I could tell you that my trip to Switzerland was wonderful and amazing, and that's probably what you're expecting. However, if I were to tell you what you were expecting I would be lying because in fact, the overall trip was terrible. When we arrived at Tante Catherine's (Aunt Catherine's) house just outside of Zurich, it was only to discover that Tante Catherine's house wasn't a house at all but instead a small apartment. Which meant that for the next 10 days there would be 9 people squished into 3 rooms and all sharing 1 shower. I was to share a room with Fanny and Flora while Isabelle and Matthias took the other guest room with Timon and Christoph. But all that changed when Flora began throwing up everything she had eaten that day just before we were getting ready for bed. She was followed closely by Fanny who came down with an awful cough and fever. As bad as I felt for the poor girls, I didn't exactly want to share a room with them. (can you blame me?) And thank goodness I was rescued when Isabelle offered to sleep with them and suggested that I take the couch. Although I was really excited to have the couch to myself free from sick children, it also meant that I had absolutely no privacy and that I would have to stay up as late as the adults (which is really late) and get up as early as the kids (RIDICULOUSLY EARLY)!! On top of the "close quarters" issue Isabelle's sister, Catherine (pronounced Katrin), is OCD to the tenth power! She freaked out over every teeny little thing. She was constantly pushing a vacuum around everybody and cleaning up after every single person to the point of extreme rudeness. Her whole world almost came crashing down when Timon got an ALMOST visible fingerprint on her perfectly clean refrigerator door. Heaven forbid.
After a couple days of no sleep and excessive cleaning we received a phone call from Isabelle's mom who was watching the house while we were gone. She bore the wonderful news that the house had just been broken into. She called us again later, after having called the police and stood by as they ran forensics tests, to tell us that all of Isabelle's jewelry and some of Timon's money had been stolen. But the room that the stupid thieves had the most fun in was mine. They stole all of my tithing money along with all of the money that I had been saving. They also stole a ring of mine which is actually kind of funny because they'll be quite angry to discover that the ring is not real silver nor is the emerald real and it's really only worth 20 dollars or less. You'd think that stealing would be enough to satisfy them but OOOH NO! For some reason they felt it necessary to trash my room as well, throwing all of my clothes on the floor and emptying all my drawers out onto my bed, and scattering everything that was on my desk. Nice guys those thieves. So instead of being relaxed and trying to enjoy switzerland I was anxious and just wanted to get home before anybody could take anything else.
We kept thinking that after a couple of days Fanny and Flora would get better. Which was the case with Fanny but unfortunately not Flora. She remained sick until just a couple nights before we came home. And, sure enough considering the "close quarters" issue, Christoph had picked up what Fanny had and joined Flora in the sick room, which meant I remained on the couch for the duration of our stay.
The upside to the trip was that I was able to get some good quality time with Timon. Him and I have been struggling lately and it was really good to break through the barrier a little. We spent most of our time together playing hide and seek games throughout the apartment complex and neighborhood, and going for long walks often visiting a farm to see the cows, sheep, and eat apples from a wonderful apple tree. One evening during one of our games, I was trying to be sneaky so that Timon couldn't find me, but was interrupted by a really old creeper guy with the majority of his teeth missing. He kept mumbling the same thing to me over and over and the only word I could distinguish was 'gorka' which means cucumber. As you can probably assume I was a little confused but eventually I figured out that he had a bunch of extra cucumbers he wanted to give away. So after taking two and bringing them back to the 'house', I discovered that he had also given some to Timon and some to Joaquim (Catherine's husband). It made for a good memory to see that we had all been reeled in by the same creeper old man with the result being an overload on cucumber. :)
Despite all of Catherine's annoying and unfortunate OCD issues, she is a wonderful cook! I'm literally salivating just at the thought of her cooking. She made excellent desserts which included rasberry cheescake, zucchini chocolate cake (yeah yeah I know what you're thinking but I ate it and admitted liking it before I knew there was zucchini in it) and also mouthwatering tiramisu. ooohhhh sooo delicious. She also made wonderful lasagna and heavenly schnitzel. So all though I was not well rested at least we were all well fed. :) Another good quality about Catherine was that she married a great guy. He is by far my favorite family member and I'll tell you why....He loves basketball. He even keeps track of the NBA. And, Joe you'll love this one, his favorite teams are the Boston Celtics and the Utah Jazz. It was so awesome to be able to finally talk to someone about a sport I'm actually interested in.
So I just decided that this post is entirely too long so I'll finish up real quick with a couple facts about Switzerland.... First of all, did you know that they're not actually part of the European Union? So even though they are surrounded by EU countries on all sides, they refuse to join, forcing you to exchange your money from euros to swiss francs every time you enter the tiny country. Another fun fact is that Switzerland is a quadrilingual country. They speak 4 languages!! On the Italian border they speak Italian, on the French border they speak French, and the they German and Austrian borders they speak, you guessed it, German. The fourth language is called Romansch and is only spoken by a few valleys some where in the middle.
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