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