There is so much to be thankful for. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with all sorts of extended family from both the Stabler and Church sides of my family. Chad and I were in charge of making 10 pounds of mashed potatoes. We also got to help my mom make her fabulous pies. I made apple cider. I made it twice–one batch that had too much allspice to be ingested, and the other batch that turned out OK. 🙂 The food was great, the company was wonderful and we have enjoyed a couple of days together doing finishing work in our bathrooms and conceiving exciting ideas for spreading some Christmas cheer. We have thought a lot about our family members who are far away and have been especially wishing well for them and praying for them. Daniel is having a birthday today and we’ll be celebrating it at dinner at my parents house. Even though he is coming down with some sort of sickness, Chad sneakily whipped up a special treat for my birthday too. It sure smells good! We are taking it easy while we can before the many choices and many changes to come.

We didn’t do an entry on Elisa’s birthday because we were so busy in Zurich. Now that we’re back it’s time to celebrate.

Elisa sometimes gets shafted on her birthday. That’s what happened this year. She was so jet lagged on her birthday. And she had caught me trying to sneak her birthday present out the door, so she knew what she was getting! Poor girl with ruined surprises.

Elisa had been asking for a white coin purse for awhile. I found a nice one online and it came in time for her birthday. I was so excited until I actually opened the box. It was about twice as big as it had looked in the picture. Instead of being a convenient coin purse it was more like a miniature handbag. It certainly wouldn’t fit in a pocket, which was the whole point. So that idea got deep-sixed. That left her with one present for her birthday. Her whole day really got overshadowed by other things going on. 🙁

Fortunately Elisa is a good sport! As I keep telling her, she is perfect for me. Elisa deserves to be treated like a queen all the time, not just on her birthday. I hope we can make it up to her during Christmas season. Happy, Happy Birthday Elisa Parry!

Elisa and I are in a hotel in Zurich right now. We are pretty beat. My interview is tomorrow and we are hoping for the best. We still haven’t decided for sure whether we’ll want to live here permanently.

The first day of our trip was miserable. I hate to deter anyone from the trip to Switzerland, whether to visit us (we’re crossing our fingers) or just for your own holiday, but my goodness the flight was miserable. If you’ve ever traveled to Europe then you know what you’re in for. We started out early Friday morning and, after a layover in Georgia, ended 14 hours later in Zurich, Switzerland at 8:45 am on Saturday. My whole body was just aching and unlike Chad, (Mister “I can go to sleep anywhere at anytime,”) I was not rested at all. The plane’s schedule was weird because they were showing a movie in the evening when it was already in the early a.m. in Zurich. The cabin lights didn’t go off forever. When we went to put our shoes back on at the end of the flight we discovered they had plumped up during the trip. My birthday in Switzerland began as Chad sang Happy Birthday to me over our plane food breakfast. What a guy. Elisa said that only some of the notes were out of tune. It was probably my best Happy Birthday ever. I didn’t dare ask the help of the other passengers though.

We wearily boarded a train to go to our hotel and I was deliriously tired and overwhelmed. We found the train station pretty easily and grabbed cheap 3-day passes. The train system is pretty good. We’ve seen that it can get you anywhere on schedule. And there really are a billion clocks everywhere in the city. They are all synchronized, just like you would expect of Switzerland. The hotel let us check in early so I was able to take a much needed nap. We then went out to explore.

Chad and I started by walking along the Zurich lake waterfront. It is very serene and there are enormous Trumpeter Swans. The weather has been so good. We’re lucky. This time of year is way past tourist season because it’s cold. Unfortunately a lot of places are closed for the season. In fact, some tours are only closed during November. One of the mountain resorts that we wanted to see, Mount Titlis, is only closed this week! Our first stop was a large art museum. It was rather dull until we got to the section with originals of the artists that I have heard of and that have made significant contributions to art history. Monet, Picasso, Mondrian, van Gogh. We strolled through the old medieval part of town. There’s this expectation I had that Zurich was pretty big. The walk through Old Town was only a half a mile long though. That’s pretty much as big as the entire city gets. All the towns around here surprised me with their compactness. The architecture is beautiful. Grossmünster is a church built in the 1100’s. It has two large towers and pretty stained glass windows. We climbed a billion steep stairs to the top and were able to look out over the city and the lake. The steps were through a cramped tunnel and two people couldn’t walk past each other very easily. It reminded me of the hunchback of Notre Dame. By this time Elisa and I were really feeling jet lag. It was all we could do to keep moving in order to stay awake. Elisa had a little more energy than I did at the end of the day. Around 4 pm I just zoned out and had her drag me by the hand back in the direction of the hotel. We didn’t want to go to bed right away because we needed to overcome the jet lag. We were pretty out of it though.

Zurich is nice but it was not what I expected. Being so tired and overwhelmed by the possibility of making this place my home left me exhausted. It was hard that we were looking at touristy parts of town, and that didn’t shed any light on the personality of the city. We really want to know what it would be like to live here. One of the things that I thought was neat was there are these underground cities where you can buy groceries and get dry cleaning. It’s really different from what we’re used to, but it’s their equivalent to the necessities.

Sunday we got up early and traveled by train to Luzern. In English its written Lucerne, just like the Safeway milk. It is about an hour away and southwest of Zurich. We didn’t realize we were traveling along the lake nearly the whole time because the morning was thick with fog. From Luzern we took a bus to a cable car going to Mt. Pilatus. It was SO steep and beautiful. I liked how the mountain was surrounded by green meadows and red fall-colored trees. It was just like lots of old medieval paintings that I have seen and that I always thought were fantasies. At the top of the mountain there was a Christmas Market and great views. There was a little church perched high on a cliff (small congregation I’m guessing) and a hike through caves that had plaques telling about the folklore of the mountain. We had Swiss cheese fondue and Swiss hot chocolate at the top of the mountain while we listened to a family of accordion players. All around us people were speaking different languages. It felt foreign and wonderful. You’d be surprised at how the rest of our trip really hasn’t felt foreign. Zurich just felt like it could have been a suburb in New Jersey or something. People dressed and lived just like anything I’m familiar with. Finally when we were sight-seeing around Luzern we felt like we had gone somewhere unique. We came down the mountain by a cogwheel train. It was like a slow rollercoaster ride. It was on a 48% grade and there were times when you couldn’t see whether the track ended or dropped off. We took a train back to Luzern and walked around the beautiful city. Holy cow, it is amazing. There is a monument back in a small park with a lion carved into a cliff. It was relaxing. There were old covered bridges and I guess the architecture was pretty cool. All in all we liked Luzern but we didn’t spend a lot of time in the city. Most of the entertainment around here is probably centered on hiking or doing other things in the country. Come to think of it, we also met someone from Luzern on the ride up Mount Pilatus, and we got to see him parasail off the top of the mountain.