Food, Glorious Swiss Food!

Yes, there was much chocolate eaten. The most frustrating part, in fact, was that the very best brand of chocolate we found was in a convenience store somewhere in the Swiss sticks, and we just assumed we'd find it again. We never did. It was called Villars. We miss you, wherever you are.

That said, we did enjoy very much our visits to Sprungli, which I discussed in an earlier post. We made it to one that was open late in Zurich on Saturday before we flew out Sunday to, I thought, get some for gifts. Turned out, Miles figured we'd keep this stuff for ourselves. Good idea. We still have two left for a little post-Swiss celebration sooner or later. This was the only shot I was allowed to take...


...because they apparently don't allow photos inside the store. Weird.

Anyone who reads this blog or listens to the podcast knows I've got a serious sweet tooth and I love to snack. That wasn't a problem in Switzerland. Here I am with a lapful of interesting treats including chocolate, some sort of chocolate-coated rice cookies and these little wafer things with chocolate in the shape of the Alps. Oh, and some sort of sugary vanilla milk beverage to wash it down...

Milky Way had this delightful offering over there, too! See this candy-related blog for an exposition on it...


The also sell gum by the, uh, ball...

And here's what we bought that snowy day in Crans Montana when we knew we'd be stuck inside our chalet room. There's some cookies, plenty of bottled water (which actually tasted weird), lots of Coke Light, the name of which tickled Miles, and three things of ice cream in the front there.


Here's what one of the cheese display cases looked like at the grocery...


Perhaps the loveliest snack came in the town of Gruyere (yes, like the cheese), when we stopped in for some raspberries and cream. Love the placemats, right?


There were many excellent cappuccinoes, including this one in Crans Montana...

One of the things we loved about that place was that each coffee order came with this delightful little chocolate cup filled with whipped cream. Here I am eating it with relish...


And of COURSE there was fondue. Once. At the restaurant inside the Hotel de la Foret in Crans Montana where we stayed...



...Although for $20 a person, all we got, though, was a crock of salty melted cheese and two baskets of torn up, day-old sourdough bread.


It wasn't ALL decadence, though. One night in Fribourg, we had a great deal of trouble finding a place to eat where we didn't have to navigate a foreign-language menu or the blank stares of waitresses. We found this handsome spot, a little bakery-deli place.


Here was Miles' delicious sandwich...


And here's my tuna salad with all sorts of other odd things in it...


See? That was healthy! Still, mostly, it was a lot of this...


And I throw in this final photo just to remind you all that, somehow, despite all of this, I am not a big fat cow...

...yet.

The Strip is LIVE tonight at 7:05 p.m. PT

It's the attack of the Vegas reality-TV stars this week -- except that these are actual success stories! We'll have Las Vegas Hilton's $100,000-a-show ventriloquist Terry Fator ("America's Got Talent") on live as well as a taped chat with Trump marketing veep Stefanie Schaeffer ("The Apprentice") to discuss their reality-show experiences and how they led them to Las Vegas.

We'll also recap our big trip to Switzerland and delve into some Vegas news. So join us at LVROCKS.Com at 7 p.m. PT tonight for the live show and chat room. Or grab the podcast version on Thursday.

If you haven't seen Fator before, he's really remarkable. Check this out:

Easter Mad In The Chocolate Capital

I'm still catching up on our big trip and will be doing so all week. Today's lesson is how a country built on chocolate (and illicit banking, but that's not very tasty!) goes absolutely bananas over Easter. This sort of thing...


...was everywhere...

And just like here in America, it was made of the utterly worst, waxiest, cheapest chocolate around. Poor Easter bunnies! Oh, and not a single Peep anywhere to be seen. The JustBorn company has some globalization to do, methinks.

Beyond the candy, though, there were signs of Easter every-frigging-where. Even in random shop windows like Anika's costume shop...

And doesn't a demented Easter bunny just make you want to buy a Swiss watch?

We were relaxing over a not-great cappuccino in Geneva at a cafe called Central Perk -- we'll get to THAT later in the week -- when I noticed this hideous, hopefully seasonal, light fixture...


I actually have no idea what this one is about but it has something to do with something called Biolust.ch...


And here's another that stumped me. It was on a bus. From what I've gathered with help from an online German-English dictionary, it reads: "Easter? We'll be open." But, Bugs Bunny, why the long face?


Maybe it's a depression hotline or something? You know, from someone who got the seasonal blues because the chocolate bunnies were so gross?

Alpine Adventures, Hooray!

I was beginning to worry. As many of you know, Miles loves cold weather and snow. That's the appeal of coming to Switzerland -- and the appeal of coming here in winter.

So imagine our consternation when, while all has been lovely, most everything we'd seen for seven days looked lush and green like this:


Cute, right? But not what we bargained for. So as we made our way counter-clockwise around this clock-crazy nation, I realized our last chance would be to go high into the Alps in a southern region known as the Valais. I booked us a room via Expedia at what I hoped would be a snowy chalet called Hotel de la Foret in a region known as Crans Montana.

We got there late on Thursday evening and found, again, no snow. But we were also up in ski country, so we figured Friday would entail a gondola ride up to a ski chalet or something.

Then, on Friday, we woke up, pulled back the curtains and...could not see a darned thing! Total white-out. When it calmed down a tad, this is what we could photograph from our balcony:




To give you some idea how fast and furiously the snow was coming, this lump below was our car -- after Miles had dug it out once.


We ended up hiking into the town a couple miles away for brunch. It looked like this...

Here's Miles in his winter gear...


We weren't originally supposed to stay at the Hotel de la Foret for two nights, but the snow made it worth it and impossible to do anything else. It did taper off by evening, and here's ol' Smitty waving as he works on digging out our car again just so the overnight freeze doesn't make it even more difficult...


And this was what we could not see all Friday...





Nice moon, no? Miles clearly did a nice job with the car...

Then here's what that whited-out view looked like Saturday morning after that storm...



Of course this all made Miles gleeful...


So we got in our trusty little Opel Meriva after a quick photo...


...and began the alleged five-hour drive back to Zurich. Except that we had to go east and then north through the Alps. Street signs were covered in snow, the Fodor's guide was relatively useless and cars were flying all over the place. Including ours.


We planned to take something called the Grimselpass. Except that the road instead led us to a dead-end of a ski resort. So we asked a nice couple sitting on a bench enjoying the sun and they explained that the road passes were closed to drivers -- and would be until, uh, May.

No, we had to put our car on a train and go through the mountains. Literally. See this is the train...


...and these are all the cars that have to be loaded into that trailer thing in front of the train. (Ours is the middle first car after waiting through three cycles and paying our $30 passage.)


The thing is, nobody prepared us for what would happen once we were inside the mountain. Having been instructed to turn the engines and lights off, we found ourselves in a pitch-black tunnel for at least a half hour. I had time, so I took this picture...


Miles was a little spooked. He complained it was claustrophobic. Oddly, Miles does not suffer from claustrophobia. But whatever. Mostly, I napped and had snacks.

Oh, I also got this photo...


Once we got through the mountain, the ride back to Zurich was uneventful and the roads vastly easier to navigate. We checked back into the Hotel Neufeld, which upgraded us to this huge suite for no evident reason. It had a corner balcony from which we could see this...


So now it's time for bed. We fly back to Vegas, via Atlanta, early in the morning. We have blog posts to come on our food adventures, on Swiss cars, on odd signs and more. Stay tuned!

Swiss-Vegas: The Overflow Lot

Here's some Swiss-Vegas stuff that came up after I wrote my Weekly column...

Blue Man Group, Live at Luxor, Victorious at Venetian and... Gauche en Geneve?

We passed through the French city of Evian and look what we found...


This isn't really fair, except that I liked these pix and they had a vaguely Vegas air to it, a stripper joint called Moulin Rouge...



When we finally made it to the Swiss Alps on Thursday for a two-night stay, of course we came across this casino in town called Crans-Montana. Yes that's Smitty...

They were more lax about letting me shoot pix inside...


And, making my heart and sweet tooth gleeful, they had these bowls of strangely delicious green-apple chewy candy around the place...