48 Hours in Paris - Conrad's Apartment

I will start by saying that we are very grateful to Conrad for letting us stay in his apartment in Paris this past weekend. It was centrally located and on a street filled with shops and restaurants and great cafes for people watching.

But, that being said, his apartment was dirty. And not just dirty to me because I'm used to Zürich's levels of cleanliness, but really seriously dirty. Conrad definitely had not cleaned it since he moved in a year ago ... and most likely the tenant before him had never cleaned it either. I did a lot of dry heaving every time I entered his bathroom and Esther had to take off her glasses every time she went in there so she wouldn't be able to see how dirty it was. She actually sprayed the entire bathroom down with bleach when we got there, but it didn't help. And he had no cleaning materials! No mop or broom or sponge or even paper towels.

Let's start with the look of his front door and front hallway:





We definitely were not in Switzerland anymore!

And here's his mannequin (it's his landlady's, but still interesting that it has to stay in his studio apartment):



The apartment, how it looked when we first got there. We left it slightly neater and cleaner than we found it, but not by much because we weren't willing to buy cleaning materials to deal with it:



The excessively long, about 3 feet wide, front hallway that also doubled as a closet that you could barely walk through without tripping on something:



And don't get me started on the funny smell coming from around his fridge. We cleaned out the rotten stuff in the fridge, but the smell didn't go away so I think something died behind the fridge that we couldn't see or get to.

And that's where we stayed during our 48 hours in Paris.

Anniversary Flowers

We've been married a whole year already! It calls for some orange flowers to celebrate.







Sorry they were still in a tupperware container when I took the above pictures. We have real vases here I swear ... the flowers just didn't make it into one before I took the pictures.

This weekend we're going to Paris! Expect great Paris pictures next week.

Beware of Slugs

This is kind of gross for those of you who don't like creepy crawly things. But slugs and snails are a big part of life where we live now (not so much in downtown Zürich but here in the outskirts of the city). Slugs are *everywhere*. It's really hard not to step on one when I go running in the mornings because they're all over the sidewalks and paths. But I've done a good job avoiding them so far because I don't want to step on one of them! It'd be really gross.

We used to see slugs and snails in Florida, but only after or while it was raining. Here they're out all the time. Well the snails come out more when it's raining but the slugs are out all the time. Since it was sunny and dry this past weekend there were no snails for me to take pictures of this morning but I found lots of slugs!

So here are some slug pictures! This guy was on our front steps this morning:





And they're bigger than you think. Some of them are 6 inches long and over an inch thick. Ugggghhhh.

There were pictures in the newspaper here last week of the slugs eating everybody's lettuce crops. There were swarms of slugs on each head of lettuce. It must be really hard to have gardens here with so many hungry slugs around.

Flims Hiking

It was cold and cloudy and rainy, but we went hiking in Flims anyway. You can see in the progression of photos below how the day started out sunny then got cloudier and darker. We hiked up a little mountain and then took the gondola back down so we didn't get too worn out ... it started to rain right when we finished hiking.







This area of the mountains is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the horizontal lines in the sides of the mountains. I am completely ignorant about how these rocks came to look like that but it must be a swell story to have made it a UNESCO site.



My cow friend. I think we're a little scared of cows now because when we first started out on the hike this group of about 10 cows came over a little hill and all started running like crazy down the hill towards a group of hikers. Cows are really big things to be coming straight at you. But the cows stopped right in front of the people for some reason. I always thought cows were pretty lazy - they're always sleeping or eating when you see them. But these cows had a few screws loose I think. Must be the mountain air in Flims.



Some more lines in the mountains:



Here's a little glacier:



Then Martin took the camera and that's why all the pictures from now on look really good. I went inside (because of course there was a cafe at the top of the mountain!) and had some hot tea to warm up while Martin wandered around and took pictures.



Flims:

A Real Swiss Balcony

This is what a real Swiss balcony looks like.



If you go into a village in the mountains, you will see houses with balconies like the one above with flowers just exploding off of the railings. Perhaps mine will look like this next year??

Nailing

So here's something you will never see done in the U.S. In some Swiss bars, you will see a large tree stump, some hammers, and a box of nails. This is where you can play a round of Nailing while you have yourself a few of your favorite frosty beverages. The object of the game is to get your nail fully nailed in first, and then to nail in a second nail in the middle before anybody else (everybody works collectively on the middle nail and the person who nails it in fully wins). The trick is that you can only use the small/thin end of the hammer and you can't line up the hammer with the top of the nail before you try to hit it, so you're basically taking a blind swing with the thin edge of a hammer. It's a good time.

This is one of the hammers just lying around in the bar. In America, some drunken frat boy or angry redneck would get ahold of this and cause problems. But in Switzerland, it's only used for Nailing of course.



Nicole is getting her nail set up:



Martin, Nicole's boyfriend, is explaining the game to us (he's Swiss):



Martin lines up for a swing:



I managed to win the first round! But Dom, the guy with the glasses, one of Swiss Martin's friends, won the second two rounds. It was pretty intense.

Our Updated Balcony

No more piles of cardboard and empty flower pots and no more gross old white table with plastic blue chairs! We now have a nice table from IKEA and I planted some new orange flowers to replace my first attempt at balcony flowers that decided they didn't want to live on the balcony. One of them was a violet that I brought inside and it's now quite happy on my windowsill out of the sun and rain and heat and cold and everything else violets don't like. Note I also fit in a sunflower plant in the background ... he attracts the biggest bees you've ever seen but I love sunflowers so it's okay. Martin sits on the side of the table closest to it anyway. :)



My chives, and the surviving red plant from my first attempt at balcony flowers that didn't really like the sun. It's shady on the ground in that spot so he's happy there:



My new orange plants ... they're in a more shaded part of the balcony because the middle plant, currently not flowering but about to, does not enjoy much sun (he's purple when he does flower):



My balcony is still extremely sub-par when compared to other Swiss balconies ... I need to fill the entire railing with flowers that tumble down over the railings and bloom all summer long. I'll work on that next summer. Or maybe in another life where I'm not allergic to bees.