Hello, my dears. I apologize for the radio silence, but it's been rather quiet around here since the New Year. Naturally, you wouldn't know it in reading the sheer quantity ahead of you right now--wordiness abounds!--but just so you know: I've recently realized that I've spent the first quarter of the year at home. THIS WILL NOT STAND, PEOPLE, although as luck would have it, the travel season is coming up quickly. THANK GOODNESS. Cabin fever is not my favorite.
At any rate. We delve now into the relatively recent past, for a quick run-down of the most exciting events in January and February!*
January: nothing but a bunch of fondue (wooo!), and a visit to Maison Manesse**, which was a really delicious and enjoyable meal, but exorbitantly expensive even by Zürich standards. (A great touch, though: at the end of the night, we ordered a round of gin-and-tonics for the table, and they brought us each our own flavor of house-infused gin. The mandarine [mandar-gin? gindarine?] was a standout.) Also in January, I got super snowed-on during a lovely evening of vegetarian food and cocktails with our dear friend Lori.
The snow that started around of Christmas (and continued into January) did not thaw from the Uetliberg until last month. It was insane.
February: ok, so, in retrospect, it was quite action-packed. We ate waaaaay more fondue (it seems to get tastier every winter!) and had a wonderful evening at Herzbaracke...which, in case you don't remember, is the little turquoise-floating-cabaret-and-dining boat that parks at Bellevue for 4 months in the winter. We opted for dinner again--their food is shockingly good, and about as local as it can be in the winter months--and the music, just like last time, was absolutely tremendous. The evening's entertainment was Swing de Paris--a four-piece, all Swiss band--that played quite a bit of Django Reinhardt, as well as swingy-jazzy versions of 'Sing, Sing, Sing' and 'Try A Little Tenderness,' the latter of which was genuinely impressive, as the lead singer (and drummer, and song-writer) had quite a voice. At times, he sounded a bit like Sinatra, Jamie Cullum, Harry Connick Jr., Tony Bennett, and even Otis Redding and Ray Charles. It was another tasty and truly enjoyable experience from Herzbaracke, which I think is maybe my favorite way to spend a wintery evening in Zürich.
It's such a charming little boat.
In the middle of the month, we went to check out Adam Lambert and Queen. Yes, I know Freddie Mercury departed this world in 1991, thank you, but Mr. Lambert has got some serious pipes on him, and so I figured that if anyone could front Queen sufficiently flamboyantly and do the vocals justice, it would be him. On the up side, Lambert was great, the two touring original members of Queen still seriously rock out, and I got to hear every song I wanted...but for this particular concert, the negatives outweighed the positives. For one, it was a stadium show where we didn't get to select our own seats, and so ended up stuck in more-or-less the worst seats in the house; Messrs. May and Taylor did ridiculous extended solos (the drums I can handle, the weird 10-minute guitar jam, not so much); and they threw to video way too often. People, if you're going to perform 'Bohemian Rhapsody' live, you cannot start the song and then cut to an enormous screen showing the music video as the conclusion to your concert. (This was a tactic they employed a couple of other times in the night so that Freddie Mercury could 'sing' with the band.) Seriously?? I was genuinely curious to see if, and how, they would perform that song live, but ugh. We left slightly early, but not early to miss that particular travesty.
This is what inconceivably overpriced stadium seating looks like. That giant black thing across the top of the picture is the catwalk across the ceiling, right next to the electronic scoreboard they use for hockey games here.
At least things got better after that: next came Fasnacht, which is the Swiss version of Carnival. It's a smallish event in Zürich, to be sure, but genuinely huge in Basel, which is where we went to catch the main parade, as well as to revisit the Chienbäse in Liestal the night before. Sooooo much festivity...
Basel has its own official Fasnacht beer brewed just for this event.
A Native American and a Viking, together at last: our first costume sightings in Liestal.
No idea what these puffy people were supposed to be, but I love how naturally they're just hanging out dressed like this.
A Gugge band performing the Offspring's 'I Want You Bad.'
Another band performing between the daytime parade and the fire parade. Those masks were major.
The fire parade begins with a few pipe-and-drum corps and then the Laternen, which are these big lantern-y (...duh...) constructions decorated with various political and satirical statements.
And then the main draw: marchers carrying bundles of lit firewood, as well as the huge fire carts.
Yeah, your view may be better from the less-crowded side of the street, but when the cart stops nearby, you get roasted. Heh.
Post parade, the Gugge bands take to the streets and set up little performances in restaurants and squares. These people work hard this time of year. Here, a band of sea monsters...
...led by this incredible figure. Sorry 'bout the terrible quality of the photo, but this guy was too good to pass up.
Stopped in to check out one of the indoor performances, which was deafening, but fun. This trombone player took a shine to our little group and invited us to sing along with 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight.'
Coincidentally enough, they were playing 'Fat Bottomed Girls' when we walked in.
A band of pirates out on the street...
...marching off to the beat of their own drums, if you will.
After the fire parade, Mike and I headed to Basel, where we had a hotel room for the night. A quick bit of background: in Basel, the celebration of Fasnacht in some form or other dates to 1376. In its current form, it's about a hundred years old, and is commonly called the "drey scheenste Dääg," which, in Baseldeutsch (...even crazier than Zürideutsch!), means "the three most beautiful days." This city does, in fact, party and march and parade for three whole days. Fasnacht officially begins at 4:00 AM on the Monday morning after Ash Wednesday, with a cannon shot and the extinguishing of all the lights in the city, followed by a parade of pipe-and-drum bands; then come major brass-band-and-float parades on Monday and Wednesday, and a children's parade on Tuesday; singers and satirical poets performing in various restaurants in the evenings; a central exhibit of all the Laternen; and general revelry everywhere, with pipe-and-drum corps marching all the while. Which all sounded rather charming, until we figured out that our hotel was right on the parade route, and that those crazy people who begin at 4:00 in the morning do not stop parading until the big parade begins at 1:30 in the afternoon. So much for getting any sleep.
View from our hotel window in the morning.
We dozed as long as we could, then headed out through the festively-decorated Old Town...
...to find some breakfast, which ended up being a slice each of the cheese and onion tarts that are a special food associated with Basel's Fasnacht celebration.
Somehow we ended up in Basel's oldest bakery, where the employees were truly friendly and gave us (in German) a brief education on the baked goods they make for Fasnacht. Really nice people, really good tarts.
We then had an hour or so to kill until the parade, and as it was freezing and raining, we ducked into the cathedral for a little shelter and Gothic architecture.
Grumpy guy on the misericords.
Happiest cathedral statues ever. (These guys are copies, but the originals are from the late Middle Ages.)
View of the Kleinbasel district of old town, from across the Rhine.
As we headed back towards our hotel--the better to see the parade from, my dear!--all sorts of parade-y things were happening around us. Because Fasnacht is a major holiday in Basel, lots of places were closed--but it seemed like everyone who wasn't working in the few open restaurants was out on the street in costume, marching in some sort of band or pulling a float or involved in the parade in some way. Masks, costumes, and marchers everywhere!
Seemingly endless pipes and drums marching through old town.
These guys were quite good, and just kept on going.
A marcher guarding his stash of giant bags full of confetti.
It was at this point that we discovered that the camera battery I had plugged into the wall the night before had not charged...and that none of our convenient spare batteries had much, if any charge at all. I cannot even tell you how disappointing it was, during the parade itself, to have to keep running into our hotel to change out the camera battery, one of which was charging in their lobby at all times, and to be unable to take any video of the parade, which was incredible. These photos and my descriptions will have to suffice until next year, when we CHARGE ALL THE STUPID BATTERIES BEFORE WE EVEN LEAVE HOME. Ahem. (And also...near the end, because it was so wet outside and I was tired of trying to manipulate both the camera and umbrella, I gave up and switched to using my phone for photos. So those are mingled throughout: APOLOGIES.)
Anyway, the big parade (cortège, as they call it in Basel). We learned quickly that the thing actually proceeds along both sides of the street in different directions (similar to normal traffic), and so at times it was entirely chaotic. Made it harder to photograph, but it was insane and I loved it all.
Most of the marching bands were led by someone in an oversized costume:
There were a handful of these old-timey horse-drawn carriages scattered throughout, and the people riding in them had the most gorgeous masks. (I'm just sorry I couldn't get more photos of these--these were few and far between, and across the street from us, but so very pretty...!)
Lots of kids' pipe-and-drum groups in the parade, too: it seemed like the entire city was marching, regardless of age. (Srsly...so many marchers...)
I felt kinda bad for everyone, though, since the weather was so terrible--you can see how many of them are wearing plastic ponchos over what one can only assume are really great costumes.
What we saw most frequently were these crazy big-nosed masks. And the characters in the floats were hurling things into the crowds: flowers, candy, oranges, miniature bottles of various alcohols, and--my absolute favorite--soup fixin's. We came home with a few oranges, a handful of candy, a mini of Appenzeller Alpenbitter, a couple of leeks, a potato, an onion, a zucchini, and a packet of vegetable bouillon. (We had some fine veggie-beef stew for dinner the next night.)
More than anything, however, the guys in the floats were absolutely dousing the crowd with confetti. Some would just throw it in spectators' faces with their hands or with buckets; others went more large-scale, with confetti guns like t-shirt cannons, and this guy below had his confetti hooked up to a shop-vac on reverse. Others were more circumspect, and would distract you by conversing with you, or acting like they were getting your attention so they could throw something to you, while their cohorts got you with a load of confetti from the side. Post-parade, the streets are so littered with the stuff that it looks like it's snowed blue and pink and yellow. We came home with it in our clothes,, bags, etc., and I even found some in my underwear. (Why? How? I have no idea.) To date, there's still some in our refrigerator. (It got stuck in the leek, and I'm enjoying having it look like someone threw a wee Fasnacht parade in the fridge.)
Shooting confetti into the crowd.
Manning the confetti cannon.
They got Mike. (Bonus points for the confetti-throwers: it rained off and on throughout the day, so the stuff stuck to everything.)
As we were leaving, this was the ground where we had been standing.
We watched there for an hour and a half, then headed indoors to warm up with some fantastic Rösti (topped with cheese, ham, and a fried egg!!!) and a bowl of the "flour soup" particular to Fasnacht. (Mehlsuppe, which is awesome and is kinda like eating a bowl of beef gravy with a smattering of cheese bits throughout.) Even from indoors, I kept seeing new groups march by, which, considering the fact that we saw zero repeats the entire time, I found genuinely impressive. It even seemed that, perhaps due to the nasty weather, the dearth of spectators meant that there were actually more marchers in the parade than people watching! (Or at least, more than those of us dumb enough to be watching outdoors.) I think it also meant that those of us pressed up against the sides of the route with cameras and mouths agape and obvious enthusiasm gathered far more attention--and thus, more confetti and soup ingredients--than we would have on nice day, with a real crowd. Then again, this being our first Basler Fasnacht, who even knows. Ah well...the weather was rough on the camera and my poor, freezing feet, but what a grand event in spite of it! And next time, folks, I will have fresh camera batteries. Just imagine the quantity of photos then. Ooh, and even some video.
And now: March! Yeah, I know this post is turning out to be another long one, but bear with me: only one thing happened in March, and it was Sonnwendfeier. In case you haven't heard, it's an hour-long fireworks show that occurs only every three years. I have no idea how this got on my radar, but since I am a bit of a fireworks fanatic, and we missed it the first time it happened after we moved here, I was not going to miss it again. Kids, it was so worth the effort and the wait!
The show itself is fairly unique, in that it is created by two local, quasi-competitive clubs in and around the city of Oensingen, about an hour west of Zürich by train. It occurs at two ends of a long ridge line above the town--one end for each group--and as long as one is standing on the road that runs parallel to the ridge, there absolutely is no bad view of the show.*** It's my kinda fireworks, people. I won't bombard you with too many photos and videos, 'cause that's kinda painful and pointless if you weren't there, but I need to throw in a few for my own sake. Please enjoy.
Heh...this one looks like a face.
Just off-center here, under the base of the fire trails, you can see a tiny red 'VCO.' Each club had its name in neon on its respective end of the ridge, so VCO is the abbreviation for the Vogelherdclub, whose fireworks shot from the eastern end of the ridge.
Some nifty shapes from VCO.
A giant sequence from RCO (Ravellenclub), on the western end of the ridge. And this wasn't even the grand finale to the show. As they went back and forth between displays from each club, the fireworks got progressively larger and more impressive...and there was an hour of this, people!!
Ooh, and one more thing in March: Mike's rugby games started back up. During the first match, Rugby Union Zürich absolutely massacred the poor team from Schaffhausen...and to add injury to insult, Mike punched a guy. OK, OK, NOT REALLY, but tell me what you see when you look at this photo:
See?!?
With a little bit of context, though, you can kinda see that he was just using his forearm to protect the ball:
...more or less. I believe him.
Either way, look at him go. DEAD BODIES, MIKE! DEAD BODIES! WOOOO! And all that.
Well. I was going to include the standard "What we're watching/eating/reading" filler here, seeing as how it usually fits well at the end of "Not much to see here, folks!"-style posts, but since this one's gone on long enough, I'll sign off.
Next up: lots of really good food, and then...I can't tell you anything more. You'll find out why later.
*Sad confession: I still have a few things left to say about Egypt. These are absolute non sequiturs, but I somehow forgot to record them when they were pertinent, and so now I want to make sure they are not lost to history. Indulge me, if you will. (Hey, at least I managed to contain this to the footnotes...)
- Finding weird chips the world over, I got to sample Lay's kebab-flavored chips in the Luxor airport. They were quite smoky and beefy up front, with a nice touch of bell pepper flavor, but the aftertaste, sadly, reminded me of the artificiality I taste in things involving Liquid Smoke. (We also tried out a can of sour apple Fanta, which tasted exactly like a Jolly Rancher. Undrinkably sweet, but as is obvious, I am compelled to try out these sorts of things.)
- Did I tell you that Egyptians love their air conditioning? 'Cause they do. Boy, do they. Everywhere we went that was fully enclosed had the AC on full blast, and it was generally freezing indoors. Good thing I packed layers.
- I learned a grand total of three Arabic words while we were there: midan (square/plaza), yalla (let's go, hurry up), and shukran (thank you). Obviously, only the last was actually useful.
- Even if I've mentioned this before (and in all honesty, I can't remember), it bears repeating: the sky over the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, out in that intense desert, were absolutely and hands-down the bluest I've ever seen. A remarkably deep, almost jewel blue, the likes of which I haven't even seen in my own home state, which was the previous "Bluest Skies" titleholder. It was astonishing, especially in contrast to the earth and the huge banks of red, pink, white, and orange bougainvillea lining the roads near the Nile. So much color.
And with that, I feel like I've finally and officially brought Egypt to a close! Which is quite pathetic, considering that we returned from that trip over four months ago. Worst...blogger...ever.
**THEIR INTRO PAGE IS HILARIOUS. Totally reminds me of Jimmy Fallon: "You like fine cookin'? I got a Swanson's dinner in the freezer with yo' name on it."
***Naturally, this being Europe, there's a 13th-century castle in the middle of the ridge, but for our purposes here, it's of no consequence. "Pay no attention to the castle there, folks. Just watch the show." Who lives like this??
***Naturally, this being Europe, there's a 13th-century castle in the middle of the ridge, but for our purposes here, it's of no consequence. "Pay no attention to the castle there, folks. Just watch the show." Who lives like this??
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