or cracking a beer.

For a German, no conditions are too extreme for kaffee & kuchen. Case in point, I was on a road trip with my German family last year. It was August and we were somewhere between Pheonix and Joshua Tree when they pulled the RV over to the side of the highway. It was 105 degrees, we were the middle of the desert, and my father-in-law, god bless him, started boiling water for coffee! I just sat there sucking on a rapidly melting popsicle in disbelief.

At any rate, last time Ralf and Irmhild visited us in Zurich, I totally botched kaffee & kuchen. I hastily brewed a pot of coffee, forgot the sweets and proceeded to eat half the soft pretzel they'd picked up on the road for themselves. I was such a lame hostess, especially compared to my sisters-in-law who are always whipping up wonderful homemade cheese cakes and fruit tortes.

So I was determined to redeem myself yesterday. I set the table, lit the candles, had the coffee brewing and - the topper - I made Apfelchuechli. I had my first Apfelchuechli (ap-fell-kook-lee) a couple weeks ago on the farm, and they were divine.

They're basically fresh apples, peeled, sliced into rings, battered, fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. The finishing touch is to serve them with whipped cream and jam. They're super simple to make, and they are sure to impress German and American friends and family alike. Click here for the recipie.

A week on Helmut's farm

OK, I'm starting to see a pattern. I have a thing for farms. It started in Italy with a visit to an agriturismo last May. Then in July I spent two nights sleeping in a barn in the Alps. Two weeks ago I shipped myself off to an organic farm on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, where I spent five days picking apples, shoveling grass, and squeegying cow poop out of the stalls. And I liked it!


Most of the people I know think I'm slightly crazy to do this stuff. I told a friend about my upcoming trip to Helmut's farm, the latest of these adventures, and the conversation went something like this:

me: i just talked to my farmer!
friend: cool!
me: i'm all signed up
friend: and they're going to let you work for free? (note mock astonishment)

Sassy beetch, you know who you are! Anyway, the question is, what's the big attraction for me? I suppose, in part, it's my inner hippy, which I cultivated in my youth on camping trips with my aunt and uncle and during four years of college in Eugene, Oregon.


But it also has something to do with my idea of the farming life. It seems to me there's a certain purity and wholesomeness in that lifestyle. There's a rootedness about it too. I'm such a wanderer, changing cities and traveling every chance I get. So it's fascinating to me - the idea of staying on one piece of land for most of your life and caring for it like a child - more like 10 or 15 children actually. In Helmut's case, the farm has been in his family for four generations. He lives there with his 80-something parents, his girlfriend, and his two teenage sons, who all pitch in around the farm.

A typical day on the farm went something like this. Helmut woke up at 5:00 a.m. to milk the cows (except for the morning he got up at 3:00 to deal with the arrival of a milk truck). Helmut's son Louis and I got up just before 7:00 for a quick breakfast of coffee and bread. At 7:30 we all helped take the cows out to pasture and then cleaned out the stalls.

At around 8:00 Helmut would mow a patch in one of his fields, and the rest of us would rake and shovel grass into big piles, which Helmut would move to the barn with his tractor. This really got the blood pumping as these were no ordinary rakes but big industrial-size, 50-lbs rakes.

After a short break, Helmut, Louis, Opa and I went out to the orchards to collect apples off the ground. We spent a couple hours at this with Opa and I at the trailer picking out bad fruit and debris and Helmut and Louis operating the apple-picker-upper machine. We returned to the house at about 11:00 to bring the cows back into the barn. At noon was lunch and at 1:00 we returned to the orchard and stayed til about 3 or 4. At 5:00 Helmut milked the cows again and dinner was around 8:00. The routine varied from day to day, but that was the basic schedule. The exception was Friday, when instead of picking fruit we made apple juice.

I was pretty grubby by the end of the week. I had dirt under my finger nails, my hands turned brown from handling pears (a strange thing about pears), I had bug bites and bruises all over and I smelled like a barn. Christoph was somewhat taken aback when he came to pick me up.

The farm was full of characters. Helmut is really upbeat and funny. I think he welcomes volunteers more for the company than anything else. He told me stories all week and told Christoph when he came to pick me up that I was welcome back anytime just for my smile. Opa, Helmut's 82-year-old father, does an incredible amount of work on the farm for his age. He could be a bit of a curmudgeon at times, but he had the sweetest smile and rosiest cheeks. Oma, a.k.a. "the general," was also a tough cookie. She favored the seemingly futile task of swatting flies in the barn to any other activity. I can't imagine she made much of a dent in the fly population, but she was never deterred.

They were all really hospitable and kind to me, but I did feel like an outsider at times. I suppose that's just a natural part of being a stranger in someone else's home. I finally got into the swing of things on my last day there, so I suppose I'll just have to return sometime to apply my new apple-harvesting, cow-milking, barn-hygiene skills. In the meantime, I'll let these pictures tell the rest of the story.

Fright night

Switzerland doesn't celebrate Halloween, but lucky for us my hubby's company does. They threw a big bash last night for those of us who love dress-up. Of course, I didn't think about costumes until a few hours before the party began. I came up with a quick, cheap idea - I was Mrs. Inside-out and Christoph was Mr. Backwards.

As lame as it was, it's a good thing we came up with something. People who arrived without costumes faced the consequences for their lack of halloween spirit. In the case four hapless software engineers, that involved having to strip down to their tighty whities and bikini briefs (eeek!) and sing backup up for Britney Spears. It made for a truly scarey evening, as you might imagine.

It was one of those moments when you know you're not in Kansas (or even California) anymore. Can you imagine such a scene at company party in the U.S.? And I was worried my outfit would shock and offend...