12.20.06

Eight Miles and One Hundred Seventy Curves

Here we are in Switzerland. Rike and I are sitting with our two matching iBooks in a cafe in the village of les Diablerets, at the end of a perilous, impossibly sinuous and precipice enhanced road. This asphalt covered path, sometimes lined with guard rails sometimes not, finds it's match almost in the village at the foot of 6,000 feet of sheer rock, ice and wind blown snow that reach up 10,500 feet.

Two guys in bright coveralls and two women come into the bar/restaurant with a small horse, or maybe it's a big dog.They greet everyone, including me, as they come in and most everyone greets back. That is the way things go in a small community in Switzerland. When you enter somewhere you greet. They sit next to us and now that the beast is laying down I can tell it's a St Bernard, a very big dog, that has sprawled between our two tables. His thorax is bigger than mine. The owner is a Swiss lumberjack who speaks with the caricature of the Swiss accent that the French make fun of all the time. He takes off his jacket, points down to his belly and says "Look, I have a bump down there!" Like everyone within earshot I laugh too and am happy these guys are here.

When picking a place to spend the winter in Switzerland we had many choices and many of them involved the big ski resorts. Many of these resorts are impersonal. Les Diablerets escapes this and, during the off season, as we are in now, it is simply a small mountain village. Here, amidst the strong smell of cow manure, everyone knows everyone else. Everyday cars and trucks with their gallons of fresh milk show up at the small creamery that neighbors us . It will be bottled, churned into butter or made into yoghurts or cheese right here. The owner of the creamery, Corinne Morero is also Anouck and Céline's gym teacher. She has the body of a woman who can devour any ski slope.

Speaking of ski slopes, we are still waiting for a good snow fall that will hopefully push the lumberjacks and farmers to turn on and man the ski lifts. So far this snow has eluded us and the warm weather has been more of a boon for hiking than skiing. Aside from being "strange", this fact has more immediate repercussions. A few weeks ago the thawing of the permafrost led a mountain side to separate. It slid 5'000 feet or so.

However, we have been doing more than waiting for the snow and watching the Alps falling apart. A quick trip to Paris for some sightseeing and family visiting put us back on the water. We rented a boat on the Seine in the center of Paris, a few steps from Notre Dame. The price was the same as an average hotel but the kitchen made the deal much cheaper since we could eat on the boat. The bonus, aside from being on a boat again, was the location and the ability to hop on the "Bateau Bus" that stops at the tourist attractions.

We have also been working hard at home-schooling, trying to keep our heads above water as we struggle with the fact that we started a month and a half late. Unfortunately we were not successful in our quest to have Anouck and Céline attend art classes at the local school. The art teacher was all for it, but the local official said that the girls should be in school full time or not at all. Given the amount of times we will be pulling them out of school and our March 31 departure, we figured our bohemian schedule would get us in trouble with the school system. So we opted for the gym class that unfortunately only happens once a week. The point, of course, is to get Aouck and Celine to meet other girls their age and that seems to be working well.

We did visit our friends, the Gaggini's, in Wintherthur and Rike's aunt and uncle who own a deer farm close to Winterthur. We had a great time in both places and our stay at the Gaggini's was bug free. That does happen, every once in a while, when we meet.

We also drove back to Port Saint Louis du Rhone to see how Cénou fared during the past two months. All was well there and so Rike and I took advantage of being a couple again, (the girls were left in Switzerland) to visit the town of Orange. Orange was a Roman outpost at it's origin but it now has one of the only three remaining Roman theaters in the world, the other two being in Tunisia and Turkey.

So, all in all we are doing well. I would like to add that my southern Spain memories were revived by a French TV report. It spoke of Marbella, which is close to Malaga. The area, which is a big transit point for drugs, has the heavy influence of the Russian mafia. The report spoke not only of the drug issue but of the fact that the presence of the mafia in many levels of local government has corrupted and undermined the respect for building codes and restrictions. This has lead to unfettered building at the profit of the mafia and the expense of architectural and environmental laws. And here I was blaming the Brits and the Germans retirees . . .

Cheers to all, we wish you happy festivities, religious or not, and a happy new year!

Claude, Rike, CÉline and aNOUck.