interlude 2

i have been completely remiss in euro-blogging, and have many weekends to catch up on. but i wanted to let everyone who doesn't know yet know that i'm back in california now, but will be heading back to zurich for another five months from february to june! so the adventure will continue...

chagall is nice

since becoming museum girl, i've been somewhat embarrassed to say that i love monet, because it's just so... commonplace. at least i can be a tiny bit less ordinary by having discovered that i'm also terribly moved by the fanciful works of marc chagall. the zurich kunsthaus has quite a nice set of his works, and i was itching to visit THE chagall museum in nice. it was everything i'd hoped for and more! small enough that you can savour every single piece, and very nicely laid out. swoon!

back to the city of lights

for me, though, it's really the city of falafel! behind this blurred picture of b, the heavenly pockets and plates are being assembled. yum. paris has so much to offer, but i'm easy to please -- completely satisfied with falafel and a few hours at the orsay. some day i'll figure out what all the excitement over ritzy shopping and fine dining is all about. oh yeah, and of course, it was great to see b, b, and the other gk again!

the family business

it's all well and good to enjoy waffles and chocolate in belgium, but no trip to brussels could be complete without spending some quality time with kwak beer! it tastes much better drunk from its trademark glass, a work of true marketing genius. and what a trip to see 'kwak' on signs outside restaurants and bars. i've decided that some part of me must be descended from dutch-speaking tribes. after all, the name is there, and there's the mysetrious allure of dutch to my ears...

interlude

i will catch up on blogging some day. in the meantime, here's an update from the present! the tyranny of eurail has ended (i.e., my pass expired) and i finally had the freedom to spend a weekend doing nothing in zurich. except for laundry and su doku puzzles. people often think i'm kidding when i say i have ocd issues, but i don't think many could match my feat of 16+ hours of su doku in two days, including one 9-hour stretch with no breaks! sigh.

i'm not much of a turkey eater, but i'm feeling sad this week about missing thanksgiving at home. it snowed today, the first snow with big fluffy snowflakes, and i loved it. coat, scarf, hat, and mittens have all come out for the winter, and i'm surprised that i'm kind of enjoying the cold. (maybe because it's not that cold.) but i have LA weather on my google home page, and i wouldn't mind being in 82º LA right now either, puttering around at home and being fed in unhealthy quantities by mom.

cinque terre

i was ready for a break after over a week of work travel, so i headed off for a beach weekend in cinque terre. there's something about italy -- it's grungy, the buildings are run-down, trains are late, and i can just barely understand the language -- but i keep going back. obviously, it's the food! for someone who never really liked italian food, i've become quite the pasta lover. and you know how i feel about gelato. so i ate well and enjoyed the stunning coastal beauty of the five towns in the wonderfully uncrowded off-season. the place is probably too small for the hordes that swarm in during the summer, but i would highly recommend it in the spring or fall, and hope to return for a longer stay sometime soon.

bed bugs!!!

warning: extremely gross stuff ahead!!! i've stayed in all sorts of places on my weekend adventures, both nice and not so nice. i didn't expect that a 4-star hotel would be the one that introduced me to the terror of BED BUGS!!!!! i can't even begin to describe how absolutely disgusted i was for days and days. parts of my body looked diseased (e.g., >50 bites on the lower left arm alone) and i had to carefully wear concealing clothing for a while. YUCK!!!!! everyone: take a moment tonight to appreciate the peaceful sleep you'll be able to get in a clean bed.

so i will always remember granada as the city of bed bugs. okay, fine, the alhambra was beautifully intricate and i was blessed with blue skies. but the good parts are hard to pick out of the memories of panic and horror left in my head...

amsterdam is lovely

i lucked out and had a second weekend in a row loving my weekend destination. i spent a beautiful fall weekend in amsterdam, taking in lots of museums and biking all over the city. i liked it quite a lot, especially the language! there's something about dutch that catches my ear and i will have to learn it one of these days.

i love vienna!

i made some really ambitious plans to visit vienna and budapest in the same weekend -- one action-packed day in each. little did i know that vienna would become my answer to that previously unanswerable question: what's been your favorite city so far?

it was a bunch of little things. it's very clean like zurich, but has more to do. i loved the first cafe i ended up in, even if i decided after two tries that i'm not a sachertorte fan. huge grand buildings, in good condition and with solid tourist infrastructure. i lucked out by being there on the one night a year the museums stay open until 1 am. there was a traveling exhibit from the orsay including a lot of the works that were missing when we were in paris. i kept thinking, "I FOUND THEM!!!" i was so excited to be able to see them! $2.50 standing room opera tickets appealed to my frugal side, even if i decided after two shows that i'm only a shallow opera fan (frivolously amusing plots only, please). i heard (but did not see) the choir boys sing mass. and i got a dose of history at a fantastic exhibit on austria since world war i. it made me want to bust out the european history books again. i just loved it!

if you haven't figured it out yet, i didn't make it to budapest. ah well, next time! (and i'll have to take a train that doesn't go through vienna.)

settled in, or not

when s&j visited me, as soon as they got to my apartment they marched into my kitchen and turned my refrigerator on. apparently, they thought it was ridiculous that i was living sans fridge, but i thought it was ridiculous that they were turning it on when there was nothing to put in it except chocolate. over the next couple weeks, though, with the parents visiting and a couple weekends spent in zurich, i actually acquired things like leftovers and milk. it was almost like i really lived there!

then the visitors all left and i was back to my old ways of eating at work every weekday and leaving town every weekend. (yes yes i'm still behind on this blog.) the result? yesterday i dumped out congealed milk and an unspeakable something from tupperware. back to just chocolate in there keeping cool.

what happened?

suddenly, the leaves are changing and i've busted out my scarves. autumn is here, and my assignment in zurich is more than half over! unbelievable!

[photo credit: sis]

roman find

i reunited with the fam and we spent a quick two days in rome. the sights were of course magnificent, but the real high point was discovering an amazing new dessert: tartufo! it's a huge blob of chocolate gelato mixed with chocolate chips/shavings and other chocolatey goodness. i guess i don't know exactly what it was, except that it was delicious! it was also, shall we say, mood enhancing. i kept poor tired s up all night engaging in various ridiculous activities. such as wiggling.

trompe l'oeil

this picture is funny because strange perspective effects make me look even smaller than i really am compared to my (mostly) tall, white, male co-workers. hee hee. we went hiking for an offsite, conveniently on my one day back at work between vacations. (though i paid for it by staying up all night working... in case those of you who think it's all just hiking and traveling for me were wondering...)

magic mountain

mom and dad joined me and s in europe, and we headed off to zermatt, city of the matterhorn. we spent one whole day on trains following the "glacier express," taking the long scenic route to zermatt. (but we all dozed off during one of the prettiest stretches.) for dinner, i finally tried my first cheese fondue. it was terrible! then we spent a day worshipping the mountain. disneyland made a good copy - it looks just like the matterhorn i grew up with.

yellow dog

s has asked: where the mongolians? we happened to be in san sebastian during their film festival, so we popped in to watch a movie about a nomadic mongolian family, die hoehle des gelben hundes (the cave of the yellow dog). not bad at all. the most striking thing was that mongolians look like koreans! and similar language elements too. i never knew.

eating in españa

it's obvious to anyone who knows me that anything called "chocolate con churros" is a dish i'm sure to go out of my way to try. but oh no! the churros were decidedly not delicious (to my disneyland-trained taste buds), and they gave me so much chocolate that i figured i should just drink up the remainder after the greasy sticks were finished... (and s hinted that she'd seen somebody else doing this) we were in a hurry so i just poured it down my throat. plus, i don't think it was really a single serving size but s didn't help me out much. i went into such sugar/grease shock that i was totally knocked out for the entire scenic train ride to bilbao, and couldn't eat anything sweet the rest of the day!

during the whole trip, dinner was usually pintxo (basque version of tapas) hopping, which was always great fun even if i couldn't actually eat much. little dishes are put out on the counter and you just eat what you want and figure out the bill later. the cheese sandwich (one of my staples in switzerland) of spain has turned out to be tortilla con patatas -- a fat omelette filled with fried potates. i love breakfast eggs and potatoes, and here they are rolled up in one dish, often in a baguette as a sandwich. i think i ate this every day. it's a good thing i brought vitamins.

alone in the dark

on our second day in spain, we ended up in a nature reserve where the camping season had already ended. the nice lady at the office (after we spent about an hour asking her questions about nearby hikes) said we could camp there for one night anyway, since it was obvious that we had come for "el camping." BUT, as we lay in the tent that night, we kept hearing noises in the night and i was super jumpy. we were alone in the park... or hoped we were! tooooooo scary. in the end, we decided that there was too much potential for a really bad situation. so less than two hours after the tent went up, it was folded up again and we were walking down the dark road to the next town, about 7 km away. a grim situation.

after only 15 minutes though, we came to a little bed and breakfast. we weren't sure they would be awake, but they answered the door and there was the nice lady from the park office! we heard her say to her mom, "these are the girls i was telling you about!" it was pretty hilarious, but i was so overwhelmed with relief that i didn't appreciate the humor until later. i've never been filled with such gratitude and comfort by the sight of two beds in a little cabin...

just can't get enough

day (night) 1 of our spain trip. what do you do during a one-hour layover in paris? if you're me, you run as fast as you can to falafel alley and hope desperately that you don't miss your next train... it was a crazy sprint to the marais and back, i wolfed down said falafel in seconds due to the adrenaline, and s laughed out loud at my red face, vein popping out of my forehead, and hand-fanning-face-while-saying-"la stresse! la stresse!"... but it was worth it! YUM!

updated: i stand corrected! from s: "the vein was in your neck, not your forehead! not even gaston's veins bulge in his forehead! hahahahaha!"

off again

oh goodie, more visitors! s&j are coming tomorrow, then i'm going with s on some kind of tbd adventure in northern spain. we haven't figured out yet how to balance out city/beach/nature time, but we're just going to wing it. so what about all you people who haven't visited me yet? when are you coming??

hagelslag

one of my dutch coworkers brought back a box of hageslag from amsterdam. in his words:

"Hagelslag is the Dutch contribution to world cuisine, much ignored by the rest of the world (except for decorating cakes) awaits you in the kitchenette near the espresso maker and consist of very small pieces of chocolate to be put on bread. For the uninitiated, you have to put enough butter or similar on your bread lest the chocolate pieces will fall off again. It works also great with peanut butter. Maybe next
time."

basically, they're chocolate sprinkles to be eaten with buttered bread. but oh my goodness!!! it's delicious!!! dare i say, even better than chocolate croissants! because you can control the buttery-ness and chocolatey-ness. i've eaten way too many pieces today... YUM!!!