25 October 2004

So on Saturday, I put Fiver in one bag and my camera in another, and took a 94-minute train ride across the country, ending up in the town of Fribourg, population 30,000. It was sunny and unseasonably warm, about 70 degrees, and my friend Jon met Fiver and me at the train station. We then headed to Gruyeres and had a fondue before wandering around Gruyeres a bit. (Yes, I finally had fondue in Switzerland, and I had forgotten both how much I like fondue and how much cheese is involved). Gruyeres is the kind of town that makes you think of Heidi and the Sound of Music, all at once. It is a Technicolor green kind of place, complete with Disney-esque cobblestones, painted backdrop mountains, woolly little sheep, and placid cows. It was gorgeous. And then, strangely, there was a little museum in the midst of this quaint town, celebrating the creator of the creature from the Alien movies. The museum is in a pretty little building with a cobblestone courtyard, and has statues and greenery like every other building, but the statues just happen to be of aliens. We then headed back to Fribourg and wandered around there a little bit. It’s a very hilly town with narrow, crooked streets and old buildings perched precariously on the steep slopes that tumble down to the river. One particularly high bridge is the suicide point of choice, and apparently some of the recently departed end up in the backyards of the people living by the water, which I imagine must cause much consternation.

Yesterday was again warm and sunny, and since it was Sunday, everything was closed, so Fiver and I took it easy, reading and napping on the terrace, wandering around town taking pictures of some of the details of the city that lend Zurich its charm.

An interesting tidbit learned over the weekend: The official hours for practicing an instrument, according to the Swiss civil code, are between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., except on Sundays, when no practicing is permitted. If you practice outside of those allotted times, your neighbors can call the police and have you stopped. If only that had been the case in the U.S. when I was young, I would have just stalled and stalled until 7 p.m., after which my parents would have been breaking the law by making me practice piano!!

So, the average Swiss person eats about 11 kilograms (about 24 pounds) of chocolate per year. I, however, have never been one to settle for being just average, and seem certain to far outpace the average Swiss when it comes to amount of chocolate consumed this year. If you think about it, 24 pounds of chocolate, when spread out over an entire year, isn’t that much. That’s just 10 “fun-size” candy bars per week, not even the full-size or king-size bars!! After realizing that eating a full-size chocolate bar every day would bring me in at about 80 pounds of chocolate per year, I decided to make a slight effort to curb my habit. After all, I’m happy to be in the 99^th percentile for chocolate consumption, but there is no need to be in the 99.999^th percentile. So last week, I bought about 5-1/2 pounds of chocolate of various types (all on sale, I might add), but was careful to buy it in smaller packaging, in the hopes that I would eat the same number of bars per day, but less chocolate, since the bars are smaller. Nothing doing, I just eat more bars per day to maintain my breakneck chocolate consumption pace. I am leaving the rest of the country in the dust, and I haven’t even had a lifetime of Swiss-chocolate-consumption training; imagine how good I would be if I had grown up here and developed a disciplined eating program. Next areas of focus for out-Swissing the Swiss will be maintaining neutrality, laundering money, and yodelling.

In my defense, I would like to point out that I chose healthy chocolate. At least that’s what the packaging proclaims. This particular chocolate is aimed at parents buying snacks for their children, and the kind I chose is fortified with extra milk, so that if I eat a mere 250g per day, or about 12 or 13 fun-size bars, I can meet my calcium requirements! This would only require eating about 200 pounds of chocolate per year! (Now that I think about it, 200 pounds isn’t *that* much. It’s less than twice my weight, after all… I think that would be a good rule of thumb to go with ones we already have: never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear; never put marbles up your nose; never eat more than twice your weight in chocolate per year.) The same brand makes chocolate that has 5 different kinds of grain in it. Apparently, instead of having cereal and milk in the morning, I could have chocolate and chocolate.