A Bit About St Moritz

We stopped skiing early on Saturday to wander around St Moritz a little bit. It's filled with expensive designer shops, just like Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich. Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc. The pedestrian area is not very large or unusually ritzy or upscale. Almost everybody there was wearing fur which I found somewhat disconcerting. Lots of long fur coats, fur hats, fur boots, and even big furry mittens. Ridiculous ... especially the big shaggy boots. I would have gotten a picture of some of them but I wasn't brave enough to take somebody else's picture on the street.

I got a picture of the back of the big 5-star hotel, Badrutt's Palace Hotel (I think there's a woman in a fur coat in this picture):



If you go to this website it shows you the "big 5" 5-star hotels in St Moritz:

http://www.stmoritz.ch/index.php?id=595&L=1

There's a big lake in front of Badrutt's Palace Hotel where there were lots of tents and people. Looks like there are horse races on the lake, which is different. There are also horse and buggy rides through the town ... we saw a few ... maybe people in St Moritz use those instead of cabs.

Here are a few other pics from around the pedestrian zone:







Anyway, I wasn't all that impressed with the town of St Moritz but the surrounding mountains and available outdoor activities were certainly impressive. There is a cross country skiing marathon that takes place there every year that looks quite popular. And there were countless people snowshoeing, ice climbing, skiing, xc skiing, and just wandering around on the big lake and on the streets. I hope to post some pics from skiing sometime over the next few days but our cell phone is currently refusing to speak to our computers so we'll see.

Here's a picture of the Engadin xc ski marathon:

Some Skiing Pictures

I don't even know the name of the place that Martin and his friend Julian skied at last Sunday (though I think they went to Lenzerheide but I could be wrong) but Martin took some pictures with the cell phone so I'm going to post them here for your viewing enjoyment since I have failed at getting pictures of ski resorts here so far.











This coming weekend we're going to St Moritz for some skiing and snowboarding so hopefully I will take some good pictures there. St Moritz is where all the rich and famous go to ski so it should be interesting.

Swiss Fondue

Last night we gathered at Nico's for some cheese fondue. Martin's parents make cheese fondue fairly often so I was interested to see how a Swiss person would make this Swiss specialty ... if it would taste any differently or if any secret ingredients were used.

Obviously, they can use slightly different cheese in Switzerland that is not available in the US. They still use gruyere and emmentaler but they also use Appenzeller which you can probably find in specialty stores in the US (I've never seen it) but it probably costs quite a bit.

Nico decorated the table quite nicely with Swiss flag napkins:



I'm not sure there were any secret ingredients involved that I was unaware of other than the use of Appenzeller cheese but the fondue tasted very different to me. More cheesy and less winey, at least in our pot. The pot on the other side of the table tasted more winey. They were both good, of course. Here's Martin digging in:



And to go with fondue, you apparently have to drink cherry schnapps. Nico said there's an argument and some people like pear schnapps better but the tradition is cherry schnapps. The one on the left is cherry schnapps, unlabeled and sketchy looking because it's homemade:



It was quite tasty and possibly better than the store-bought bottle of cherry schnapps we moved on to when we ran out of the homemade stuff. In Switzerland you have to have a license to make your own alcohol ... unless you own a cow. If you own a cow then you don't need the license. Maybe that's why there are so many cows in Switzerland! But they sure are happy cows with all the pretty vistas they have in the mountains.

Here's our American friend Nick, on the right, and his friend Tom who was visiting from the US. It was his first try of cheese fondue and he was a big fan:



Here's a round of schnapps. It is some sort of rule that when your pot is half finished you do a round of schnapps. Then afterwards I guess you just do them randomly or sip schnapps at your leisure because it supposedly aids in digestion.



It's also traditional to drink tea throughout the meal, hot tea, either black or green or herbal I don't think it matters. I drank some herbal mint tea and I'm pretty sure that that helped my stomach more than all the schnapps.

And of course here's our host Nico, on the right, with Oliver and Oliver's girlfriend whom I managed to catch in the middle of saying something:



Another thing Nico invited some people to try was snuff which is basically tobacco that you snort through your nose and seems popular in Switzerland. Nico is in the middle of his annual three weeks of Swiss army training and apparently they do snuff all day long during training (but don't touch it the rest of the year because it will ruin your nose). I think they have to though in order to stay awake for 18 hours per day hauling heavy packs around in the mountains (I believe Nico said he has to carry around anti-tank missiles). He's in the mountain infantry so mountains are what they do. Anyway you just put it onto your hand and inhale it and before everybody did it they all had to hold their hands in the middle like you see below while some funny Swiss saying was read (it was different every time but always funny):



None of the ladies would go near it (and some of the guys stayed away as well). Definitely not my cup of tea!

Portugal: Lisbon

We stayed at a great hotel in Lisbon with a great view of the city. Here's a view of the castle from our hotel:



And a view in the other direction:



The only downside to our hotel was the hill it was on and all the confusing turns you had to make to get down to the main part of the city. But once you figure out the route it's no big deal. We would often take cabs home at night to avoid walking up the hill though. Good luck finding a hotel that's not on a hill in Lisbon - it has seven hills and they're all good sized.

We have now been to Lisbon three times and have never been bored or disappointed. Our first time there we visited the Monument to the Discoveries:





And we happened upon the gay pride parade:



And we visited the castle, where there were lots of cats:





And we visited a neat church which had great carvings on the inside of it but I only have a picture of the outside:



And here are a few more pictures of Lisbon from a different vantage point. The castle:



The straight streets in this picture are in the area known as "Baixa". It contains lots of shopping and some pretty big bakeries filled with goodies:



Here's a street-level view of Baixa:



We always go to the area of Lisbon called the Bairro Alto to grab some drinks and dinner. The Bairro Alto is filled with restaurants with all different flavors of food to choose from (it is also filled with bars so you can hang out in that area all night long). And we always go to a Brazilian steakhouse named Sul for some mojitos because the mojitos are good there. I highly recommend it.

When we were in Lisbon just after Christmas, it was filled with Christmas lights. It was nice just walking through all the streets because every street had a different theme and different types and colors of lights.

Portugal: The Castles

There is no shortage of castles in Portugal. And they are all labeled on maps of the country so that when Martin and I were driving around Portugal in 2007 we simply planned our route so that we could stop by as many castles as possible. I think they're pretty neat.

So below are some pictures of castles that we found on our journey in 2007. They are all located in the southern half of Portugal. Some day we'll get to the northern half!

Some of these are of the same castle but I can't remember which ones. We only saw 3-4 castles on our drive Lagos-Evora-Obidos-Lisbon so don't go thinking we toured like 12 castles on this trip.






This one was neat, in the middle of a river. We couldn't quite figure out how to get over to it because there was nobody manning the boat there to take us. But there were people in the castle, and some sort of army training going on up top with people scaling down the walls.




Some of them are not in as good of shape as the others:

Portugal: Obidos

Obidos is a little town located about an hour north of Lisbon by car. It is surrounded by an intact castle wall. We stayed at this B&B, in the 2-bedroom apartment:

http://www.casadobidos.com/english/index.html

It overlooks the castle and the apartment we stayed in had a yard and BBQ that we used for dinner. The breakfast they served there was the biggest breakfast spread I've ever seen at a B&B - even bigger than the breakfasts we ate while on safari. I highly recommend it although things might have changed in the past 4 years since we were there and it's probably not the same anymore.

Here is our B&B with the castle behind it (the town of Obidos is all contained within the castle walls):



And another pic with the rest of the walls in it (I couldn't get the whole thing without some sort of panoramic camera):



Obidos is a very cute little town. It's filled with shops and it's fun to walk around in for a day. You don't need more than a day in Obidos though, unless you have day trips planned to other nearby towns. We stayed two nights there and would have been somewhat bored the second afternoon/evening except that we met up with some friends from college there (who flew in from Germany) and hung out with them that evening.







You can also walk all around the wall, which we did (I think most of the pictures in this post were taken from the top of the wall):



I'm not sure if you can go into the castle anymore or not ... it has been turned into a 5-star hotel or a spa or something like that for rich people. Many castles in Portugal have been turned into luxury hotels, and they are called Pousadas. I'm sure they're very nice to stay in if you can afford them.

Portugal: Evora

Our next stop in Portugal on our 2007 trip was the town of Evora, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Evora cathedral is the largest in Portugal (which we took some pictures of but none of them do it justice ... the streets of Evora are so narrow that you can't get a picture with more than a little bit of the church in it at a time).

The two things we saw in Evora that I found the most interesting were the Roman ruins and the Chapel of Bones (not connected to the cathedral mentioned above but to a different church, the church of Saint Francis). It's a neat town to wander around in as well and it has a 9km long aqueduct and some other minor sites of interest and churches but it's not very big and we did everything we wanted to in less than 2 days.

Here are some of the Roman ruins, we took pictures at night and during the day:





There was a little park in Evora as well which was filled with peacocks (and some more ruins).





And then there is the Chapel of Bones. It is indeed a chapel made out of human bones. You kind of have to see it for yourself so I won't give too much away here but this is what the walls look like:





There were an estimated 5,000 bodies used in the walls and pillars. They are not from any specific war or battle but are simply all of the people buried in Evora over the years leading up to the 16th century when the chapel was built. Apparently the cemeteries in Evora took up too much valuable space so the monks there decided to consolidate them all into one and to use the bones to build a chapel that would remind people of the inevitability of death. There are several full bodies hanging on the walls as well:



and the inscription when you enter the chapel reads, "We the bones which are here, for yours await."

Portugal: Lagos

More pictures from Lagos, from our trip in 2007.

This is the big beach we try to walk in its entirety:





Some pictures of the town and the neat tiling that is everywhere in Portugal:







This is the palm tree next door to the McLaughlin's condo when it was still healthy:



These pics are from the other beaches that are hidden in the cliffs: