Bon jour - or actually Bon soir as it's 10:30 pm here
Well, we made it to Switzerland. The flight over was pretty painful - at least for me. Colin and Brian fared very well in business class. Edwin was unfazed as he sprwled himself over both his and my seats. Julia, Aidan and I fared about the same as we unsucessfully tried to sleep sitting upright on the plane. Aidan was content to watch movie after movie and I finally made him turn off the movies at about midnight. On good advice from Aunt Mimi, we bribed the flight staff with a box of See's candy (yes, it was "their box of candy") before we took off. They were very appreciative and friendly to us. But the kids were actually very well-behaved, so we didn't need to make up for any bad behavior with the preemptive bribe of chocolate, thank goodness.
Landing in Zurich was nice - much better than landing at LAX: getting bags and going through customs was a cinch. Renting the car was fairly easy - expensive, but easy. Gettting the luggage (as some might remember, one of my fears for coming over) into the car was downright comical. We should have been clowns. Suitcases and bags were everywhere in the "7" seater. Yeah, 7 seats, no trunk/luggage room. While we were driving the 1 1/2 hours to Neuchatel, I couldn't even see Aidan's head behind all the stuff. At one point I couldn't see Ed's head either. But everything fit, just barely. The Swiss love their tunnels: miles and miles of them on our drive here. Because Switzerland and Austria are hosting the soccer EuroCup this year, there are a lot of people on the road either going to soccer games, or just proudly displaying various country flags on them. The team from Portugal is actually staying here in the town of Neuchatel.
Neuchatel is a very old town/canton (region) in Switzerland. It's one of those towns/areas that has been around longer than the country has- I'm sure it's changed in ownership many times over the last 1000 years. Currently it belongs to the swiss, although they fly their own town/canton flag in addition to the swiss flag - which always makes me think I'm in a big red cross station.
We pulled up the the hotel on the lake and it's a very nice hotel. the kids have one room (very big) and we have another smaller room. We went to a pizzeria last night and had a nice pasta/pizza dinner. It's an expensive country. We are paying 4 and 5 dollars for cokes. I guess expense is relative as we are paying 4 and 5 dollars for a glass of beer or wine too. 2 glasses of wine and no sleep left me plenty ready for bed. After waking up a few times, and then going next door to check on the kids and decide I really needed another rest, the kids and I all dragged ourselves out of bed at 12:30 pm (Brian was up and gone to work at 8:30). I wasn't too disappointed because I figured that was less time today I'd have to figure out what to do with them. It's been a bit overwhelming actually.
We got dressed and ready and headed out and stopped at basically the first place we found. Luckily, most everyone speaks English. We had some sandwiches and then walked a little further on a found a super-market. The kids loved it because there were escalators leading to a floor above and one below. The escalators were only for people - but there was a funky contraption next to it that was an escalator type device that took your shopping cart up and down. Aidan thought it was really cool. We found the pull-ups we needed, plus a few other things and then as we proceeded to check out, the young gentleman pronounced "Bonjour madame....et petite famile." I got the joke and laughed with him. We haven't seen many families (some large groups of school-children:young and older) but not many families with 4 kids. None actually. I've seen at most two children per family/mom out for a walk. As we left we saw that there was a deli/take away bar with food, drinks and coffee, so I think we'll go back to the supermarket tomorrow for some meal.
As you know, Brian left his cell phone at home, so I have spent some of the day trying to figure out how to find it and get it back over here. As of now, it's been found and Brenda -thank you!- will be sending it to us. That has been stressful. I can't connect to the internet with my computer without paying 12 swiss francs and Brian's computer won't let me log onto my blogspot: hence the email. He also took the car keys with him to work today- not that I was in any shape to drive the (now empty) car anywhere. Maybe on Wednesday we'll venture out. This area does have a lot to offer. We did manage to get to the tourist office and get maps and tourist attraction brochures. We'll be off on a walking tour to a castle and tower prison tomorrow.
So I'm going to go and tell the kids to go to bed now. They aren't tired. They woke up at 12:30 for goodness sake. But we'll try and manage through the jet-lag. Me and my petit famile
More tomorrow,
Joelle
ps - I have figured out one reason women over here are thin - after I ordered my meal from the very friendly Turkish man at the Kebab house tonight, he very politely said that women don't usually order something quite so big, and didn't I want the smaller version?
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