La Tene Festival

The Scottish Ceilidh band that I'm in played at the La Tene festival around Neuchatel. According to wikipedia La Tene is an iron age culture. The festival was very fascinating and there was tons of crafts, furs, iron and stone tools.

We got to the festival very early before all the crowds and first we watched the stone crafters. As well as carving stones there were demonstrations of flint knapping.

There were also kids who were carving the stones and they were really interested and serious about their work. This one kid was copying what he had seen the adults do and was very serious about it.

Next up was the basketweaving.

And onto the blacksmith. We watched the man work an iron tool, in a manner similar to how they continue to fit horse shoes today.

Also they had a demonstration of casting, metals poured into molds made of sand or clay.

The blacksmith was a confident man working in bare feet!!

Also at the festival they had a large battle, with all the swords and spears. There were people walking around the encampment all day with fantastic costumes.

And we sat eating our lunch watching the fighting.

And they also had the children get into it.

When I make a tent it's going to have these on the poles. Not really my regular lion.

All the structures at the festival were made of wood and hides and for the people who were dressed up even their shoes were period (or at least looked pretty different).

Later in the festival I also tried throwing a spear, with little success, it didn't go very far so there's no worry of violence from me.

Performing at this festival was fantastic. We had a very nice green room to leave out stuff before the show, it had couches and a fridge filled with water, pop and wine. The entire setup was very professional with a good soundcheck and they had the fancy rock concert lights that move around and change colours. There was even a fog machine to give an atmospheric effect! That was pretty distracting when trying to read the music though!

Our audience was very enthusiastic and very big. It was a fantastic crowd and they were all very excited and cheering and getting into the dancing (we had a caller).

When the show ended we were cheered back onto the stage for an encore. All in all, a tremendous amount of fun.

Then it was back to Lausanne, lucky me got a car ride back and practiced my French too.

I will hopefully have pictures from the festival later to post.

Gothenburg

On a long weekend I traveled to visit friends in Gothenburg Sweden. If you are familiar with my blog, you know I'm a fan of lions and Gothernburg had some lovely ones. This one was sitting in a less formal pose compared to his twin with his paws crossed and his hind legs on one side.

Compared to many other European cities (especially Switzerland), Gothenburg had great wide streets.

On our first full day we started by having tea and cake for brunch. Chocolate cake for brunch is a good way to start the day. Anyway, in the square was a new hotel and at the top of the building they had a swimming pool that hung out slightly over the square. Thus it was possible to swim suspended above the pavement.

One of the famous statues in the city is the statue of Poseidon in front of the city museum (I think). Anyway, apparently there was much discussion about the size of his ... package and the ladies at the time objected. So they gave him a very small one.

However, when you view the statue from the side, on the steps of the concert hall, you get a very different image.

One of the things we did was to visit the Universeum, a new large science museum. They had some pretty neat displays including a large shark tank with some of the largest sharks I've seen in captivity. They also had a ray tank where you could pet them as they swam by and a rope ladder that crossed the tank. I convinced Maria to go across with me, and learned later there was a sign in Swedish saying only for children....

Also in the Universeum were jellyfish. I always liked the jellyfish display at the Vancouver aquarium.

Erik insisted I take a picture of the Scarlet Ibis in the jungle section and I said they were boring and you could find them everywhere. However, Erik posed so here's his picture of the Ibis.

Running around in the jungle exhibit were several monkeys.  One of the monkeys jumped over the trail and sat for a while until it snatched a butterfly out of the air. Hmmm, that's why there were so few of them fluttering around.  Anyway, here is the monkey eating the butterfly, it was stringy and gooey and he ripped off the wings.

In the sport exhibit they had a horse riding simulator. Of course, it was mostly kids who checked it out but dammit I wanted to see how it worked. It was a very sedate ride, even at the canter and you could barely post at the trot. While it had sensors for leg yielding etc it didn't respond at all.

Apparently right now in Sweden is the crab season and we went to Erik's brother's house for a lovely crab dinner. Maria is saying hello to the food.

More crab tails on the plate.

Anyway, what you do is eat a lot and drink schnapps. You have to sing before you can drink though, and you drink a lot... They have a saying Sweden, that for the Swedes you sing three songs and take a drink. The Russians sing once and drink three drinks and the Finnish have two songs. One short song is just the word "now" and then they drink. Their longer song is "not now, .... but now" and then they drink (I hope I have the nationalities correct).

On Sunday we traveled to Gotehenburg's Southern Archipelago, specifically the island of Branno. There are a bunch of islands with ferries connecting them and they are popular places to live and vacation in the summer.

Here I am on the boat with the Swedish flag.

Wandering around the small villages/collections of houses was really nice. Here we are at the highest point on the island. Erik and Maria have been away from Vancouver too long based on what they now call mountains...

The weather was generally cool and overcast, but sometimes it was warm enough to remove both the coat AND the sweater.

In the middle of the island we stopped to have a tasty lunch. I ordered mussels with the fries but they only brought me the mussels appetizer. When I said I had ordered the meal they brought me not just the fries but another plate of mussels. And then on the bill they only charged for the appetizer because they said they had made the mistake. In contrast, while in Kensington market a few weeks ago, we ordered a plate of vegetarian dumplings. When we bit into them, we found out they were meat. We asked for a replacement and the waitress at first insisted since none of us were 'vegetarians' and we could eat meat, we should just eat th dumplings (gross) we were given. However, we asked to have replacements and she finally removed our plate. But then said that she can't bring 8 out, because of the meat dumplings, two already had bites in them. So.... she was going to put the rest back in the freezer? Anyway, instead we didn't pay and got up and left. However, word of warning, I'd be cautious of eating at a thai place in Kensington market in Toronto. Anydigression...

After the island we went to Scandinavia's largest amusement park! I like the fakeness of amusements, combined with the sugar and all the rides. I wanted cotten candy (which I got) and here I am posing with the froggy ride that Erik wanted me to go on. It's a gravity drop ride for very little children... ok, sure, I rode the horse at the museum, and crossed that rope bridge over the stingray pond, but I do draw the line at some point....

At the amusement park we rode the wooden rollercoaster which was pretty fantastic.

On my last day I wandered around the town before catching my flight home.

I visited two churches up on the hill, here's one in a traditional Swedish style, even though the church is relatively new.

Inside was exposed timber.

Horse riding in the Jura

On Saturday I went with three other girls horse riding in the Jura mountains. These are low mountains to the north east of Lausanne and they aren't near as high as the alps. It is also a more poor area of Switzerland although at one point it was a main part of a trade route.

We went to a small village and the native-breed of the horse in the Jura is the Franches-Montagnes horse. They are a small-ish draft horse and we were told the breed comes from years of different armies from many countries passing over the Jura (this area was the main route between Paris, over the Jura and then over the St-Benard pass into Italy). The armies would leave horses and that's how this type of horse came to be.

In the Jura then it is very popular to see the Franches-Montagnes horse pulling a cart (even through the small village).

We drove to the stable (I was puzzled to read it was in the village, but since the village is only one street, you can be both in the village and in the countryside at the same time), although when we drove to the village we took the wrong way around the lake... good thing I usually put in lots of extra time when we don't exactly know where we are going.

Anyway, the horse I was riding was Jumper. Hmmm, suggestive name...

He was very friendly though and very calm.

We all helped brush and tack up the horses.

And then we headed out for the ride. I don't have any pictures of the area because I was really just focusing on the horse. We cantered for a bit and some of the horses were *very* forward. They came charging up from behind Jumper and passed us but luckily my horse didn't take off either and he would listen to me when I asked him to slow down or stop.

First we walked through pastures (this is where we cantered). The Jura looks like large rollling hills, not very much like mountains where we were. At our turnaround point we walked past a horse sale. I didn't look too carefully because where you pay attention, so does your horse and I didn't want Jumper to get all excited watching the horses run around in the ring. Anyway, they were showing the foals and the foals were displayed running free beside their mom's who were led in a trot around the ring.

At this point we turned around and headed up through the higher pasture. There were lots of cows, and lots of horses and foals in the same large pastures. We walked through the trees and the cows and the horses all had bells. The foals joined us in our line for a bit and that was pretty cute.

We got back to the stable without any incident but we had to walk by an ambulance, there had been a riding accident. Our horses weren't too upset by this though and when we were back at the stable we saw an ambulance helicopter so it must have been pretty serious.

We cleaned the horses and our tack and I sat on Jumper bareback.

Then it was time for one more group photo.

We were lucky because just as we came back the rain started in earnest. We walked through the village as the farmers were also walking their cows through the village:

And then we drove back to Lausanne.

Aletsch Glacier

The weather this past weekend was decent. It was a beautiful Saturday while I worked in the lab ( protein not biotinylated but I digress), Sunday had a bit of rain but sunny enough that I took the train to see the Aletsch glacier. As this was fairly last minute, I went by myself. I'm still jetlagged from Canada so getting up at 6:30am was pretty rough...  However, I'd been wanting to see the Atlesch glacier for some time, it's the longest glacier in Europe and has two medial moraines! I like glaciers, and things that cover geologic time.

First I took the train and cablecar to Fiescheralp and went right to the top to see this UNESCO world heritage site from the UNESCO world heritage viewing platform. I wouldn't recommend it in the future. Actually, for this photo I left the 'exit the gondola and view' viewing platform and climbed the closest peak. Wet rocks = not exactly safe going but I digress. There you see it, me and two medial moraines!

This is the glacier that grew and grew and dug out Lake Geneve in previous glacial ages.

Anyway, the advantage of the rain meant fantastic rainbow over the glacier.

After climbing down from the peak, I continued to climb down almost all the way back to Fiescheralp so that I could go around the peak and walk close to the glacier. In the future I would avoid going all the way up to the platform since the glacier is more impressive from beside it.

On my way to the glacier however, there were these unusual fuzzy plants.

There were also sheep everywhere at this height. Lower down were cows and even at this height there were cow paddies. The alpine meadows here in Switzerland are less impressive than BC because of all the grazing.

Up close the glacier looked fantastic. Truly a giant river of ice.

While walking along the trail I saw this marker, I'm assuming it's used in research about the flow of the glacier or something.

More sheep, they were on the narrow trail and you had to walk around them as you were walking.

Here you can see the end of the glacier, and you can see how much it has receded over the years.

At the end of the glacier trek I climbed up on the ridge and through more alpine meadows. Here there were small pools and with the sun shining it was very pretty.

Visit to Canada

Yup, pretty late with this post. At the end of July I went home to Canada. Yes, it is now my only home, Switzerland not reaching that state of home just yet. I wonder how long it took for Vancouver to be home.

Anyway, my parents have a bee hive on the roof of their house. Here's my dad working with the bees (bare hands). I'm inside behind the screen on the window. An excellent viewpoint for watching bees.

My dad has purchased a new kayak and I took it out on the avon river.

It's still a pretty stinky river. I kayaked to the dam and back again.

Also on the long weekend was family camping at my uncles farm. It rained the first day so we strung up a huge canvas tent and everyone worked on puzzles and board games. In this picture, I spent the afternoon with my aunts and female cousins drinking and learning all kinds of things that alcohol reveals. Good family fun.

I also got to visit my little boy, poor little man has been sitting around with the battery out after my aunt jump started her Cadillac with it... :-0 Anyway, my dad put the battery in and I took it for a ride around at the farm just to see how it ran. An important note, the shots happened *after* the motorcycle ride. I'm not stupid to risk my precious little boy! Or my brain for that matter. As Emily points out, I've spent a lot of money on it at this point.

Another toy to ride on at the farm is the dirt bike. This thing has been running for ever and it's running a lot better after my dad took it to the shop.

Also at the farm was the fantastic weather. The wheat has come off really early this year. Here's my dad looking at the farm bees.

Can you spot the queen? I don't know if she's there, but it was the most likely place and I wasn't going to stick around that close to check for sure!

Also while visiting I went out with friends to an organic farm in the north of Perth county. We had tasty ice cream and wandered around a field maze. In the maze they had paint pots for you to colour your fingers as you discovered them in the maze. That would give you 5! combinations and they gave you a personality quality based on the order (as scientific as any cosmo quiz). Interestingly myself and another friend got the same pattern even though we weren't doing the giant maze together and she coloured her fingers opposite to me (starting with the thumb). What are the odds of that happening! ^_^