from zero to 3777m

It has been a pretty eventful week. My friend Puk came to join us in Switzerland so we showed her around in this lovely country and the nearby french towns. The weather wasn't cooperating in the beginning, it was raining for a few days in a row. but as brave as us we still ventured out to some nearby tourist attractions , like Chateau de chillon, and met up with Patrick in Laussane, who just arrived in Switzerland for vacation . as a result Puk got a little sick (poor her!). But later the weather clears up, from then it was on a sunny beautiful streak for 5 days. we took the opportunity to visit Zermatt and Chamonix. Zermatt is this picture perfect town and everything one imagines switzerland would be like - small mountain town only accessible by train and foot, chalets decked out with colorful flowers, horse drawn carriages and electricity powered carts transporting tourists to their hotels, with the backdrop of swiss alps. from there a cable car took us up to have an close-up, impressive view of Matterhorn (if the name doesn't ring a bell, think Toblerone chocolate bars! :-)).

Puk and I in Zermatt


Matterhorn vs. Toblerone

The next day we visited Chamonix, from there we took one hell of a gondola ride, at some point almost vertically ascending, up to Aiguille du Midi at 3777m, in 20 mintues!, from there another elevator ride to 3842m (12602ft) and a breathtaking panoramic view of the surrouding french alps, including Mont Blanc, the roof of europe!! The viewing platforms and structures are just almost as impressive as the view itself, perched on jagged pinnacle of rocks, connected by a footbridge, it's one engineering marvel. Funny thing is i had been there once before, in the winter of 2005, and i didn't remember much about it other than that my feet were numb even before i got in the gondola, and it was -35C up there and was the coldest day of my life. i remembered the line in cafeteria was super long, and i really needed that cup of hot chocolate before working up my nerve to go outside. This time around, it was much more enjoyable. we got to spend much time on the deck, marvel at the view it offers and have many pictures taken (with smiles and skin shown this time). :)

winter 2005 vs. summer 2007, -35C vs. +10C! same place, different feeling :)

one of the viewing platforms

hardcore hikers and climbers make their ways to the top.

Yesterday, Patrick and Karen came to meet us up and we all went to Aletsch glacier. When they arrived, i went straight past Patrick to hug Karen and the guys all laughed at me. :) we had a fun (and very rainy) day, they stayed over for the night and this morning we went to Augnet (my fave cafe in switzerland!) for brunch and did some shopping together. then we sadly said goodbye and hoped to see each other again soon, hopefully in taiwan!

us at Altesch glacier. tried to put on a bright smile for the picture in the cold and rain. :)

brunch at Augnet. the things displayed and the things we took. I took a croissant and a ham canape (bread topped with ham, sliced egg, pickels, tomatoes, and a layer of cream cheese, it's so yumm, i finished one and wanted more! ). they also have one of the best capuccino there.

now the rain continues, tomorrow Puk will be back to Munich and our stay in Switzerland is gradually coming to an end. with only two weeks left here, on one hand i know i'll be sad to leave this beautiful and comfortable place, but on the other hand i am excited to be on the road again!

for more pictures on Chamonix and Aiguille du Midi, click here

for more pictures on Zermatt and Matterhorn, click here

Austria (2) - Vienna

"And your name is... Pascal VIENNE?", said by the hotel receptionist in Vienna (or, Vienne in French, or Wien in German). we were in the city that shares the same name with Pascal. That adds an extra stroke of interest to the city.

Vienna is a place full of history, culture, and the beauty of baroque architecture. the whole old town (or Inner Stadt) itself is a world heritage site. and it wasn't hard to understand why as soon as we set foot in it. every building and the decoration, sculptures on it seem to have a religious or mythological story to tell. and the number of museums! it's impossible to visit them all in one trip. As in many times before when we first arrived at a big city, we felt a little overwhelmed and disoriented and thought a little guidance would help. so we kicked off our stay in Vienna with a walking tour in the old town. i always love walking tours, because it quickly gives an overview of the place by an insider. After the walk we were able to narrow down a mile long list of things to a reasonable few. And experience tells us the importance of varieties. we can only visit so many museums and palaces and castles in a short amount of time, after a while they all kinda look the same. :) we visited the beautiful Stephansdom, a gothic church with beautiful tile roof and baroque interior, climbed up the tower to take in the view of the city. The next day we visited the breath-taking national library, the ceilings are decorated with impressive frescos, floor to almost ceiling collection of old books that require a ladder to access. i said jokingly that this is the kind of place Indianna Jones or Professor Robert Langdon would come to find clues to save life. :) Then we spent some time in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and got drowned in its massive collections, from egyptian art to renaissance paintings. Almost all museums in Europe provide audio guide, on which a pre-recorded commentery is played when the associated number is entered. I like it a lot because it allowed us to visit at our own pace without being rushed from room to room if we were to follow a real guide tour (a small tip: bring a pair of earphone). After taking a break to digest all the information, we headed for yet another museum - Sisi museum and the imperial apartment (where Sisi and her husband Franz Joseph lived). This beautiful empress surely lived an eccentric life. and the things she did to maintain her good look just dropped my jaw. to name a few, every morning she spent 2 hours to have her floor-length hair done(not by herself of course, she studied languages and other things while her hairdresser works on her hair), she followed strict diet such as eating raw veal meat juice squeezed from juice press. the juice press and some of her diet menu are displayed in the museum. Too bad it's in German, otherwise i could have got some diet tips from the royal family. :)

the next day we visited Scholoss Schonbrunn. it's one of the most visited places in Vienna so we got there early. But still it wasn't early enough, as we entered the palace we found ourselves sandwiched by two Japanese tour groups. The audio guide took us through rooms and rooms full of beautiful paintings, decorations, furnitures. what a lavish life style the royalty lived!

of course all these visits are spaced out by little breaks in cafes and sausage stands (as talked about in previous entry). :) at the end of the day we really felt the need to escape from the emperor and the empress and all those busy rococo ornateness so we decided to go to the architecture museum to see a modern architecture exhibit. the exhibit was interesting and all but 20 minutes later i found myself waking up on the couch in front of this interesting slideshow of modern buildings. :) i think i might have exceeded my museum quota....some pictures below:

Stephansdom

national library. the ceiling fresco.

national library.

the line to get into Schloss Schonbrunn

Pascal and I in the garden of Schloss Schonbrunn

Pascal in front of the palace at Scholoss Schonbrunn

did you know...?

what are the world's most widly spoken languages? here is the list:
1 Chinese (Mandarin) 1,000,000,000 +
2 English 508,000,000
3 Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) 497,000,000
4 Spanish 392,000,000
5 Russian 277,000,000
6 Arabic 246,000,000
7 Bengali 211,000,000
8 Portuguese 191,000,000
9 Malay-Indonesian 159,000,000
10 French 129,000,000

Austria (1)

To balance out the bitter nature of my last post, I'll share some pictures and stories from our trip in Austria. and i'll start with my favorite subject - food!

we had a sausage marathon when we first arrived in Salzburg, actually i can't remember we ate anything other sausage there - because it's tasty, cheap, and everywhere. plus we just can't resist the smell. Eating those super size sausages with bare hands on the street in a chilly, drizzling day in Salzburg, we were really feeling it - we are in the high Austria! :)

there is just one problem - to order it. but soon we mastered it, in the sausage department. easy, just stick around for a while and point at what other people got. :) my most memorable sausage experience was at Hohenwerfen (a castle about 30 minutes south of Salzburg) where they serve sausage with hot sauerkraut. yummy! In the restaurant, it got a little more difficult. thankfully our bible Lonely Planet has a menu survival guide that lists the basics. since there are big signs of "tourists" written on our forehead, it wasn't too much a shame to bring out the book to study the menu. sometimes we looked around and found ourselves not the only people doing that. ha. great (traveling) minds think alike. :) In most cases, I just gave up and asked the servers to explain the menu to me. and i am often sold as soon as i heard the keyword "pork chop" or "stewed". i got lucky several times (or perhaps they are just overall good). loved the stewed pork dishes there! The soups are also wonderful. we had Frittatensuppe (clear beef soup with strips of pancakes) and Gulasch (think beef stew soup) a few times. it's awesome.

me with my pork chop dish. I knew i wasn't gonna remember the name of the dish so i took a picture of the menu straight away. here it is. are you ready? "Linas Bauernreindl", Zartes Schweinsfilet mit feiner Pilzrahmsauce, Gemuse und Eierspatzle"

in the sweet department, we were never too far away from a cafe or bakery, especially in Vienna. there are so many coffee shops here (note: do not mistake it with the "coffeeshop" in Holland). and there are so many choices, simply ordering a "coffe" or "latte" won't cut it.i wasn't too impressed by the taste though (no offense!, just personal experience), but perhaps it's because i wasn't too adventurous in trying out the "exotic" ones. i often went with the safest choice and got a melange (an equivellent of capuccino, maybe with different proportion of milk and espresso). but the cakes, OMIGOSH, they are so delicious. we also tried the much hyped-up Sacher Torte. It's a cake with two layers of dense, not overly sweet chocolate dough with a thin layer of apricot jam in the middle. the original recipe is a well-kept secret to this date but many bakeries have their own versions of it. It's created by Mr. Franz Sacher in 1832 when he was only learning to bake. He stood in for his ill teacher and created this cake that wowed Lord of Metternich and his guests.i wasn't overly impressed by it though, it's good, but not great. or perhaps because my head was stuck with black forest (for which we were at the wrong place). :( we only found one black forest look-alike on our last day in Austria, it wasn't what we expected but oh it tastes so good.

to the left, the famous Sacher Torte. for some reason we had it in Demel Cafe, the rivalry of Hotel Sacher, where the torte is originally from.

we were also fortunate to be in Vienna during the musikfilm festival. every night, in front of city hall, huge screen plays films, operetta, or recording of music performances. better yet, it's free! and i must not fail to mention the food stands at the festival - they are a sight by themselves. it was just so great and relaxing the way it is. the only thing was all the showings are in German. still, we loved the ambiance of the festival and went a few times just for the food stands (surprise!) and be engrossed in the festive atmosphere. :) i wish there was something like that in the city i live.

me in front of the food stands.





view from top



this delicious chocolate balls are filled with hot fudge inside, freshly baked and it just melts in our mouths.



the festival. isn't that really nice?



that was a lot of talking about food! hope you had a enjoyable gastronomic ride with me as you read along. but don't take me wrong. food wasn't the only highlight in our trip. more details and pictures to come (promise there'll be no food, but be prepared for A LOT OF palaces and castles). stay tuned!

bomb shelter

this is not an entry about our Austria trip, not yet. i thought i'd share an interesting fact and some photos in Switzerland with you.

here are some photos taken from the basement of Simone's house in Ollon. notice the thick metal armored door and window? yes, it's a bomb shelter! In switzerland, a 1963 law required practically every new building to have them in the basement, or sign up for the communal shleter in the city. there was even a bomb shelter industry evolved around that.

the window.

the door. the first question would be: how do I close it?

with the war long gone, the shelter is more like wine cellar and food storage now. :) perhaps we could drink our way through a nuclear war. on the left is the air filtering system. i don't know about this one but i heard most filtering systems have to be hand cranked.

in a country that escaped both wars, it was surprising to see it here. still, many questions comes. For one, how do i know when it's safe get out? 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? i don't expect someone to come knock on the door ( if it can be heard through the door) to get me out. even if i come out alive and in one piece, the danger of radioactivity can still remain for many years to come.

back from Austria!

Hi you all! We are back from the trip in Austria (thanks for voting!). The past 10 days are filled with lots of highlights - gorgeous castles and palaces, beautiful cities of Salzburg and Vienna, and (a lot of) sausages! I'll soon blog about that and post some pictures. in the meantime, i have pictures from the holland trip posted here. check it out. but please bear with my tired look and huge eye sacks.

Canals, Windmills, and Bikes

I am back from an action-packed week in the Netherlands, and I am exhausted! I felt like i was back to one of those 5-day-in-a-country vacation. :) there are so many things to do and to see there, the more we did and more we wanted to do. i felt i'd need another week to come close to finishing everything on the list. who can imagine such a small country has so much to offer?

I stayed at Puk's friend An's lovely, excellently located townhouse in Delft, a town about an hour away from Amsterdam by train. The town itself is a tourist destination, with lovely canals dividing the city streets, an old church dominating the central square that offers GREAT city view on top, and it's also the birthplace of the famous dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and delftware. At first sight, the delftware bears lots of resemblance to chinese porcelain. and it was indeed designed and perfected as a look-alike to fill in the gap when the civil war between Ming dynasty and the Manchau interrupted the chinese import. that's one of many interesting things i learned during this trip.

We spent most of our time in Amsterdam. the city can be explored in so many different ways - walking, biking, canal cruising, or simply by public transportation. each way offers a different perspective to the city, and guess what? we did it all. we had an intense walk-till-you-drop first day in the city, we didn't realize how much we walked until later we looked at the map. no wonder my legs were still sore days after. It is not a huge city so the walk is pretty managable, with some minor hurdles. :) first of them being the LONG and incomprehensible street names. imagine trying to match it on the map to see where you are, or when we tried to tell each other which street we are on. can't even make meaningful pronounciation out of it! the other hurdles being the ubiquitous bike trails. as much as i tried not to be an annoying tourist, i often mistaken it with sidewalk and leisurely strolled on it until i got a ding from behind and then a biker zoomed by :P. the next day we decided to do it like a local - riding a bike. we took a guided bike tour through the city centre, passed some really lovely park trails to the countryside, where we visited a cheese and a shoe factory and had our first pictures with a windmill taken. it was too bad we couldn't visit the windmill. our guide said it's converted to a home now and people actually live in there. how cool! the day after, we explored the city the big touristy way - on a canal bus. it was a lovely ride, and being IN the canal we got to see those beautiful houseboats closely (i wonder if the owners ever get tired of curious tourists taking pictures and commenting on their homes :)) and the characteristic bridges spanning the banks of the canal. as we wind through the city, i wondered exactly where and how our friend Patrick popped the question to his now-wife Karen. it must be a romantic moment. :)

we spent as much time indoor as outdoor. i was amazed by the number of museums in the country, and the rich collections they have. to name a few, Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmusem totally wowed me. the Anne Frank house is another important piece of history that tells a true, sad story that shouldn't be forgotten. as i stood in the secret annex and browsed the exerpts from her diary, my eyes were brimming with tears. what kind of hardship this little girl must have gone through during the 2 years of hiding and later in the concentration camp. i can't imagine. we are lucky to have grown up in this peaceful era (at least for now).

many other things surprised me here, in a good way. i did not know Van Gogh was greatly influenced by Japanese art and this resulted in his move to south of France to persue brighter natural lighting for his works, and as mentioned before, Delftware's popularity had a lot to do with the civil war in China, and the fluent english spoken by virtually everyone on the street. After the first day, i didn't even bother starting the conversation by asking "do you speak english?". because it just seemed so unnecessary. :) perhaps because it's a small, below-sea-level country, the dutch learned to adapt and embrace things foreign. it has a long history of welcoming immigrants and integrating them into society. As an expat myself living in a foreign country for nearly a decade, those things are well appreciated, and i am even considering moving there!

by day 3 i already concluded that it's impossible to do everything during this short trip and start making to-do-lists for the next trip. ha. one (among many) regrets is that it wasn't the right season to see tulips. each time we passed stores selling picture-perfect postcards with tulips and windmills in the dutch countryside, i reminded myself i must come back to see it in real. that gives another reason to revisit this lovely country!

and now it begins the PG-13 part of this entry. it wouldn't be hard to guess isn't it? :) the redlight district! when i saw the first few sex shops i knew we were coming close. but it wasn't until we saw a row of window girls touting themselves to potential customers i realized the scale of it. i find it a bit ironic that it's located right by the city's old church. (so it's more convenient to make a confession?). i haven't seen this in-you-face prostitution before (not that i am an expert), as we walked through a narrow street full of windows on both sides, i didn't quite know where to look so most of the time i just squinted.... and as we were about to leave we found the hidden gem of redlight district - a hong-kong style restaurant with roast duck and bbq pork hung by the window. we decided immediately that we'd come back next day for dinner, and it was excellent. we ended up going there 3 times within 24 hours. :) that adds a few extra points to this city. :)

now i am back and after some quality sleep i finally feel like a human again. :) we haven't figured out what's on the agenda for next week yet but we have a few potential destinations in mind. why don't you cast your vote to give us suggestions? (you'll need to log in your yahoo account to vote, but your vote be anonymous). oh, i'll post pictures from the trip soon.