We went to a Ball!

Hello,

Martin and I did the most fun thing last weekend, we went to a ball! Martin's university (ETH) hosts a giant ball for reasons unknown every year that is apparently the largest ball in Europe. This year there were 10,000 guests! I was thrilled when I found out he'd gotten us tickets, excited for about three months, and the ball itself more than lived up to my expectations. The main building at ETH is staggeringly enormous and completely mazelike, which makes it perfect for an event like this. The theme was "Scheherezade," which meant everything was all decked out in Aladdin and Arabian Nights decorations put up by students and official event organizers. The people who attend the ball are a mix of students and actual adults, even people unrelated to the University, so it was a really big party.

 

 Main ballroom!

I couldn't possibly afford a dress at Zürich prices, but my big sister Sarah got married this summer and we had awesome bridesmaid dresses. My mom sent mine with a package I was getting anyway, and I became one of the only people ever to be really excited about re-wearing my bridesmaid dress!

 It's a little dark, but look how fabulous that dress is! Thanks, Sarah :)

We took the "crash course" dance class on Monday night to brush up our ballroom dancing skills, which was great because we spent the whole night going from one area to another and dancing to as many of the 20-odd live bands as we could. While bands were switching on the same stage they would have a dance show for a few minutes, so we could watch people demonstrate some super cool Charleston, swing, waltz, and salsa skills. Most of the dancing we did was swing (they had lots of big bands), salsa (two of the stages on the main floor were Latin music), and waltz in the main ballroom.

 Charleston show between sets!

When we weren't dancing, we stopped at some of the many, many bars and catering tables. Each one had its own theme, so the bar we got drinks from was Baruba. While we were swing dancing we were near the table selling waffles and ice cream, which got really appealing after a bunch of dances!

 

 This room is normally a gym! Unfortunately the big band (white blob) is between sets so you can't see the millions of dancers, but it was usually a packed dance floor!

 

We tried to explore the whole building, and we saw a lot of it. The main swing floor was down in what's normally the student gym, but was transformed into a fabulous dancehall. There was even a monkey riding a flying carpet back and forth up by the ceiling! Engineering schools are the best. We heard there was a cinema playing the Aladdin movie and its sequel (apparently it has a sequel), but we never managed to find that. The main ballroom was decorated with red and white stripes to look like that one really famous mosque (clearly I need to do my googling, but go back and look at the first picture. All of that is normally grey stone!), and the side areas of the main floor (with the Salsa bands) had a desert nights theme, complete with enormous (think half of a football field) hand-painted murals. There were murals on every plain wall, most of them massive, of Aladdin characters, constellations, scenes from Arabian nights, and famous buildings from the area. It was so cool! I'm trying to figure out how I can get on that committee next year. Even the hallways to the basement coatrooms were decorated or at least lit with colored lights.

Right before going home! Very happy campers. And no, my hair isn't shorter, I just got the layers weird.

We powerwalked home (it was below freezing and formal clothes aren't exactly warm, even with coats!) at about 3:30, found some friends for late-night snacking and recapping in the kitchen, and finally made it to bed around 4 (or 4:30, who knows?). All that plus a long run that morning, I wasn't fully recovered until Tuesday!

Katie

Thanksgiving!

Hello,

We had a fabulous Thanksgiving party at our house with about 50 people on the Saturday after the real date. There were three Americans co-hosting, and we had everyone bring a dish (from our approved list of thanksgiving recipes) while we provided turkey and pie. It was tons of fun and everything came out well, I'm very impressed with the abilities of our very multinational guest list to make the traditional American stuff we asked for, especially since most of the ingredients are very hard to track down here! There were some food-finding adventures.

Finishing the gravy and looking a tad demonic. But look! Turkeys!

 

The turkeys themselves were the first challenge: food in Switzerland is very expensive and we didn't really want to spend 250 Swiss Francs (which are about the same value as US Dollars) on just the turkey. The solution was for Martin and me to go to Austria (a town near Liechtenstein where his family normally shops) and pick up pre-ordered turkeys there, which ended up being about 100 Euro for one 7kg and one 12kg turkey. Conversions-wise, I think that's about USD150 for a total of 35lbs of turkey. Very rough calculations there, don't go checking my work. So we saved a lot! But the turkey wasn't the only challenge.

Just one corner of our large table.

Martin cleaning the turkeys after.

Other important thanksgiving ingredients we did without were canned pumpkin (I am becoming a pro at working with the real thing), evaporated milk (we used a cream and milk mixture that actually ended up being delicious, obviously), brown sugar, pecans, and allspice. Swiss people will defend their brown sugar to the death (just try to tell them they don't have it), but it's really just that Sugar in the Raw stuff. Which is great for coffee I guess, but which is really really not brown sugar. The normal fix is to spin molasses into white sugar, but you can't get molasses here either! Eventually I used a molasses-type syrup that we found in Austria with white sugar, and it was close enough. Another expat said they might have some at the Polynesian market on the other side of town, so if I need it again (thankfully I don't really need it in daily life), I might go adventuring. It's possible to get pecans here, but only in a bag of about a half cup. Since that's about six Francs by itself, we just went with walnuts. As for allspice, I am really lucky because Martin's mom has a fully stocked spice cabinet from around the world, so I'll be able to snag a teaspoon or two to make my family's all-important Christmas cookies later this month. Still, this Thanksgiving took a lot of creativity!

Some of the pies!

Everyone came through really well, and we had some very delicious food of which I will try valiantly to get more pictures. Until then, I hope everyone had as much fun as we did.

Katie

Italy Part 3: Bologna

Hello!

After our 24-hour whirlwind through Venice, we drove down into Tuscany (which is a province-type-thing) through Bologna to Florence. I was really really excited about Bologna, because I had read on every website and in every guidebook I had consulted (lots. I like researching) about this fabulous market they have every day there at which you can buy food, textiles, leather goods, and all kinds of things. It’s also apparently the kind of place where, when you buy your ingredients from the local butcher or whomever, they’ll give you a recipe they got from the other butcher’s wife for what to do with it. I was excited! We had a plan, we were right on time, and I even reviewed the guidebooks we’d brought on the car ride to make sure I was ready.

  

On the way to the market! Checking out some really big buildings.

 

We got to Bologna, found parking (after almost driving into the city center again. Watch out for those, they’re sneaky) and set off for the main square for my market! We walked fast through the old parts of the city, seeing but not lingering on the city as we passed. Bologna is very different from Verona and Venice in that it is just as old as those cities (if not older, it was first settled in 1000BCE), but its streets are not narrow nor are the buildings small. Since it was a trade capital, the streets are wide enough for horse/wagon traffic and pedestrians are protected in arcaded walkways that remind me of the American West. If it was done in stone and for real. Bologna has lots of impressive statistics (the oldest University town in Europe), but I was much more interested in that market.

  

Looking at a map near the landmark towers (one had to be cut short because it was leaning too much).

We got to the main plaza, which is impressive in its size and in the giant buildings around it in addition to their general old- and cool-ness, but there was no market. Well it was a big plaza and maybe the market was hiding? We looked all over but there was no market. We asked a restaurant owner, and he directed us to the supermarket. We asked a student and she directed us to an empty plaza. Finally, we asked a hotel concierge and she circled a spot on the map and gave us directions to a busy street. Everyone we asked knew immediately what we were talking about, then directed us nowhere! I was frustrated. And maybe a little cranky about the whole thing.

 

 

Looking at a map near a cool building, See how it has the arcaded walkways around it? Very Bolognese.

Note also the lack of market.  

After marching from one “market” to another for more than an hour, we decided to give it up and enjoy another thing Bologna is known for: its pasta. Here is the Italian food most Americans consider to be the real thing. Pasta Bolognese (red meat sauce) comes from here, as do all tortelli (filled pasta like tortellini, tortelloni, etc.), lasagna, and the yellow type of pasta that can be flattened out to make filled pastas (as opposed to noodles or little pasta shapes. Shapes like Spiderman mac and cheese. Which is the best, by the way, because the little spider webs and spider masks hold the most sauce. This is important to know). So if you like your pasta with the excitement built in, you have the Bolognese to thank. We found an outdoor restaurant, ordered four different types of Bolognese specialties, and enjoyed Bologna living up to its reputation in that manner, at least.

  

Tuscany! Enough of Bologna, let's go to Florence!

 

Next: Florence! Until then, help me decide if I should boycott Bologna forever for being mean or if I should go on a personal crusade to find that dang market. It has to be one of those; there can be no middle ground. Bear in mind that they also have fabulous gelato.

Love Katie

The Pros and Cons of Running in Venice

Hello!

After we had explored Venice all day, I got up to go running. Venice is very much a maze, but I figured that walking all over the place the day before had gotten me a pretty good sense of where things were. Added to that, Venice is very compact, so there's really nowhere I could go that I wouldn't be able to make it back within fifteen or twenty minutes. I planned to run for 30, maybe 45 minutes since we needed to get moving to get to Bologna then Florence.

I did great for the first little while, running along the Canal Grande (well, as close to "along" as you can get. There aren't sidewalks on the canals, so you have to sort of parallel it even though parallel is not a thing here) until I reached the sea, then running along the outer edge of the city. My plan was to run around to St. Mark's square, then use that as a landmark to get home. I could see the square up ahead on the shoreline, everything was great!

I was on the wrong island.

While there are 118 tiny islands making up the city of Venice, there are also bigger divisions separated by major canals. The Canal Grande, which separated me from my objective, is unusual in that there are only three bridge crossings of that canal in the whole city. They actually have special little gondolas that just go across and back at certain locations to make up for this issue. However, those cost money and I didn't bring any.

I knew the Academica bridge was somewhere near me, so I backtracked and hit some dead ends and crossed some bridges until I found the bridge, then did the same until I actually made it to St. Mark's square. From there, I made it home with only the occasional dead end or turnaround, about an hour from when I had departed.

Even though I was late, though, I got to see all kinds of things we had missed or seen from afar the day before. I got to see the Santa Maria della Salute church that they built at the end of the plague as thanks for not killing all of them. It's a pretty amazing church--it's said they drove a million pylons into the marsh to support its giant dome. I got to see Peggy Guggenheim's fabulous and modern art-filled pallazo. It's a museum now but when she was living there she hosted the likes of Jackson Pollock, whose work she's almost responsible for publicizing.

 Obviously not my picture, but hey, pretty! Sta. Maria della Salute.

Added to the things I found while I was lost, I got to see the workings of a city built in water. I saw garbage boats, DHL deliver boats, mail boats, and more public transportation boats carrying the city's workers to their day. I saw the shops opening, people carrying home their groceries (no wheeled carts here--Venice is full of stairs) and kids going to school. As I was leaving our hotel I saw the fish market setting up, receiving the day's catch, and putting everything on display.

 

Garbage boat! I only show you the coolest things.

As frustrating as getting lost may have been (I really like to think I'm omniscient), I think it's much better than what all the other runners were doing: running laps along the 1-mile sea wall where you see nothing of the city itself but are assured of getting back on time.

Love Katie