Bern and Rapperswil

This weekend we went to Bern to pick up our rental car, and stopped at Rapperswil on our way home on Sunday.

We spent a lot of time in museums, learning about medieval Swiss history (Swisstory?) and walking around the city of Bern, admiring the architecture.

There is a 700+ year old clock in Bern called the Zytglogge which we walked by, but never seemed to be there at the right time to see the show or take the tour.

The weather was supposed to be nice, but as usual, it rained every day – so we didn’t get to go on any hikes. But we are coming back to Bern in a month or so to get our actual car, and we will try to see more while we are there.

On our way home we stopped in a town called Rapperswil, and learned more about Swisstory there.

My favorite room was an entertaining room from the 1400s, which had every square inch of the walls and the ceilings painted to look like wallpaper.

Another thing we learned in Rapperswil is that the word “calzone” doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to the Swiss. To Americans it means like, a pizza pocket, for one. To the Swiss, it means an entire pizza folded in half and stuffed.

In non-Swiss-specific news, I had a little bit of a rough week.

On Monday, I tried to deep-clean the bathroom. That’s when I discovered that the wall-mounted ceramic toilet bowl holders are actually removable, and that if you remove them by accident they will crash to the floor and break all over the floor, spreading shards of poop-water-soaking-tile across the room. That was a true joy to clean up.

Also on Monday, I took Coach for a long walk, and she decided that would be the perfect time to roll around in the carcass of a dead animal. The rotting flesh got stuck in her hair, so I had the pleasure of giving her an impromptu haircut and a shower (which she HATES).

On Tuesday, I had the brilliant idea to make tomato soup, because I was really craving a hearty tomato soup. I didn’t have a food processor, but I thought I could use a hand mixer. I was incorrect. Using a hand mixer just splattered boiling tomato chunks all over the kitchen.

Today, as of 4:30pm, nothing has gone terribly wrong. I finished the bathroom deep-clean, am on my third load of laundry for the day with only one more, and I am keeping myself happy by remembering that when we move back to the US I can buy the biggest, fanciest, most efficient washer-dryer combo at Best Buy and only do laundry twice a week.

I’ll close out with a picture of Coach eating grass in front of some corn today.