Weekend Update

I'm going to wrap up the last few days in one nice, long entry.  Otherwise it just isn't going to get done.

Saturday I took the morning to shop for my Mother's Day gift.  Yes, I could have sent Ryan for it, but half the fun was picking it out.  Who wouldn't want to choose their very own cowbell for Mother's Day?  No, I won't personally be sporting it anytime soon.  Although with as much as I've been enjoying the Swiss chocolate, I might be headed that way...

Nothing says "Happy Mother's Day" better than a cowbell.

In the evening, we went to dinner at the house of one of Ryan's colleagues.  She's a very brave colleague to have us all over.  The plan had been to have a barbecue, but since it rained, that didn't work out and we had fruit and breakfast cakes instead.  Katie's only contribution to the conversation over dinner was when she (out of the blue) blurted out, "Do you have this for dinner EVERY night?"  The idea of having cake for dinner was quite intriguing to her, and she might have wanted to change citizenship had she discovered that Swiss people ate cake for dinner every night.

Mother's Day was awesome.  We had gone to the mall on Saturday and Mason and Katie had found some things to buy for me.  I must thank H & M for this, since it was probably the only store they could have afforded in the mall and Ryan serendipitously ended up stopping in there.  Katie got me the scarf and Mason got me the sunglasses.

When Andrew realized he hadn't gotten me anything, he disappeared into his room and came out with a bag full of gifts: the box from his Eiffel Tower (he didn't need it anymore, and he thought I would want to be able to look at the pictures), a few of his remaining chocolates from the chocolate factory, and a bracelet he had made using the embroidery floss my sister brought when she came.  And to top it all off, this very sweet note:

 And along with the gift of a cowbell, Ryan gave me the gift of having the day off.  He played with the kids:

 ...and learned how to make tortillas when I realized that I hadn't bought them for my Mother's Day taco dinner.  I had decided I wasn't going to buy anymore $6 bags of them, but then forgot to tell the other half of my brain about it when I got the rest of the stuff for tacos thinking that Ryan and the kids could make that for dinner.  Everything turned out great.  Plus, we both got to talk to our awesome moms (thank you Google chat), and we went on a hike.  A perfect day.


On Monday, we headed to one last zoo.  We've been to a couple of Alpine zoos, so my kids were ready for some not-so-native animals.  There's a city about an hour south that had a nice small zoo with elephants, camels, sea lions, giraffes, etc. 


First off, we headed to the camels.  They got to feed them carrots, and then ride them.  Pretty cool.  They are very hairy, and very hungry (the camels, not my children).

These little green birds got a lot of our popcorn.

And we were able to get up close and personal with an elephant.  We rode the elephant later on, but I was clearly told that I needed to HOLD ON and not take pictures.  The four kids and I all fit on at the same time, and I have to admit it was kind of fun to ride.

Breaking the first rule by stepping over the rope barrier.

Breaking the second rule by feeding the elephant popcorn

After the elephants, we saw a little bit of the sea lion show, and then headed to the goats and the porcupine.

 I don't know how well you can see it, but the look on Mason's face between the first and second photos is pretty funny.  The porcupine fluffed up his/her quills all of a sudden, and it gave them a good scare.

 I was looking for a cheap outing today, so we headed to IKEA.  Andrew and Chloe were as happy as the rest of us were about having them go into the childcare area. IKEA may not be everyone's style, but who can argue with a store that babysits your kids.

 Megan hadn't ever been in an IKEA, and it had been a while since Mason and Katie had.  We made a game out of trying to spot all of our furniture, dishes, bedding, etc. while walking through the store.

 And we finished it off with an ice cream.  When I paid for it, they handed me the empty cones and pointed to a machine.  So off we went, and did our best to follow the instructions.  You stick the cone in, push a button, and it dispenses the ice cream and chocolate syrup into a perfectly shaped mound.  

Clearly we have tapped out our entertainment options when the ice cream dispenser at IKEA warrants taking a picture.  I guess it's a good thing we're heading to Italy on Sunday.


But before we go, I need to add in a few funny things about our stay in Switzerland.  


It took me a week before I got our washer and dryer figured out.  The washer was tricky, but we finally got that one, and then the dryer stopped working after a few loads.  We air dried a couple of loads before I figured out that you have to pull out a tub that collects the water that comes out of the clothes (see exhibit A below).  I guess they don't vent their dryers to the outside, so you have to manually dump it out every few loads.

 And I spent a solid 10 or 15 minutes trying to figure out where baking soda and baking powder were.  I knew it should be by the flour and sugar, but no matter how hard I tried to will my eyes to see them, it didn't work.  So I went home to look it up on the internet and see where I was going wrong, and found out that you have to buy baking powder, baking soda, and vanilla ("vanilla sugar") in little packages like these:

 I splurged a little on this purchase, but how could I not.  I call it "flushing my way to fluency".  It's like the Rosetta Stone of toilet paper, with English, German, French and Spanish.

 I've made a few mistakes with food while I've been here.  Spaghettios instead of spaghetti sauce.  Lasagna instead of mozzarella cheese.  Spicy chicken wings instead of chicken breasts.  I'm sure there have been more.  One of my favorite mistakes was buying this:

 I thought it was yogurt, but as a friend I met here informed me, it's actually a dessert called "quark"--which is pronounced like "kwok".  I pretended I didn't hear that.  It's going to be hard to go back to Go-gurt after stuff like this.