SwissWatching

The easiest criticism of Twitter is the “what do I care that you just ate half a bagel?” complaint. So I hope you’ll indulge me as I describe my hilarious, very Swiss, meals this past week. I spent Monday through Friday (today) in Champéry, in the Swiss Alps, near France, at a tutorial on game theory and computer science. PhD students came from all over French-speaking Switzerland to attend, and breakfast and dinners were included every day. There were talks in the morning, a break from noon to 5pm for skiing (or other activities, I guess), and more talks in the evening, followed by dinner at a different restaurant in Champéry each night. Aware of the perils of trying to eat vegetarian and lactose-free in Switzerland, I didn’t come unprepared—a good part of my luggage was food, including butter and soy yogurt I planned to refrigerate by leaving outside on my balcony (a great solution until it rained on the last day!)

Monday

Dinner

Before the first dinner, the organizers ask if anyone is vegetarian. Two (!) hands go up, out of the fifty or so people there. My extreme minority position leads me to not try to further marginalize myself by informing them of my lactose intolerance. That night, at the restaurant, a waitress comes around to find the vegetarians and at this point I ask about non-cheese options. She tells me not to worry, and I end up eating a salad plus salmon. I’m not so unhappy, all things considered. So far, so good.

Day 2

Breakfast

I go down to the buffet breakfast  at the hotel and see a sign next to the super-liquidy scrambled eggs saying that eggs can be prepared to order. I immediately inquire if eggs can be made for me without butter, with oil instead. Asked how I’d like them prepared I’m at a loss (later I recalled that scrambled eggs are called “mish-mash” eggs in French) so I just say that the way the super-liquidy ones were prepared is fine. And, having been taken at my word, a few minutes later I am presented with an unappetizing liquidy mush of eggs, presumably cooked in oil. Why should I have expected otherwise? When I taste them I decide they’re undercooked or swimming in oil. Or both. Needless to say, I don’t order eggs any of the days that follow.

Lunch

I am informed that Coop (the supermarket in town) is closed at lunch time, so my plan to buy ingredients  and make my own lunch is dashed. Instead, I go to a restaurant advertising a lunch special (only 15 CHF or about $15) and order penne all’arrabiata. It’s not bad—except in retrospect when I describe it to Jackie and she points out that it sounds like they went to the store, bought penne and canned arrabiata sauce, and well, you can picture the rest. And then they charged me 15 CHF.

Later I get coffee at a cheese shop (I went in because they were advertising homemade hot chocolate—but the chocolate itself was made with milk, alas). After ordering and speaking French to the proprietor I hear her take a phone call and speak in perfect English. On my way out I check out the cheeses and find cheddar. Excited (and still committed to my French) I ask her about where it’s from. But then when I get to the word for the name of the cheese, I stumble: should I pronounce it “shed-air” or will that make me sound like a jerk? I cough and then pronounce it like they do in Wisconsin instead. The cheddar is from Britain and I buy some, planning to keep it on my balcony.

Dinner

We go to a fondue restaurant. A big pot of cheese isn’t as bad for me as it sounds—they usually use aged cheese so I can have a few bites. And they usually also have rösti (big Swiss latke) on their menu. When I walk in I find a waiter and inquire about vegetarian options, informing him of my lactose intolerance. A few minutes later, a waiter comes to say they’ve figured something out! “Spaghetti bolognaise?” “Non, non. Je suis végétarien.” “Oh! Pardon.” Later they returned to find out if pasta with vegetables would be okay. This turned out to be exactly what they said—pasta with steamed vegetables and a tiny bit of sauce. Why should I have expected otherwise?

During the inevitable conversation about my lactose intolerance that ensues at the table someone asks if I can eat pasta. “Sure, why not?” “Well, doesn’t it have milk as an ingredient?” “No. Just eggs.” “Eggs? Really?” Instead of arguing (or checking Wikipedia) I turn to an Italian student who hasn’t been paying attention to the conversation. “Not to be racist,” I start, and am immediately called out for my typical American behavior. He is not offended—and he is very knowledgeable about pasta, even about making it oneself. (There are often eggs in pasta.)

Day 3

Breakfast

I bring down my jar of peanut  butter and eat PB&J. The Eastern Europeans I am sitting with this find this hilarious and once again I am called out for my Americanness.

Lunch

I go into a bakery and buy my Swiss food of last resort: a tuna-fish sandwich. (See Jackie’s extensive run-down of Swiss sandwichery.)

Dinner

As on the previous days, I ask a waiter about vegetarian options. “Fish?” they say. OK, I guess. A strange looking salad comes for everyone, including me. It’s a cold fish salad with one leaf of lettuce (no joke), including lox and some other types I can’t identify. And then the main dish comes. More fish. Recall that we’re in a Swiss skiing resort, a village covered in snow up in the Alps, in the middle of a land-locked country. How did the fish even get here? But we’re at a fish restaurant, so I guess I have no cause to complain about the food I’m being served, just about the very existence of the restaurant. Also, I don’t really like eating fish.

Day 4

Breakfast

Having made it to the supermarket to buy more soy yogurt, I eat it with granola. Very Swiss.

Lunch

I go skiing for the first time, and find out what everyone who’d been skiing the whole week had been eating for lunch: nothing. After the workshop ends at noon, they immediately grab their skis and head to the slopes, and later they worry about food. Further evidence that Swiss people don’t really eat. I eat part of a Cliff bar during the ride in the cable car. After skiing, I try to find food in the restaurant at the top of the mountain. No luck—I eat chips and beer instead and then bread with cheddar when I get back to the hotel.

Dinner

We eat in a meat restaurant. Not “meat” as in fleishik but a restaurant with a menu consisting only of meat. As an appetizer everyone is brought meat broth. I get cream of tomato soup (which is good—I eat it with lactaid pills). Then, while everyone else eats slabs of beef (?) I am served a surprisingly diverse set of vegetables plus morels (a type of mushroom). And they do something with the veggies that’s not just steaming them. I was happy. As were the meat eaters, because a short while after serving us, a waiter comes around with a platter of meat offering seconds. I ask a Swiss person about it and he claims that this is typical of fancy restaurants. Uh huh.

Day 5

Breakfast

More soy yogurt with granola.

Lunch

The conference ends at noon so we head to the train station. With a little time to kill we investigate lunch options. Four of us go into a restaurant with a few people in it, though  none seem to be eating anything. But it’s 12:30—they must be serving food, right? After seating ourselves and waiting for a few minutes without anyone coming to talk to us I get up and go to the bar and inquire if they’re serving food. Nope! Just drinks. They point us in the direction of one of the restaurants we already went to, but first we try the Migros (the other supermarket). Closed at lunch time! In the other restaurant they have two types of sandwiches for sale: ham and salami.

On the train I’m currently eating my bread and cheese, and dry fruits, and chips, and peanut butter. I said I came prepared, right?

P.S. After another discussion about the relationship between lunch and laundry, I have news to share on the question of why Swiss laundry machines get a lunch break: back in the day (speculation was in the post-war era but people were vague on this point) women who didn’t work outside the house began to cook for their families around 10:30am or 11am. As a result, in order to ensure that circuit breakers didn’t trip due to the surge in electricity usage, laundry machines were set to automatically shut off for an hour. This is consistent with the fact that our laundry machine was off around 11am. But lunch isn’t until 12pm. But if you want to cook lunch for 12pm you need to start earlier! Case closed?

We are back in Europe, after our week-long visit to Morocco.  After a whirlwind not-quite-two-day stint in Switzerland, involving Seth going to the one laundromat we’ve found in Lausanne and repacking in about a half hour, we are now in Paris with my parents!  Unfortunately, while our stomachs made it through Morocco just fine, my lungs didn’t do as well.  I have one of my famously awful colds, though I had an exciting trip to the clean and orderly ER at the university hospital in Lausanne to make sure I didn’t have pneumonia.   Also, our pictures from Morocco didn’t make it with us to Paris, so you’ll have to see those later.

Since it is impossible to tell you all about Morocco in a post of a length which our average would be willing to read, I will just provide some highlights and general observations, and maybe Seth will add a bit more with photos later this week.

• Morocco, like Israel, is cold in the winter.  It’s much more bearable to pass the day outside than say, in the Northeastern US or in Switzerland, but the problem is, a nice 50 degrees in the sun outside during the day is quite chilly at night indoors where there is no insulation to speak of, and only in rare instances, warm enough blankets and space heaters.  The first two nights Seth and I went for cheap hotels, which were not great in that weather, but warmed up a bit when we went to space-heated riads, which are old-city houses built around an inner courtyard, sometimes restored and used as the Moroccan equivalent to B&Bs.
• The architecture in Morocco is beautiful, really really beautiful, but sadly, as non-muslims, there is much we cannot see.  Not only can we not go into all of the private riads, but we were not allowed into mosques, either.  So we saw some museums, went into a few gorgeous madrassas, peered through the open doors of mosques at prayer time, and made do with that.  What is most amazing about the architecture are the elaborate Arabic calligraphy and amazing geometric mosaics (which we went to a pottery center to see made!).  Also, the madrassas often have courtyard reflecting pools which provide a cool optical illusion as to their depth.
• The streets in the cities are crazy.  Motorbikes are very popular, and seem to get the right of way over pedestrians.  Pedestrians step out of the way of mopeds and directly into car traffic, the cars swerving around the people.  Every one of the 3 cities we visited had a new town (somewhat orderly, built under the French, wide streets) and an old city (called a “medina,” and like a labyrinth from the middle ages with added motorbikes and junk from China).  In the medinas, the cars did not come in, but were replaced with donkeys, lots of donkeys, packing in all of the junk sold in the medinas.
• Western tourists stand out, and there is no way of avoiding it.  As tourists, we got ripped off more times than we know and were hassled constantly.  As the week progressed, we got better at fending people off, setting prices beforehand, bargaining, catching taxis, etc., but we also just got better at not feeling so angry at being taken advantage of.  One thing we were completely unable to fend off on two occasions was the unwelcome attachment of unofficial guides.  Problem is, those two times, we were obviously headed to the one tourist site in the vicinity.  Every local knew exactly where we were headed.  We tried to say, “we’re fine, we’re not actually going there,” circle around, come back, but they were always there waiting for us.  No other way to get to the mosque in Sale or the synagogue in Marrakesh.  So they “took” us there (i.e. followed us there), told us we could go inside (thanks, we already knew that), answered our questions poorly, and then demanded large sums of money.  It was really irritating.
• French served us surprisingly well.  Arabic would have been best, and Berber might have been sometimes useful, but we were happy our practice in Switzerland helped out in Morocco, too.  We would have been way worse off in the bargaining/getting ripped off arena if we didn’t know French.  Also, amusingly, the Moroccans were always telling us that we had French accents like people from France, only with an added other accent.  They had difficulty figuring out we were Americans.
• Since there was relatively little in the way of architecture and monuments we could actually see, we spent a great deal of time wandering the narrow, twisty, garbagey, crowded streets of the medina, many of them market streets.  There are streets for buying fresh food (including really yummy looking veggies and dangling whole or large parts of dead animals), streets for sweets and baked goods, streets for buying Chinese junk (like a lot of shoe stores), and streets for buying crafts.  One cool thing about the crafts streets was that sometimes, there were people there actually making the really beautiful crafts.  It was pretty cool to see all these men in their little workshops, banging away at metals, painting, dying wools, and snipping leather.  Also, as previously mentioned, we visited a pottery place and also a traditional tannery.  It was definitely a good place to buy relatively cheap, beautiful crafts that I haven’t seen anywhere else.  A much better experience than the markets of Israel.
• The food wasn’t quite what we expected.  There were a couple kinds of flatbreads which were absolutely delicious and readily available in Rabat and Fes, less in Marrakesh.  There were lots and lots and lots of baklava-esque sweets, packed full of honey and almonds, in varying proportions and shapes.  Speaking of sugar, strong gunpowder green tea with a spring of fresh mint was available everywhere, though it came with so much sugar, there was only so much we could down in a day.  Occasionally we were able to order it with less sugar.  Needless to say, I was always having the urge to brush my teeth.  There a couple of legume soups, our favorite of which was pureed fava been soup (or maybe it was split pea?  we kept getting different answers) with olive oil and paprika, which we ate a few times in Fes.  We are hoping to try making it at home.  Tajines and couscous was available everywhere, though not always in the vegetable variety.  We had it a couple of times, but we’re pretty sure that even without chunks of meat, there was some chicken or beef stock hiding out in there.  The most amazing restaurant, which was so so good and I wish there were such a good place in Switzerland, was the Earth Cafe, a vegetarian/vegan Moroccan restaurant run by a Moroccan man who has spent lots of time in Australia and the US and has a much more inspired and fresh menu than any other restaurant we went to (although when we ate dinner in the best riad we stayed in, that was pretty awesome, too).  If you go to Marrakesh, vegetarian or not, you must eat there.

That about covers the basics.  We had a pretty good time, though it would have been even nicer if we were not always being pressured by the locals.  We loved Fes in particular, and were glad we made the 7 hour train ride to get there.  We got to spend 3 days out of the week with other people (a Moroccan friend of a Harvard friend and then a couple I know from school in Switzerland), which was really nice.  I like vacation.

Over the weekend Jackie and I went to Zurich for the first time. (As always, our photos are available on Jackie’s Flickr photostream. Follow the link on the left sidebar.) Billed as the world’s smallest metropolis, Zurich is a really cool city. It’s in the Swiss-German part of the country, a bit over two hours from Lausanne. Upon our arrival, we found ourselves still in the same country—our Swiss francs were still accepted, chocolate was still revered—but our French was no more useful than our English. Fortunately, we weren’t at a complete loss because Jackie’s Yiddish proved somewhat helpful in understanding signs. We managed a few “danke”s as well.

When you think of Zurich, you think banks and bankers. Lots of banks and bankers means lots and lots of money—and the weekend was not cheap. We stayed with Jackie’s friend’s older sister, who claims 90% of her friends are bankers. Hanging out with her and her friends gave us a window into the social scene of young internationals with disposable income—quite a change from student life in Geneva and Lausanne. I was on the lookout, but I don’t think we met any of the “Gnomes of Zurich”. Maybe next time.

Check out this sign from the 80′s. In a prank, some anarchists painted “Zureich” on a building visible from trains entering the city to look to look just like the real railway station signs. “Zureich” is German for “too rich.” But at least the money isn’t wasted: Zurich ranks #1 on Mercer’s Quality of Living index, and it’s not hard to see why.

Public transportation in the city is really good, even by Swiss standards. The old part of the city is very pretty and the new part somehow escaped the ugly 70′s Mather-style architecture which has scarred other Swiss cities.

I’m not sure it would be included in a Quality of Living index, but unlike Lausanne, Zurich has multiple options for really good vegetarian food! Zurich is the home of Hiltl, the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Europe. It was founded in 1898 as the Vegetarierheim und Abstinez-Café (Vegetarians’ Home and Teetotalers’ Café). Now it’s a chic restaurant, frequented both by teetotalers and non-teetolers. It’s got a buffet of vegan and vegetarian food, carefully labeled (perfect for my lactose intolerance), and with lots of options, including a number of Indian dishes and traditional Swiss dishes. We liked Hiltl so much that we went to its sister restaurant Tibits the next day for lunch. We also bought their cookbook, which is useful because it’s metric and has some relevant notes for cooking food available in Switzerland.

Other events of note: while strolling by Lake Zurich on Sunday morning we noticed a street musician with a kippah playing marimba. It turned out to be Alex Jacobowitz, a classically trained musician from New York, who plays klezmer and Israeli tunes as well. Weird!

Also, we went to a coffee museum and learned all about and tasted different ersatz coffees (alternatives to coffee for health or sociopolitical reasons). A very standard coffee replacement is chicory, but spelt “coffee” was pretty good too! Here’s a recipe if you want to try it at home.

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