Zürich is covered in snow this week and it has been freezing. All the spring flowers got buried. Yesterday we spent the day with Tony and Rachel and we got to make a 7-foot tall snowman. It was a lot of fun sledding with their kids too. Chad and I totally wiped out on the last run.

We’re figuring out how to cook all over again. Cheddar cheese is really expensive if you can find it. In Seattle that was always our staple. We had cheese sandwiches and cheese quesadillas and Mexican. We use fennel a lot right now. (If you don’t know what that is it’s OK because I didn’t either. Elisa claims she knew what it was before.) It’s one of my favorite foods now. We’re really trying to cook like the people here and use the ingredients that are easier to find and cheaper.

Google gave us a really nice surprise this week. The company is trying to encourage everyone to use alternative transportation. So someone left bicycle helmets on everyone’s desk one night as a gift. When we arrived at work we got an email saying that they are giving us a bike and we just have to choose which style we want! 🙂

This has been a really fun night. Elisa and I just got to play games with Mike and Christina, who we know through Google. We even got to entertain them in our new apartment. On Friday we played games with Tony and Rachel from our ward and with Matt and Erin from another ward. We still love our social life here.

Elisa has been studying lots of new things in German class. She is speaking more and more to people. The month-long class is already half done. It’s gone faster for me than Elisa though. The first week was really exciting, now I am hoping more and more that I can just keep up. I am learning a lot and understanding much more. German sure is a crazy difficult language though.

Yesterday we went to the Swiss capital of Bern. The temple is on the north side of town. We got so spoiled in Washington when the temple was only 15 minutes away. It was really only 11 minutes door to door. It’s two hours away from our home now (and luckily not further). I was surprised by how small the temple was. It took about half the session just to get used to hearing all the languages being presented at once. It will take some getting used to. After attending a session we did a walking tour in the Bern old-town. We saw Einstein’s home and the bear pits Bern was named after. The deeper you walked into the city the more quaint it seemed. You could easily imagine life buzzing around the streets hundreds of years ago. I had another run in with an unknown ingredient. I apparently ordered beet juice the other day. It wasn’t so bad. 🙂

Elisa got a calling in the ward today. Chad and I had just been laughing about how we were going to make disguises so we could hide as soon as a bishopric member came around. We were too slow. I was called to be the Primary Chorister again. I guess I am not getting out of doing the Primary Program this year after all. I am excited for the opportunity but terrified. I was so stressed with the calling in English–engaging and teaching children the songs in German is a completely different challenge. But I suppose we are promised that the Lord will fit our backs to the burden, right?

Elisa and I had been having hard times before, but we feel like this week was the start of a much better Switzerland.  Elisa has started German lessons now.  She goes for four hours a day every weekday.  She is already conversing with Swiss friends.  (Really!)  At a very elementary level.  I like sitting with her at night when it’s time to study.

I got to go on a ski outing to Laax with my coworkers on Friday.  They are really nice and I wouldn’t have known so much about them without doing something outside.  Google has been a good place to work in spite of all the trouble we had at first.

We are almost entirely out of boxes.  We spent the majority of Saturday assembling a wardrobe to replace our closet back home.  It is so nice to have a place to put things.