Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Lies, Lasagna, and Laundry

Dad and I got a free train ticket from the airport to Geneva. We found the hostel pretty quickly and when we walked in the door Brian was sitting there waiting for us. Pretty convenient considering we had absolutely no way to reach him. We checked in and walked across the street to a Pizzaria Roma, a chain we've eaten at twice now in Switzerland. Craig and Brian had pizza, I had the lasagna. It was by far the best meal I've ever had in my life. The lasagna was baked in a ceramic dish and half submerged in a wonderful cheesy sauce. Interesting note, if the menu isn't in English you can just look for "lasagna," it stays the same in German, French and probably just about every language.

The next day we went to get our bikes from John, the owner of bikeswitzerland. John was really nice and answered all our questions and explained the gps, phones, poniards, and other tour related stuff. We're riding super nice BMC touring bikes with two side poniards and a handlebar bag (where I keep my camera handy). I was worried about everything fitting but the poniards can fit a ton of stuff and we all have plenty of spare room. We usually average between 12 and 16mph when we're not trying to pick our way through a town. Mostly we follow the gps John provided which has our route programmed in. It's a little slow to update sometimes and we've had some moments of confusion at weird intersections.

In my earlier post I said we'd be staying in hostels the entire trip, I lied. We only have a few nights in hostels, so far just Geneva. The hotels we've been staying in have actually been pretty nice and the fresh croissants, fresh bread, cheese, coffee, yogurt, and fruit for breakfast makes waking up that much easier. The bread is seriously on a whole different level here. Great Harvest has been thoroughly put to shame. I also mentioned in an earlier post that we'd be doing laundry in sinks. That has actually been the case. It's not ideal but hopefully the next hostel we stay at will have a laundry machine... I'm not getting my hopes up.

I have much more to write about but it's 11:48 here and I think we may try to hike tomorrow and climb around in some churches. Tune in next time to hear if the Germans or French Swiss are more friendly, if they're really serious about the whole Swiss watch thing, and what the women are like here. See yah!

1 comment:

  1. So why do you think the bread is so much different over there? Do they have different grains? Better soil? They don't make their bread out of a box (ha ha ha)...

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