Sunday October 23, Lausanne, Switzerland

It was raining cats and dogs when we awakened, so we took our time and had a very leisurely breakfast at the buffet downstairs. Afterwards Monika processed pictures while I accidentally took a nap. (I just laid down for a minute, found it so restful that I closed my eyes, and the rest was history!)

We finally checked out about noon and drove through a light rain back to Lausanne. After a bit of getting lost on the narrow, complicated one-way streets near the main train station, we finally found the Elite Hotel where Christoph, Monika's cousin, had booked a room for us and settled in. Christoph and his wife Gaby stopped by later to give us a walking tour of the city and invite us to dinner.

Christoph, an architect by profession, had lived in Lausanne for over 30 years and knew a great deal about the history and significance of many of the buildings. Of course, one aspect of our tour that you would expect in any city as old as Lausanne was the plethora of churches ranging from a beautiful cathedral on a hill to the regular neighborhood churches in each district.

The cathedral had the tall, vaulted ceilings characteristic of Gothic architecture plus a great selection of stained glass windows. One of those windows struck me as rather modern, possibly inspired by cubist art, but all the rest appeared to be quite old and original. The most unique one was a rosette-shaped circular window on the south side that was basically a symphony in carved stone and shining glass. I was extremely happy that by this time the rain had stopped and the sun had finally come out so that I could see the stained glass windows of the cathedral in all their glory.

Many buildings we saw during our tour had changed uses over the years. One fancy building, for example, had been initially used by the local university, but they had then moved out of town and abandoned it. Since then apparently nobody else could figure out what to do with it! Unfortunately, in the meantime the plaza in front had become a center for drug dealers and their customers. Apparently the Swiss Police had first used the drug-tolerant Amsterdam model and let the drug trade flourish, resulting in a small "Needle Park". After complaints from surrounding businesses the police had tightened up their enforcement quite a bit, but there were still quite a few unsavory looking characters lounging around the plaza when we walked through it. Fortunately, with strict Swiss handgun laws, Christoph guessed the dealers were probably only armed with knives, and that was a comfort. I can't, after all, outrun a bullet but I imagine seeing a knife would lend wings to my feet and give me a decent chance of outrunning an irritated drug pusher.

Quite a few of the other old buildings along our route were ex-hotels that had been converted to banks, shops, and so forth. Apparently Lausanne had been a tourist center around 1900 but that trade had declined after World War I and many of the hotels had shut down as a result. Since Lausanne appeared to me to be an eminently walkable town with a nice waterfront area, the lack of tourist accommodations seemed a shame. .

There are plenty of restaurants, however, and I even counted 3 McDonalds while we walked around town! We finally tried one of these and found that a "Big and Tasty" hamburger is not the same the world over. The Swiss version is much, much larger than the American version, more like the American "quarter-pounder" or even larger, and costs correspondingly more. Another difference was that if you ordered the "meal" option, it included only French fries but no drink! During our walkabout, Christoph and Gaby invited us for a cup of espresso coffee (at a non-McDonald's restaurant!) after which we circled back to our hotel and then to their condominium close to the city center.

Their condo was on the 4th floor and had an absolutely magnificent view of Lac Leman and the French Alps across the lake. In fact, we could even see all the way back to Geneva on the Swiss side of the lake. By this time the sun was setting over the lake, and the combination of sunset, lake, clouds, and mountains made a powerful impression.

But we finally came in from the view for a comfortable evening, much of which was spent chatting about family. Christoph and Monika traded information about their family members so that both of them could extend their family tree databases, and Gaby and I also chatted about our backgrounds and families. Such conversations are probably boring to many folks and, as Gaby put it so pithily, especially so for most folks under the age of 50, but we were all over 50 and found it quite interesting. I also love a house with interesting books scattered around, and they had a really nice selection on their coffee table including "Krokodil", a book about Russian humor that I would have loved to read.

Even more interesting was the fact that Christoph had used his MacIntosh to publish personal memoirs from his side of the family. Since he does professional graphic design, those books looked absolutely gorgeous and I immediately fell to reading some of them. They really were spectacularly well-done examples of the type of personal memoir that I keep urging people in my family to write, and I wish I could have taken some of them along to show my folks. Unfortunately, those memoirs were all in either German or French, so my family would not have been able to read them. But to see how Christoph had integrated text and pictures into each book and then had them printed and bound was educational.

For dinner Gaby cooked us a true Swiss specialty called "Raclette" that featured melted cheese and "Schinken", thin slices of smoked ham, on potatoes plus assorted vegetables like onions, pickles, and corn to have a variety of flavors. To make this specialty she even had a curious kind of electric oven on the table that was used to melt the chunks of cheese in little shovel-shaped containers, after which the cheese was scraped onto the potato with a small wooden spatula. I've never had such a meal, and the combination of cheese plus vegetables plus a really smooth white wine was wonderful. You don't hurry a meal like that, so we ate and talked and ate until around 9 o'clock when Monika and I finally took our leave. Christoph guided us back to our hotel where we just collapsed into bed for the night.