While Lisbeth was sent to Denmark to fetch our Christmas presents (and run a couple of other errands) it was Tue's job to look after the little apartment and shop for the holiday festivities. Particularly the latter can be time consuming when looking for unusual goods and only speaking a broken French. In an attempt to have at least some Christmas traditions we have decided to repeat last year's
Christmas cake. For this we require of course the Italian hazelnut liqueur Frangelico, but that shouldn't be so hard to get here, this close to northern Italy where the drink originates?
Wrong! Most places that Tue entered and asked for it, he was greeted by a puzzled "
C'est quoi, ça?" ('
That is what, that?!'). So in the end it was also Lisbeth's job to parallelly import a bottle purchased at the Italian store Supermarco in Copenhagen.
It went a little better when shopping for various cuts of pork. The butcher at the supermarket Migros did have a funny look on his face when Tue asked if he could buy "
graisse du porc" ('
fat of pig')? Not to be deterred by such, Tue persevered with "
lard sans viande" ('
bacon without meat'), after which the butcher concluded that perhaps the product in mind was "
bardes" ('
broad strips of lard'). Once it was confirmed that they agreed and he was busy weighing out half a pound of it the butcher wanted to know what it was to be used for, so Tue had to try to explain
liver pâté. Then he didn't have any more questions. But Tue did: what about a "
rôti du porc avec sa peau" ('
pork roast with its skin')? For this he could only suggest a pork shoulder - with the shoulder bone still in it, that is. Not optimal for
Danish style pork roast. At the butcher in the supermarket Coop things didn't go any better. Only when Tue entered a real butcher store, was he told that he could come pick up the piece of meat he was looking for the next morning.
Thinking of specific tasks to perform, a wish had been expressed for a nail on the door for hanging a Christmas decoration from - actually we have practically no nails, but Tue succeeded in finding a single nail, left over from the assembly of some piece of Ikea furniture earlier in the year.
Likewise, a wish had been expressed for the baking of more cookies, particularly the traditional Danish cookies vanilla wreaths and perhaps also the so-called Jew cookies. Before any baking took place, intelligence arrived that both of these two types of cookies had been donated from Lisbeth's mother, so perhaps it would be preferable to try to bake something else. Tue then chose to make the not particularly Christmassy
pistachio shortbreads, and the modern compliment of the Jew cookie, the
palestinian cookie, giving a fresh breath of some different spices.
Last but not least, the purchsed lard was of course used to bake the intended batch of liver pâté and when Lisbeth's flight touches the runway tonight the pork roast will probably be in the oven at home...
Actually we don't know what happened to the rest of the ship, but at least the anchor is here.
We have previously broached the subject of how much space a mailbox can take up. And related, how large numbers can be used for writing the street number of the house. To be fair, we have to add that these guys seem to be number in both categories.
As previously mentioned, we are by now the two proud owners of Swiss postal accounts. Of course this includes net banking (ehh ... net-post-banking). But before getting started on the latter one has to wait for the post to mail this thingamajig. Which in combination with the smart card is used to generate access codes every time the system entered - this on top of your customer number (in itself a little hard to walk around remembering since it's not used for anything else - and the homepage has been conveniently programmed so as not to allow the browser to remember this field) and personal password.
We hadn't been in Geneva for long before we actively decided that we definitely weren't going to try eating fondue before it was winter.
After the party consumed a couple of trays of thinly sliced dried beef the little heaters on the tables were lit. Shortly after the pots with preheated fondue were put on the tables. There wasn't really time for sneaking a peak in the kitchen, but it is said that such a fondue is made from 3 cheeses, white wine (to dilute), and a little starch to prevent the wine and the cheese from separating. Using the small spikes the bread pieces were dipped in the cheese .. and yum. With this drink white wine. And so forth until there is no more fondue or one is completely full - whichever happens first. Although, we did get desserts afterwards...
Yes, it isn't only in Hawai'i one can find a fishy mailbox - such can also be found in Goleta.
Unlike many other US mailboxes the decoration of this one doesn't appear the least bit home made (and it certainly wasn't unique - we found a couple of it in the neighbourhood we lived in).
People sometimes have funny tendency to want to show off their flag - we know it from Denmark (which unfortunately we don't have a good picture of), from Switzerland (the other little huts also had flags on full right next them), from France (notice particularly the trees along Champs-Élysées in the upper left corner of the collage).
This little mail train from Goleta has certainly been waiting its turn to get on the blog. Not least considering it is one of the mailboxes that gave us the idea for the mailbox theme in the first place.
Saturday we went to Globus (the Swiss equivalent to Macy's) and noticed that their Christmas theme this year is 'Scandinavian Christmas'.
By now trams are not so unusual for us - when not riding our bikes we primarily use the trams here in Geneva - but these old wagons in Lisbon were more fun than the modern ones we have here. The very steep and narrow streets they ran up and down were also far more interesting and at times we wondered if the brakes could actually keep the tram from sliding when stopping for a red light.
