Le Marché de Noël Montreux

Website: http://www.montreuxnoel.com/en-site-1-christmas-market.html

This afternoon I went with my host mother and little host sister to see the Christmas market in Montreux! It was very festive, very fun, and very cold!

The little shops along the lake sold candies, cheeses, hot wine, cinnamon tea, special chocolates, Christmas cookies, jewelry, scarves, games, magic tricks, decorations, wool, leather, and more!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today my host mom made a pumpkin pie with the canned pumpkin, gluten free flower, and recipe that my family had sent from home. After school I helped her make the Sartor traditional "purple salad" (that some of you might recognize on the table) with American cherries, marshmallows, and love! For the turkey, my host dad picked up a roast chicken on the way home from work! It was all very delicious, and I even said a Thanksgiving prayer in French.

Already decorating for Christmas!


Thank You: 

To Dad for the wonderful Thanksgiving recipes, Mom for sending the American ingredients, Monika for putting it all together, Christophe for the mini Swiss turkey, to everyone who signed the adorable Thanksgiving card (and whoever attached a feather from Pixel), Jamie for the heart-warming letter and books, Elise for the paper snowflakes, heaven for the real snowflakes, Sam for the flash drive filled with Christmas music, Frank Sinatra for his marvelous Christmas album, my host family who shared the holiday with me, and all my friends at school who wished me a happy Thanksgiving!

Marché aux Oignons - Bern

I took the train to Bern after school today to see the onion market. It is an annual tradition that has been happening in Bern since the middle ages. It started today at 5:00am, and when I arrived at 5:00pm it was still in full swing!
This is a picture of the station in Bern completely decorated for Christmas! Already! If you look closely you might see confetti dotting the ground. That was my first clue as to what was to come...

 He is the street where the festival took place. I say street, but really every street in the city was lined by tents and tables, selling goods of all kinds. Of course there were onions in all forms: hanging bunches, onion crows with dried flowers, dolls made of onions, onion cakes, necklaces, etc. There were also candies, clothing, heated wine, music, sausages, games, and more!

Below is the manifestation of a funny tradition. Everyone buys packets of confetti and throws it at each other! The private and polite Swiss throwing annoying paper pieces at strangers in the street?!? What is this?!? Just walking around I would frequently get a face full of this stuff, and managed to shake off a pile before boarding my train back to Fribourg. You can see in the picture that I am also porting two strands of beads. They are actually plastic-wrapped candies! I think they are lemon and mint based on my limited understanding of Swiss German, but I have not actually tried them yet. They had every color of the rainbow in all different flavors! On the train you could immediately tell who had been to the festival because they were covered in confetti and wearing a strand of candies or occasionally a strand of onions!

One thing that I find interesting about Switzerland is that there is mistletoe everywhere! There was a time when I thought mistletoe was a mythical plant! Not only have I seen bunches and bunches of this stuff all over trees, but they sold it at the onion festival in bundles like in the pictures bellow. Now I know why people always greet each other with kisses!

Beautiful Day

Today was a beautiful day! There has been a lot of warm weather here, and as a result the grass was still green yesterday when what should have been snow was replaced by gale force winds and rain to inspire Edgar Allen Poe. The emails from my brother bursting with selfies and pictures of his University covered in snow did not help this situation. The announcement screens on all the buses and trains this week have been teasing me with unanswered snow predictions, so it was all the more wonderful when I looked up from my agenda and out the window this afternoon at one o'clock to see giant snowflakes blowing over the green, Swiss hills. Anyone who has ever been around me for the first snow of the season is chuckling right now and pitying my host family. I momentary forgot that I speak french, and ran downstairs screaming "It's snowing!" like I always do. After switching to "la neige!!!" and dancing through the living room and kitchen (much to the amusement of Elise and Tabea) I had to run to gather my things and get my host dad. The car ride to the train station consisted of a download on how long it would snow, whether it would stay on the ground, how much I could expect in the coming weeks, an intense study of the wind patterns over the hills as represented by rapid waves of white, and of course an occasional stifled chuckle or squeal of excitement. I was delighted to see some friends from choir waiting for the same train, sopping wet, and freezing just like me. As we waited for the train I couldn't resist running out from the shelter to dance around in the snow until I noticed that my choir music was getting progressively soggier. After shedding a mountain of coats and scarves on an empty seat, the train ride was pleasantly spent watching the beautiful winter scenes go by, talking, and laughing. There were things to buy at the mall in Fribourg and an hour to spare, so we toured a hundred stores in all their holiday glory, and saw enough icicle lights on each level to drain a power plant. It was awesome! Everything was perfect, everything was decorated for Christmas, everything (excepting the roads) was covered in snow, and all the Europeans were classily bundled in tailored coats and leather boots with scarves wrapped around their chins like birds nestled in their feathery vests. The choir rehearsal was at the church of St-Michel which I had actually never been inside before despite walking by it every day and seeing the lights and hearing the organ playing on late nights after school. Lets just say it is very old and highly decorated! I greeted choir friends and then we joined the adult choir on the stand. The singing was especially beautiful with the church acoustics until my coughing attack in the middle of my favorite Mozart piece. This was all made better by the most amazing cinnamon tea I have ever tasted! There were two tables covered in holiday cakes and cookies that sadly I didn't get to taste, but being one to appreciate smells, I got to enjoy them just the same! After rehearsal the giant flakes had turned to glitter and the white afternoon to a dark and quiet evening. My host family picked me up in Romont, with my host sister driving (she just got her driving permit!) and Elise in the back with hugs and chatter. We all pilled into a cafe for boxes with kebab meat and fries. The Swiss are obsessed with "kebab" a Turkish thing of meat on a rotating stick that roasted and gradually shaved off to eat as slivers in sandwiches or piles. On a side note, it is delicious! I knew that America was fashionable here, but I really did not expect to walk into a restaurant and hear exactly the same Christmas music that I listen to on the radio at home! When "Last Christmas" by Maria Cary came on I nearly burst out dramatically singing like I used to do in the car on the way to school. Your welcome, strangers at the tables nearby. I don't know that this revelation is going to help with the French language immersion, and it will certainly keep me missing home this Christmas, but tonight it was just another brilliant surprise to make today even better! The snow had turned hard and icy by the time we got home late in the evening, and the rain from yesterday had frozen into a dangerous layer below it all. We crunched up the stairs to the house and I was content to settle down in my room by the heater to watch the sparkling snow in the streetlights below. A bite of chocolate in hand and woolly socks on feet, I deiced that it had been a beautiful day, entirely deserving of a thousand words on my blog. Thank you to all who took the time to read this, and I send my love as well as a touch of the first season's snow!

Fribourg Museum

 After school today I went with some friends to the Fribourg Museum! It was raining hard and freezing, so we bought roasted chestnuts and ate them on the bus! Too delicious! The museum had some interesting exhibits on rocks and Swiss geological history, but my favorite part was the giant collection of animals. There were rooms and rooms of cases filled with preserved animals from all over the world, and a hall completely dedicated to songbirds! Each species had a window where they were placed in a painted habitat and you could press a button to see a light illuminate a bird and hear their song. Below is a picture of a living habitat filled with tiny mice. Julie said that in the spring there are even babies! They moved so quickly that I only got one good picture of a single mouse. See if you can spot him!

Choose Your Country Day

Choose your country day is an event organized by YFU to help Swiss students decide in which country they would like to spend their exchange year. We were all emailed and asked to bring food, flags, and items from our country of origin which we used to decorate a table where people interested in our country could come and talk to us. Discussing our homes and giving advice to future exchange students was fun, but the best part was getting to hang out together, be silly, and finish off each other's food!

I took the train to Lucerne early this morning, and there was a surprise waiting for me at the station in Palézieux when friends of mine from the church youth group popped up and made faces at me through the widow! I arrived half an hour early and decided to tour around Lucerne. I saw lovely parks, apartments, and all kinds of different people taking walks and enjoying their sunny Saturday. The mystery of the invasion of the boy scouts and small children dressed as firemen has yet to be explained...

Finding the gathering of exchange students at the station was like coming home! I got a million hugs and we started talking rapidly in our newly acquired french like we had known each other forever. Afterwards we set up our country tables at the international language office, ate lunch, and awaited the guests. The first picture above is of all the exchange students that volunteered today. The second is the Swedish table, the third is the German table, and the fourth is (of course) the American table!

Choir Camp

This weekend was the choir camp! We had a beautiful location right next to lake Neuchâtel in the area of Vaumarcus. The buildings were all modern and fancy! Our beds even had sheets, which was fun until we had to fit them all inside the laundry closet for washing... We sang for the entire two days except for snack and meal breaks during which we had the opportunity to swing on the swings, take the zip-line, and live dangerously on a rotating platform. Falling off was the best part!

I was not the only gluten intolerant Soprano, and this resulted in the manifestation of an incredible chocolate cake! The food in general was fantastic, and there was plenty of chocolate to be had in all different forms.
Our choir director was murdered the first night, so we all were put into groups and sent around the dorms to play games in order to win clues. My anthropological interest was sparked when my group was asked to sample identical chocolate pieces and determine their origin. From eighteen options varying from Swiss super market brands to famous Swiss chocolate makers, my group only mistook two! In the end we acted out the theory that we had developed based on our clues (often with the choir teacher playing himself), and the closest to the predetermined history won a bag of...What do you think? Chocolate! ...and they wonder where all these stereotypes come from!
I had a private meeting with our voice coach during which she decided that I had a lot more voice than I was willing to admit, and proceeded to have me stand in weird positions, do strange dance moves, and visualize all kinds of things. She was eventually satisfied with the sound that resulted from my visualizing becoming a fountain of...chocolate! I tried it all again in my room one day when my host family wasn't home, and managed to belt my entire Christmas carol "connaissance" complete with waltzing, and of course, being a chocolate fountain. The sound might not have been angelic, but I had a good time!
All in all, the weekend was happily spent with all the eccentric choir kids and our charismatic director. We managed to pound out an amazing about of beautiful music, while still being silly and having a great time. I think that I will really miss the opportunity to do it all again next year!

Some of the music that we worked on:
Heruwimska - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19tHb1OxoBs

12 Days of Christmas - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5gsRI8OEAw
Noël des chameaux - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxyBiZ2Byog
Te deum laudamus - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6t5rkg46kc

Happy Halloween!

 I hope everyone had a spooky and spectacular Halloween!
Thank you to those who signed my card! I got it in the mail just in time, and it really made my day.
Halloween is not a popular holiday in Switzerland. I think that really only St. Nicolas, Christmas, Carnival, and Swiss National Day are celebrated here. Still, some of our western traditions managed to pop up throughout the day. Big supermarkets like Coop and Migros have kept small stands of costumes for the last few weeks, my little sister was invited to a costume party at our Church (although it was not for Halloween), my neighbors hung witches from their rooftop, and I saw a small bad of trick-or-treaters on the streets of Romont just after dark.
My family in the US sent me a box filled with Halloween decorations and goodies earlier this month, so I got to share some of my favorite traditions with my host family! I even taught them how to sing "Ghost of John" in English and then in French. The banner you see in the photo below that Tabea and I made was supposed to say "Happy Halloween", but we ended up liking "Hello Happy Wean" much better. I think I will make that a new tradition when I return!
I still prefer the commercialized, American Halloween, but I really enjoyed bringing a little of my culture to my host family this year!

To the left is the spooky fog that has haunted my town for the last few days! The ghost cows didn't seem to mind...