Frohe Weihnachten Und Ein Gutes Neues Yahr!!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
To all our beloved family and friends: you know we miss you and wish you all very warm holiday greetings.
As some of you know, we had a fellow expat come stay with us for a few days at Christmas. This is Maria, our friend Tatiana's daughter, who has been living in Darmstadt, Germany since May and feels she has found her new home. We had a lovely visit with her and I was happy to have someone to ply with holiday goodies.

And our Christmas brunch: Swiss chard and salami frittata, fruit salad, Stollen that Maria brought from Germany with her, fresh coffee and juice (although I certainly missed the loud happy Christmas at home with the huge Christmas breakfast spread in Marion -- I hear Kaye's orange rolls almost rivaled Grandma's this year). Maria came on Christmas Eve at 4pm and Rand picked her up from the train station while I finished putting away the groceries I'd been collecting all day, cloth bag by cloth bag, going back and forth from the store with as much as I could carry. Luckily the store is just right around the corner. And was it ever so busy on Christmas Eve!
You see here our dining room with the romantic large windows, high ceilings, plaster walls and ambiance. Across the road is the park that houses the Grand Casino. The flowers on the table came from Rand's "West Virginia Dad" -- THANKS ROB!! And we have the few Christmas cards that found their way to Switzerland at the last moment in the window. Oh, and I almost forgot the very special orange cookies from Sue that also made it overseas, a bit crumbly, but definitely delicious. Thank you everyone.

Baden for Christmas

Some of you have asked what Baden looks like for Christmas. Here is a sampling. They decorated the narrow old cobblestone streets with hanging strands of light, all through town so when you walk through, it feels like a fairyland. The lights come on around 4pm as it darkens. It's very romantic of course and before Christmas there are also outside tables full of pine boughs and red berry limbs, mulled wine and cheeses.



These two are by the Bahnhof, train station, practically around the corner from our apartment, and is where they've put up the ice rink, fondue hut, merry-go-round and tranparent igloo bar for the festivities. On the other end of the ice rink is a large open pit with a roaring fire that people can surround to keep warm. They also roast sausages on long sticks to keep the fat on.
As we walked past the fondue hut one night we could hear yodeling coming from inside. Female voices and beautiful. We must make a reservation and check it out -- Heather?


And instead of stars or ornaments, they mount these angel figures all through town. Here's one on the morning it snowed, looking over its little kingdom.


The large ball of light is hanging in the center of town, by the clocktower. They were selling Christmas trees and roasting chestnuts underneath. The trees were not big fraser firs. They're instead rather scrawny, Charlie-Brown-Christmas trees. They decorate them on Christmas Eve with real candles.

This is a window on a residential street, decorated for the 9th day of December. Instead of having one of those little wall-hangings with the shutters you open for the days before Christmas, they decorate real-live windows to anticipate Weihnachten. That's a little suspended angel in the middle flying over a bunch of animals, to be sheep perhaps?

Finally, a cold lone Santa floating on the river Limmat. We don't know why. And that's our Swiss Christmas!

Bubbly mineral baths -- date night?

So this is Baden (bath-town) after all and we finally made it to the public baths, ThermalBaden. The town gives tickets when you register and we put them to good use last night. You go in and change into your bathing suit -- the woman thought I was funny asking if a bikini was ok. Yes, bikinis were the thing, judging by all the teen biscuits there with their beaus. No nudity or prudery at this one.

Once you change and shower down, you enter a beautiful room with lots of cream tile and wooden beams, panes of glass and skylights around a pool with candles in lanterns scattered around the edges. It was neither too big nor too small, but aesthetically just right. And when you step in, ahhhhh, the temperature was not too hot, not too cool, perfectly warm. In one part there were places to lie with mini jets massaging you all over. All around the edges were jets of water at different levels. And at one end was a big bubbly blob that we didn't even get to. No, it doesn't take long to get used to this.

After a while in that pool, we decided it was time to try the next stop, the OUTDOOR pool. Now mind you, I'd been in every layer of every wintry thing I owned to walk down there, and here I was in a bikini, heading outside. But of course they had thought it all out (these are Roman baths after all, so they'd had some time to work out the details -- ok no, not actually the building). You walked into a separate room where the steps to the pool were, with a plastic curtain over it, so you could dive underneath and come out into -- more perfectly warm water, cold air around your head, a Christmas tree and twinkly lights on the houses across the river going up the hill, and STEAM. The steam covered the whole area and kept everything mysterious. We tried every area, enjoying the night view from different angles, and the purply-deep pink sky, including the big bubbly blob here -- you have to wait your couple's turn. It was like a whirlpool built in the pool with round tile sides and rails to hold onto, otherwise I would have been swept out to pool. And the steam was thickest here. I didn't take any pictures because of the being wet and all, but the picture above is from the website, http://www.thermalbaden.ch/.

Come on over, the water's fine!

Registering good and proper

One of the first things you have to do when you move to Switzerland is register with the town where you live (ala Bethlehem?) so they can track you and tax you. I did this on my third morning in Baden at the town hall Stadthaus, as pictured here. Yes, cobblestone alley, archway overlooking the river valley on that very snowy morning, pretty painting on the archway of Vikings(?) Lake Zurich pirates(?!), another medieval building meticulously maintained with big heavy wooden door. You all would have laughed at me as I came up to that big door, because it swung open wide as I came up to it, inviting me in, and just like Shaggy and Scooby, I followed it around to see who had let me in, but there was no-one-there. Hee hee.
So coming from one bureaucratic culture to another, I was prepared with passport, paperwork, pictures, cash money. After much entering of info on the computer, I was at last given my receipt and official registration letter, brochures about town almost all in German, and my potassium iodide tablets from the Swiss Army with scary instructions ("In the event of a serious nuc-u-lar power plant accident where the safety tank fails, radioactive iodine may be released into the environment...Additional tablets may be purchased from dispensing pharmacies if you require them"). So, I'm now protected against nuclear accidents at any one of the three surrounding power plants. Our realtor, Mrs. Fischer, told us all about our nuclear neighbors. She had worked at one and could even tell us who built each of them -- none brought to you by Alstom!

Did I mention the snow?

When we woke up yesterday morning, this is what greeted us. It had already snowed before I arrived, and was still lying on the ground, but then I got to see it snow for two days, as you know a big deal for a Carolina girl like me. We got up at 6am and it was so lovely in the dark. Heavy snow and Rand said at work you never heard so much griping. Apparently it wasn't expected overnight and the snow ploughs were just a' scurryin' the next morning. Our balcony (yep, that's me in my pajamas and socks in the dark and cold) overlooks one of the roads and we could see the buses carefully pulling up to the sidewalks, people getting out with umbrellas, and yes, still a couple of hardy guys on bikes.

I took a walk once it got light and these are of town. The view to the river is just a few steps from our apartment and the picture below is looking over the river valley. The other is of the beginning part of the main shopping street which intersects at the train station. Everyone should be very proud of me in the outdoors, all bundled and warm. Sorry no pictures of me yet, having a bad hair month, but will try to rectify soon.

Yes, I'm here!!

Hi All, I'm sorry this is belated, but I'm still you know just a bit stunned that we really live here. In Europe. Medieval Europe. Snowy, mountainous Europe. It's not like reality. For instance, this was my first image of the town, arriving by train, seeing the promised ruined castle on the hill. This was my second train of the morning, both made by Rand's Alstom(!). The first was between terminals at the Zurich Airport and was surreal because you could see it going through this tunnel and looking all science-fiction, but at the same time, you could hear these faint cow-bells. That's right, cow-bells. And the cows lowing. Coming over the speaker, in the train. Apparently there was a Heidi sign there; Rand said I just missed it.

Rand's gone with the wind

So I took Rand to the airport yesterday and put him on the plane. Just when little RDU airport gets its brand spankin' new terminal all set up to look like an international space shuttle hub, *poof* we leave. He's going to start on Monday, as planned.

Lesson #1: Don't think you can mess with a Swiss schedule.

Go to Atlanta, NOW

As I think we've told most everyone, we didn't know exactly when we were moving to Switzerland. It depended on the ubiquitous paperwork, and I thought there was no way Rand would get there to start on December 1. So here it was the Monday before Thanksgiving and we still hadn't gotten the word that the visas were ready when he sends the alarms-blaring email to Alstom saying oh no oh no, no visa, no go. Wouldn't you know then, Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving, I'm ready to shower for work when Rand stops me, wide-eyed, "Visas are ready NOW". I managed to reach someone at the Consulate in Atlanta to learn that yes, we have the approval for Mr. Ward, but none for Ms. Thornton. Consulate will be open from 8:30 to 11:30am on Wednesday, then -- The Holiday. One more alarm email to Alstom, I call in to work for the rest of the week (hee hee), and down to Atlanta we go. I reached Lance that morning to let him know we were coming with no notice and was so sad that we wouldn't get to see him. But I did get the fabulous places suggestions, so after traveling all day, we checked into a hotel which turned out to be right across the street from the Consulate (fabulous planning, Caroline), and went out for a late night at the Spice Market in the W Hotel where I had the most amazing ginger margaritas and a stacked green papaya salad. The hotel and restaurant were straight out of theme Vegas, so we loved it.

Oh yeah, and the next morning we got both visas, no problems, except that the Consulate wasn't even listed on the directory in the building where we thought it was. It felt like going to a secret installation that no one knows exists in the anonymous high-rise. We had to ask the security guard. Very tricksy.

Driving home not too bad, even though it was the DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING. We left Atlanta at 9:45 with the visas, weren't we proud. And I got to see the giant peach butt in the sky one more time before leaving all lovely Southern things behind.