Blessed by the Potato

“Do you have any open wishes?” is our new favourite saying after being asked by the waitress at a cute little restaurant.

The city is incredibly closed right now, I have no idea why they chose here for a conference. The vast majority of what few restaurants there are are closed for lunch (and almost half are closed completely — it’s the off-season here), yet there are a lot of tourists who really have nothing to do but eat at restaurants for lunch. For that matter, I can’t quite understand why all the restaurants and hotels are 20 minutes away from the conference centre rather than all clustered together. There doesn’t look to be much in the way of air conditioning, though for the most part it’s not really needed, but fans are. The air just sits and stinks and it gets sticky inside, even outside the breeze off the mountains seems to stop for a large part of the day.

I’m actually quite surprised at how warm it is here, since the weather reports keep saying it’ll be 11C or whatever, but the thermometers I’ve seen on the walls and the subjective feeling is that it’s between 25 and 30, with no air movement for much of the day.

The hotel (Sunstark Park) is so strange: it’s supposedly a 4-star hotel, but is just missing some basic amenities (not the least of which is air conditioning). The windows don’t have any screens, so it’s sometimes hard to even open those for air if the bugs are out. The washrooms have giant bottles of hand soap and shampoo, but no conditioner or hand cream. There is wireless internet in every room — but it costs up to $45/day to use!! (8 CHF, which are very close to CAD, per half hour) Despite being close to an international conference centre, the concierge thought I was crazy to think they might have a north american voltage converter to borrow/rent. Supposedly to avoid fire risks, the rooms don’t have irons or coffee makers.

Strange things in Switzerland in general is that many of the doors have a flange to them to seal up to the fram, rather than a jamb in the frame (i.e.: part of the door goes around the frame, rather than in it). There’s a toilet brush next to every single toilet. The toilets are crazy about sanitation! This sponge comes out to clean the seat after you flush and squirts some sort of cleaning fluid (or possibly just water, I don’t know). Many of the other public restrooms had disposable toilet seat covers available.

So, highlights: Mountains, of course. We went on a crazy long bike-ride up around the lake and partway up the mountain, almost 3 hours of pedalling, which is about 4 times longer than I typically bike for, so I was pretty wiped by the end. Great experience though, and my first time doing “real” mountain biking (i.e.: flying down tree-root-laden goat paths, and hitting hills so steep I had to walk the bike up many of them). I stuck my feet in the lake, and it was about as cold as you might expect glacier run-off to be.

We had a social event at a former asylum for tuberculosis patients at the top of a mountain, and we ran a little late and missed the last cable car down (actually, we just made it, but stupidly followed the person who said “oh, too late, let’s walk”). So we walked down the mountain in the dark, with only the lights of our cameras’ LCDs and one tiny LED flashlight to guide us. It took the better part of an hour. About halfway down, with the trees closing in on us, and us coming to the realization that we had walked ourselves into a horror movie, a small white kitten jumped out of the bushes and swatted at my foot, playfully.

Man, I’ve never been so scared of a kitten before, I must have jumped 3 feet in the air.

We’ve arrived in Zurich, and aside from the people beside us harrassing the flight attendants and knocking us over with the “snuggle train” it wasn’t too bad — even though we didn’t get our pre-picked seats in the 2-seat part of the 2-4-2 plane setup.

Wayfare’s brand-new Air Canada branded suitcase fell apart. Hopefully it’ll hold together long enough to get it home, where hopefully the Bay will take it back.

Our hotel room is great — probably bad to start with the biggest, nicest room, because it’ll spoil us for Davos and France, where the rooms will undoubtedly be smaller and less luxurious. But for now it’s fantastic, quiet, with our choice of 5 different types of pillows (goose down, duck feather, new wool, spelt chaff, ortho latex, or memory foam). The internet is free, but strangely enough the ice costs $5/tray.

We’re pretty beat from the flight, so we didn’t spend too much time exploring the city, but so far it’s been really good. I’m surprised at how many people speak English — I thought my broken French would have to serve as a lingua franca, but so far it’s been no problem. I don’t know if it’s the pale skin or what, but most people even greet me in English from the get-go. The main shopping strip is really cute with pedestrian and trolley/tram access only — many of the cars seem to have to navigate around.

One thing that’s really struck us about Zurich is that it has a really intricate trolley/bus/regional train system, which is amazing since the city is pretty much the same size as London, Ontario, which has pretty terrible transit (ok, I like the LTC and it’s not bad along Richmond or Oxford, which is surprisingly good for small-town Canada, but this is just a whole other league). Even on Saturdays the trams have been coming every 5 minutes.

The streetlights are suspended from cables strung between the buildings, which looks especially strange in the daylight when the lights are off and you can’t figure out why all the cables are strung all over the place.

Oh, and the river was a fair bit larger than I was expecting — I figured the (Ontario) Thames was a decent-sized river, but this one is a good 10-15′ deep, with fish snapping at bugs in the early morning!

We’re heading off for a trip soon that will involve nearly 18 hours on a plane and another 20 on trains, so I’m looking for book recommendations. I’m going to want something that both Wayfare and I would probably enjoy reading (so we don’t each have to take a collection of books), and hopefully something that’s in paperback now.

Chicago is a much bigger city than I had imagined before coming here — bigger than Toronto, even.

The time change has already had one “gotcha” for me: I went down for the opening reception and was an hour early.

From walking around, I can see that Chicago is a city gone mad in a number of ways. The roads and trains and whatnot are all over the place: above ground, at grade, and underground. It still doesn’t seem to make the traffic any better. People honk all the time. Every single light change there’s someone honking somewhere. With all that honking I think the drivers here must just tune it out, so if someone tries to drive into them by changing lanes without looking (which happened to me on the way to the airport — time to take the license away from somebody’s granny!) they probably wouldn’t even react to the warning honk and just plow on through. Last night I saw 15 cars run a red light. A number of them were still running the red when the light for the other direction had already turned green. At that point, the cars running the red were all honking at each other, and some people were honking at the cars that did finally stop for the red!

That said, Chicago does have some nice architecture, as I recall reading about in The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I went out last night (Saturday night) looking for dinner around 11 pm, and almost everything was closed down. Today was no different, with most stores and restaurants being closed for sunday. The famous Uno and Due pizzarias were open, but had lineups spilling out onto the sidewalk.

The internet is working, and there are no cockroaches, which is a huge step up from San Diego. I should mention that the wired internet keeps crapping out, but there is wireless that seems to be working better. With a US IP address, I can finally check out hulu.com, which is how I spent my Saturday night here :) The hotel room is quite nicely furnished and laid out, however there’s no sound insulation from what’s going on in the hallway, so I could hear the maid knocking on everyone’s door in the morning. I think I’ll have to break out the earplugs tonight.

In Charlottetown, we found that Little Christos is open again. This used to be my favourite pizza place when I was a kid — pizza worth driving 2 days in from Ontario for. Unfortunately, they closed down about 10 years ago after coming out with their own line of frozen pizzas for the grocery store (which perhaps cannibalized their restaurant business). While it was good, it wasn’t quite like I remembered. The story is that the son of the original guy is running the place, with all the original recipes… and over a decade does dull the memory a bit, but nonetheless I couldn’t help but feel that the pizza I had this week was a lot cheesier and a lot less fluffy than the ones I remember. I also recall the pizzas having more sauce, and a bit more spice to them — but then, lacking in sauce can just be a variation thing even with the original recipe. Talking with the staff, they say that sometimes the pizzas just don’t quite rise up as much, and that the fluffy thick crust with the really large bubbles was their signature back in the day. It might be upselling, but she said that next time I should order a large since the smalls and mediums don’t rise as much in the oven.

Little Christos aside, PEI always seems to be at the forefront of pizza technology. Garlic fingers, for one, are an awesome and incredible invention that for some reason is quite slow to spread to Ontario (though we do load up on them when we’re at Pizza Delight in Penetang!). Dipping sauce also got it’s start out there, AFAIK, and is now way more popular in Ontario than it ever was out there, helped no doubt by the switch from “donair” to “creamy garlic”. This year, I saw in the Greco pizza place fridges for their pizza slices. Rather than having the pizzas that you order by the slice sit under hot lamps or wither at room temperature for hours on end, they throw them right in the fridge to “preserve freshness” and then heat them up again when ordered (which you have to do anyway with the heat lamps or room temperature displays). If you think cold pizza is even better than fresh (which is a particular breed of insanity that only seems to affect females in my experience) then you can even get it cold, right out of the fridge. Will this trend catch on and move west to Ontario? I kind of doubt it, since it seems kind of sketchy and would require a lot of equipment and changing of displays — Greco may have done it partly because they co-branded with Capt. Submarine, and turned their former pizza-by-the-slice display into a sub topping/prep area; the “pizza fridge” looks to my eye like the same fridge they used to store their bottled pop in, just with some new decals. Nonetheless, I’ve got to hand it to them for their clever ideas, and if I see chilled pizza taking off in Ontario, I’ll know that it was out there first.

Another not-quite-pizza invention is the bread bar from Piazza Joe’s. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it, but it’s basically a very large open grill where you can toast your selection of a number of different types of bread and top with a selection of spreads. It seemed to me like a huge waste of energy: this giant grill pumping out heat non stop when a couple of toasters could do almost as good a job. It was, however, a neat and entertaining way to get your pre-dinner bread, and it was nice to have a selection of breads with everything from white sandwich bread to sourdough baguettes. The bread bar idea has now been implemented in the Cornwall Pizza Delight, so it’s spreading…

In other news, I’m back in Ontario. The trip went well, but the internet over the dial-up really sucked balls. I haven’t read the Liberal Green Shift plan yet, but hope to soon and to share my comments with both of my readers. Stay tuned! The Canadian Capitalist has posted his take on it and there’s a small discussion going on over there.