Montreux Switzerland....Vacation Part III

Well another January day of torrential rains in Privas, and another day of pictures. These are pictures from our second day in Switzerland. We took a day trip to Montreux, a little city on the eastern side of Lake Geneva. It was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine and we were happy to finally be able to see the Alps.



One of the major sights in Montreux is this statue of Freddie Mercury of Queen who apparently spent a lot of time there the last few years of his life.

We took a walk along the waterfront of the lake and enjoyed seeing the mountains, the sailboats, and all the rich people. Montreux seems like it is probably a retreat for the rich and famous in the summer, but was pretty quiet in winter.







We walked about a mile down the lake to the Chateau de Chillon which is a castle sitting out over Lake Geneva.













We were very happy to see the sun during a week that was extremely cold. Next up the best stop on our trip. Annecy!

Mountain Adventures Part II: Geneva Switzerland

Today in Privas we are having torrential downpours. Apparently it has been raining on and off ever since we left on New Years Eve. So it is a perfect day to stay inside and post some pictures.

The second part of our New Years Travels were to Geneva Switzerland. Geneva is located right across the French border and was a two hour train ride from Grenoble. The train ride gave us a great chance to see the snow covered mountains, endless vineyards and canyons and lakes between Grenoble and Geneva. We got into Geneva around 3 p.m. on New Years Day.



Most of these pictures are from our second day in Geneva as we spent the entire first afternoon trying to find an ATM and a place to eat dinner! Note to anyone going to Geneva in the future, change money and bring it with you. ATM's are next to impossible to find in Geneva. The one in the train station would only give us 100 Franc notes (not very useful) and every ATM we passed on the street belonged to a private bank that required their bank card to enter. Another note... in our entire time in Switzerland we found it impossible to find a regular grocery store... all that we could find was little corner convenience stores. Weird.

On the whole I enjoyed Geneva, but wasn't super impressed with it. Our time their was very cold, overcast and many of the things I wanted to do were either way too expensive (museums with $12 entrance fees per person) or closed for the holidays (The UN center on Jan 3rd). We were actually very surprised that many businesses and attractions were closed long after Jan 1st.

However, there were some memorable attractions. Our first stop was to the flower clock which lies near the waterfront of Lake Geneva. It was impressive and I was happy to see planted with winter plants. Both in France and Switzerland there is this odd obsession with continuing to plant flowers (usually pansies) even though the cold weather cannot support them. You constantly see government workers replanting pansies over and over as the old ones die from the frost.









As you can see from the close-ups it was really really cold out. Through our entire day we did lots of walking and its always nice to see what random sights you can find in a city. I really enjoyed seeing all the Swiss flags, the pointy rooftops and this pretty archway.







We walked through old town Geneva in search of St. Pierre Cathedral. This is a Protestant Cathedral (and thus much less ornate than the many Catholic cathedrals we have seen in France). It was interesting because Geneva was the center of the reformation and there were monuments and exhibits relating to the reformation.





The waterfront of Lake Geneva was quite pretty and we walked along the lake every morning trying to get pictures of the sunrise over the mountains. Sadly it was too overcast every day to really see the Alps. But I did get a few nice boat pictures.





So those are most of my Geneva pictures. Next up our day trip to Montreaux Switzerland... a very pretty little lakeside town.

Mountain Travels Part I : Grenoble

Well I haven't blogged much lately because I've been so busy entertaining friends and traveling. It's been a fun couple of weeks. First my friends Reed and Regina visited Matt and I in Privas for 3 days. We had a good time taking them to the sites in Privas and Coux, going on walks, making great meals and playing board games. It was really nice to have friends visit us here.

Then on New Years Eve all four of us traveled to Grenoble to spend the day/night. We were very lucky with the weather and were able to see the mountains all around Grenoble. On New Years Day Matt and I traveled to Geneva Switzerland, followed by short trips to Montreaux Switzerland, and Annecy France. It was a nice week away. I took nearly 300 pictures and have so many I want to share, that I'll probably split the pictures up into several blogs, one for each location.

I hope everyone had a nice New Years!

Here are pictures of our New Years Eve Day in Grenoble.


This is a view from our nice little hotel located in downtown Grenoble. From this vantage point we got to watch a caravan of drunken French teenagers drive down the street waving champagne bottles out their windows, do Chinese firedrills, party on top of their cars and drive down the street backwards. It was funny only because we were above their cars and not on the street! Definitely one of the most entertaining new years sites I've ever seen.



We wandered around downtown a bit and found this beautiful church. Matt was happy to see the church. During the whole summer he lived in Grenoble he had never found it open.



We rode the telepherique up to the Bastille, which is an old prison and fortifications high above the city of Grenoble. Matt used to climb up to the Bastille a lot during his time in Grenoble so was a very good tour guide. The sky was absolutely gorgeous when we got to the top and we had amazing views of the 3 mountain ranges that surround Grenoble.









On our way down the mountain we stopped in a series of caves that peered out onto the city. The caves led down into staircases built into the mountain. We then proceeded down the mountain and the views of the city just kept getting more and more beautiful.











When we were down from the mountain we were lucky to catch a bit of alpen glow on the mountains as the sun was setting. Quite a pretty scene in a beautiful city.





I enjoyed Grenoble a great deal and really understand why Matt loves this city so much.

Snow in Coux!

So for whatever reason, I'm not really in a mood to write much. However I did want to post some pictures of a hike Matt and I took to the next town over called Coux. It's has a very adorable downtown that looks like its straight out of a movie. The town is tightly packed together and has all kinds of neat passageways and arches.









We hiked in the hills above Coux and went to see the grottes, or caves. The caves have been around for a very long time and were fortified sometime in the last couple hundred years. I believe they were used at hideouts at one point. They are tucked away in the mountains and would be good hiding spots.







When we were up in the hills it started to snow and made a very pretty scene. Sadly the snow didn't stick much and didn't stick at all back at our house. It has been cold enough to snow all week, getting well below freezing. However, there hasn't been enough moisture in the air.







Matt,being a mid-westerner loves the snow and was very happy to see some. Getting that little bit was almost cruel, because it made us hope even more for some real snow. Oh well, it might happen. I always hope for a white Christmas even if its completely unrealistic!

Rodgers Family Christmas Traditions

My friend Lisa wrote a wonderful blog a few weeks back about her Christmas traditions and considering the fact that I love Christmas so much I thought this was a wonderful idea. I think part of the reason I love Christmas is that I love tradition. Doing the same little fun things every year just makes me happy. I continue to insist that Christmas is a magical holiday even if certain people around me insist that it is overly commercialized and goes on for entirely too long. I don't care. I just choose to celebrate the way that makes me happy and ignore all the rest.

So without further ado here are the Rodgers Family Christmas Traditions and reasons why I love Christmas:

1. Presents
At this point in my life I care much less about receiving presents than wrapping them. In my family wrapping presents is kind of like creating works of art. This is all due to my dad who has truly raised the bar as to what makes a beautifully wrapped present. First off, it is an unstated rule that no two presents under our family tree can be wrapped in the same paper. This is entirely possible because of the fact that my dad has an enormous store of wrapping paper (we're talking about hundreds upon hundreds of rolls of paper here). Secondly, lining up the design of the wrapping with the box, creasing corners, and making a nice looking box are all essential. If you really want to go all out, special presents can be adorned with decorations such as flat ornaments superglued on (stars, bells, snowflakes, santas,etc), cutout Christmas cards (such as doves on a sold background) or ribbons and bows. I love the challenge every year of creating beautiful presents. Sometimes on Christmas day we don't even want to open presents because they just make the room look so beautiful!



2. Present Clues
So one unique thing my family does is write clues on all of our present tags. I'm not really sure where this tradition started, but I love it. It makes all of your presents like a puzzle. Plus thinking up clues is also fun. There is a challenge in finding an appropriate clue that doesn't completely give away what the gift is. The best clues have you completely flummoxed for weeks and then when you open the gift you're like Oh duh that was obvious!



3. Decorating the Tree/House
As a kid I always enjoyed helping to decorate the tree with ornaments and put up our decorations all around the house. We of course at this point have many boxes more ornaments then could ever fit on one tree, so my parents now have to pick out their favorites every year. Some of the ornaments that always have to go up include our 12 days of Christmas silver bells, my and Susannes baby ornaments, ornaments from my parents travels all around the world, snow flakes and stars we get every year from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection, beautiful blown glass ornaments, an angel made out of Mt. St. Helens Ash, ornaments from my Dad's mom, and a crepe paper wedding bell from my parents wedding (which was 5 days before Christmas some 30 something years ago). And of course plenty of cute Hallmark santas and animals.



4. Christmas Cooking/Eating/Baking
We always do a lot of cooking around Christmas but only have a few steadfast traditions. One is making homemade Orange Juliuses on Christmas Eve. This stems from the fact that we usually get boxes of wonderfully sweet oranges from Bakersfield from Shuperts orchard, just a few blocks from my grandma's house. There is nothing like homemade Orange Juliuses and no oranges that quite compare to Bakersfield oranges. We also have a longstanding tradition of making Christmas cookies every year... though we've been slipping in recent year. We had fantastic cookie cutter collection including a very detailed Santa and detailed angel that my Dad would decorate.

A more recent tradition when my sister and I are both home is to make Chicken Chimichangas. I think the recipe came from either Sunset or Bon Appetit from the 70's but its a great recipe. However its one of those recipes that none of us really want to make alone, so with 3 of us in the kitchen it usually works out well. It involves boiling chicken, making a tortilla dough, creating a chicken filling, wrapping and then frying. It's amazingly good and I'm sad I won't be doing it this year.

5. Extended Family Gatherings in Bakersfield
Every year when I was little, after our Christmas in Ridgecrest we would head over to my Grandmas in Bakersfield and meet up with my Mom's side of the family...my Aunt Debby, Uncle Mark, cousins Matt, Stacey and Danni, Uncle Earle and my Grandma Barrall. There were many great things about these gatherings, but the best was that sometime after Christmas we would all go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant called Yen Ching. I know this sounds like a weird family tradition, but I loved it. The restaurant would usually put us in its private back room, and we would get a huge spread of food, including dishes such as crispy duck and prawns that we wouldn't normally get any other time. I have very fond memories of those meals, and I'm very sad that Yen Ching closed a few years ago. It was probably the best Chinese food I've ever had. I'm also sad that as all of us cousins get older its pretty much impossible to all gather at my grandmas anymore. What with jobs, marriages, and children added to the mix, its hard to keep every tradition going.



6. Toys R Us
So this isn't so much of a tradition anymore, but when we were kids my Uncle Earle used to give all his nieces and nephews the best present ever. He would take us to Toys R Us give us a 10 or 20 dollar spending limit and let us pick out whatever we wanted as our Christmas present. As a kid this was truly the most awesome thing ever. Our other Toys R Us tradition was a little kids (6-10) our parents would take Susanne and I separately to Toys R Us to pick out presents for each other. This tradition one year resulted in us buying the exact same present for each other!( a bright pink stuffed my little pony with blue hair if you're curious). Fond memories.

7. Christmas Movies!
Then of course no Christmas is complete without watching Christmas movies. Some of my favorite Christmas movies are also probably some of the cheesiest worst movies every made, but I'm still attached to them from watching them as a kid. For example you have The Night They Saved Christmas. Set in the 80's this is about a family of kids who to save Santa Claus and North Pole City from being blown up by dynamite and oil drilling done in North Pole by their fathers oil company. My other favorites are National Lampoons Christmas Vacation, Miracle on 34th Street, All I Want for Christmas and The Gathering. It's hard to be unhappy after watching a Christmas Movie.

Anyway, I'm a little sad I won't be getting to do participate in most of these traditions this year, but I guess I can live with a one year hiatus. Matt and I will still going to try to make Christmas cookies and figure out some sort of interesting Christmas dinner. And then we get a great treat on Dec 27th of a visit from my friends Reed and Regina. So while it won't be a traditional Christmas, it should still be lots of fun.

Food Blog!

Food is something I consider to be a highly important element to my life. I don't just eat for nourishment I eat also for the enjoyment of eating. Last year one of the assignments Matt gave his French students was to write an essay on whether they "eat to live or live to eat". I definitely fall into the category of living to eat.



So coming to France I was expecting to be blown away by the food. And in some respects I have been amazed. The vast amount of patisseries and chocolate shops truly demonstrate that the French see pastry as an art that should be appreciated. Likewise the ever present boulangeries that all seem to have cheap wonderful bread is another wonder.



I also love the fact that so many different kinds of cheeses are available here. I have tried so many different kinds of cheese in the past two months that I don't even know where to start. I'm especially enjoying blue cheeses, which a year ago I never would have thought I would enjoy. Roquefort is my clear favorite, and I also love Fourme d'Ambert which is a creamy mild blue cheese (so good!). I'm also enjoying cantal, various goat cheeses, gruyere,and comte. It's amazing the variety that can be found here at relatively inexpensive prices. One of my complaints about cheese other than cheddar in the U.S. is that it is so expensive,that is feels like you are splurging to buy any kind of decent cheese.






One thing I appreciate about France is that good bread, wine and cheese are considered necessities and are often given government subsidies to remain cheap. Consider the fact that I can get a baguette for 55 centimes-1 euro depending on the size!

So I was stating earlier that I was expecting to be blown away by French cuisine, and despite what I just stated, in many respects I haven't been. Here's a few reasons why:

1.The French love Meat. Every kind of meat, especially ham. Their cuisine is highly meat centric, and while I am not a vegetarian, I definetly lean in that direction and the over emphasis on red meat especially I find a bit disturbing. For example in the weekly grocery store advertisements we receive, the first 4 pages are huge pictures of all kinds of meat. In the grocery store there is an entire aisle comprised solely of sliced ham and lardons. When dining out vegetarian options are extremely rare.

2. There seems to be an unwillingness to branch out and explore the cuisines of different cultures. In the U.S. I am used to being able to find a variety of ingredients from Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Thai, Spanish, Indian and various other cuisines, even in the most basic grocery store. Here Mexican and Asian foods are considered more of a specialty and are all rather expensive. There are even boxed taco kits you can buy, but they cost the equivalent of about 8 dollars. Tofu, which you could find in great quantities for say $1 in the U.S., costs 4-5 dollars here for a very small box. I think the U.S. because it is an immigrant nation has adapted and grown in a way to be inclusive of world cuisines. France is a very insulated nation, and despite its growing Muslim/North African/Middle Eastern population is very insistent on keeping its longstanding traditions.

When going out to eat the cuisine other than traditional French that you see in the largest quantities is Italian. There are pizza places everywhere! In fact in our little town there are probably more pizza places than actual French restaurants. We were lucky to have a Chinese restuarant in town and were amazed to find that it was actually really good.

3. The inability to find certain key ingredients. This relates to number 2. I in some ways find the French narrow minded in what they are willing to eat. I suppose all cultures do this to some degree. For example some foods that in the US are seen as basic the French find appalling. The biggest example is peanut butter. While you can find peanut butter here it is extremely expensive, and the French just find it odd. You will not find any kind of peanut butter flavored candies (i.e. Peanut butter cups or butterfingers). Matt LOVES peanut butter so this is a bit of a tragedy for him.



Another example is whole wheat/grain bread or sandwich bread. It is very hard to find any good bread here that has much nutrition. While I love baguettes and all the fresh bread, it really doesn't have a great deal of nutritional value. You can find pain cereal (bread with grains) at boulangeries but it is pretty much impossible to find sandwich bread other than a gross looking "American sandwich bread" that looks like white wonder bread. Matt and I tried to explain to Matt's advisor Yvonne that it is possible to have good tasting packaged sandwich bread, and she just didn't believe us. Back in Portland I became addicted to a bread called Dave's Killer Bread that was expensive but chock full of grains and so so good! I love baguettes but sometimes I just want a sandwich or some whole grain toast!

The inability to find cheddar cheese, mozzarella or parmesan (especially when Italy is so close) is a bit unfathomable. I mean they put emmental (swiss) cheese on their pizza! Yuck!

Well I suppose I'm starting to sound a little whiny so I should stop. I love a lot of what I've eaten here so far, but sometimes I just want more options of what I can make for dinner and the appreciation of other cuisines beyond French. I don't mean to say that I dislike French cuisine, I like many elements of what I've experienced here, but I also appreciate the openness and variety that can be found at home.