Une Petite Suisse

Switzerland.

The country that (horror of horrors!) does not have a common national language; where everything costs the earth; where trains and all public transport runs incredibly on time (First Great Western and Oxford Bus Company are you listening?); where people getting in don't wait for alighting or exiting passengers on buses, lifts, and the like; where people smoke as if their lives depended on it; where people are so fit and outdoorsy, despite all the smoking, it makes me want to cry; where areas of outstanding natural beauty are always just around the corner; where you could enter two countries through one airport or one railway station; where bathrooms don't have windows and all windows have secondary shutters; where clean is a state of being; where renting is not considered second best to owning your home; where you have proper summers and proper winters; where beer is a pale bubbly lager or, as Martin* eloquently put it, Eurofizz; where banking is a religion and is über efficient; where rules are everything.
(*Martin's a very respected phonetician and speech therapist and a good friend of ours.)

Dot and I were in Lausanne, Switzerland, a couple of weeks ago. Half of our week there was spent with Dot working (yeah, right) and me being the ultimate conference accessory wife, and the rest of our time was spent meeting friends, old colleagues and attending a friend's Spanish-Swiss wedding.

While Dot constantly laments the absence of a place he can call home, Lausanne is home to him, and he has lots of wonderful ties to the place and the people. I too have met almost all these friends and visited all the haunts quite a few times, and so this became a wonderful nostalgia trip.

Here are some pictures:

Dot playing around with the macro lens.





Want more? Go here. Dot's photoblog is no longer fed from his mobile. It's now a proper photoblog which he promises to update. So there.

Drinking Monaco, which is 2/3rds Eurofizz, 1/3rd lemonade, topped with a splash of grenadine syrup.
This is the remarkable Sauvabelin Tower built entirely with recycled materials and offers panoramic views of Lausanne and beyond.

See what I mean when I say outstanding natural beauty?





















We spent an afternoon at Thermalp Ovronnaz. A thermal bath in summer sounds ridiculous, I know, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to lie in an open-air jacuzzi with the stunning mountain landscape as a backdrop, could I? That said, a thermal bath is best done in the winter. Picture it - snow-capped mountains, minus-2-degree-Celsius weather, 36-degree-Celsius pools, saunas, Turkish baths, fondue in the restaurant - do you see what I see?

I know you do, except when you're wearing sunglasses and your head is taking a pounding from a hot water spout.

And then there was the wedding. What a wonderful end to a fantastic trip!