Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys

Like all his kind, he sleeps only by day

Well, it seems that Gabe's full night of sleep the other day was just an aberration.  Like a cat, he toys with us.  Oh, look, you're escaping!  Whoops!  Claws to the neck again!

When I came to Bucharest this time I brought with me a little noise machine that is supposed to help babies sleep.  It plays a sort of whooshing white noise, with a low-frequency heartbeat in the background, and is supposed to mimic the sounds he heard in the womb.  I don't think it's doing him that much good, and for us it's like we're living in The Tell-Tale Heart all the time.  Appropriate for Halloween, though, I guess.

They don't celebrate Halloween here, which is too bad because it's my second-favorite holiday.  In my position as Ambassador Of Awesome, I taught Robin and Roxane how to carve Jack-O'-Lanterns, so we had some Halloween fun.  We were also going to try to take Gabe trick-or-treating (there's an American family in the building and a few other internationals who might have known what we were doing) but he fell asleep before everyone else got home.  Next year, Gabe!  

There's an app for that

Earlier that day we had our big day on our own.  Our Swiss hosts were all at work or school, so Io and I took Senor Sassypampers out on the town.  

The first part of the walk was just walking around and looking at things, because all the businesses in  Feldmeilen (the suburb of Zurich where we are staying, just north of the city along the western shore of Lake Zurich) are closed from 12 to 2 for lunch.  Everything is also closed all day Sunday (yesterday), but many of the businesses were also closed all day the day we went because it's...Monday.  I don't understand how the economies of Europe continue to function.

EDIT: My dad pointed out that this map has south at the top.  So Zurich is actually at the north end of the lake, and Feldmeilen is south and east of Zurich.

It may be that they are powered by sheer beauty, though, because pretty much all of the countryside out here is gorgeous.  It was a foggy day most of the day, and we had a really nice walk from our hosts' condo to the town of Fieldmilen and back.

While we were in town we managed to pick up some groceries and I got to try out my extremely rusty German, which I haven't used at all since playing Castle Wolfenstein 3D.

GUTEN TAG!

Tuesday was another Big Adventure, this time to Alsace, France, a town that has surrendered so many times that half the street names are German.  France is about an hour and a half away by car, so we piled Gabe into his new carseat (the downstairs neighbors, who have a three-year-old, graciously allowed us to use all their old baby stuff for the week that we're here) and off we went.  The kids were in school but both Alina and Christian were off work.


As usual, Gabe travels like a champion.  He was really good in the car ride both on the way there and on the way back.

Gabe is like "Where is MY goddamn candy?!"

Alsace was pretty cool.  The real old-town part of it we couldn't do more than look at, because everything was closed for All Saint's Day (I swear to God, people never work here).  But the more regular part of town -- which is still pretty damn old by Los Angeles standards -- was open, so we did a lot of window-shopping and looked at all the cool old architecture.  We stopped in at a chocolatier, even though Christian pointed out that "French chocolate is shit," and bought some delicious snacks.








I realize this blog entry is basically just a bunch of photographs with none of my usual witty text, but these parts of Europe offer up lots of beauty and not a lot to make fun of.  That crack about France surrendering all the time is probably the best you're going to get:

After Alsace we headed off to another town, whose name I forget, about 5-10 miles away.  Christian (who has spent most of his life in this area) said it was the best small winery town in the region.  This is the great thing about staying with locals: you get to see all the really good stuff.

So we headed out to that little town, and did more shopping and some wine-tasting as the sun went down.  Ioana got to try lots of wines (I guess this region is famous for its Gewurztraminers) and I got to have beignets.  Christian and Alina bought something like five boxes of wine, which I thought was frankly crazy.  Then we all headed back home, exhausted after a long day.

He can also do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs

Switzerland is not part of the EU.  Because of that, there are border-control people each time you cross from Switzerland to France or vice-versa.  And Switzerland has some pretty stiff import restrictions, especially on food and drink, I think because they're trying to prop up local businesses (prices in Switzerland are much higher than in nearby France and Germany, to the point that Alina does a lot of her non-food shopping over the border).  You are allowed to bring in four bottles of wine per non-baby person, but we had way more than that.  Fortunately, Christian's car is apparently modeled after the Millenium Falcon and has a smuggling compartment.  So we had no problems, and I got the added bonus of feeling like a 1920's era bootlegger.  Eat hot lead, Ness!  But then the border guards just waved us through.  Sort of anti-climactic.

When we got back home I could barely stay up, but Christian managed to cook an entire traditional Swiss dinner, including little meat cutlets they call "schnitzel" but are not what we think of as schnitzel, and some sort of amazing potato-pie thingy that I am going to have to get the recipe for.  Delicious!  Another freaking amazing day for us.  What a great vacation this is.

Moment of Zen: