Chocolate heaven

It's only a 30 minute walk to heaven. 

Well a steep, uphill 30 minutes but who said the road to heaven is easy?

 
The heaven in question is the village next door. Bougy Villars has a population of 450, a narrow little center street not quite the 'Grand Rue' it is called. It is a hamlet that is barely on the map. It does  however have a stunning view of Lake Geneva. And it has this ...........

The shop at Christmas time

Depending on who you ask or what you read, the Tristan chocolate shop has been variously dubbed the best artisan chocolate in the region, in all of Switzerland and even in the whole world. Whatever superlative you want to use, there is no question that the Truffles, Plaques and endless other variations (chocolate with pepper for e.g. or green tea chocolate), all home made by Tristan and his family, often with help from other villagers are completely exquisite and exotic. And expensive. Though that hardly stops the locals or the expats from driving long distances to wait patiently in queue outside his tiny shop.


chocolates in Tristan's shop

Whether its special chocolate like Tristan or the store brought mass produced varieties, the Swiss do eat a lot of chocolate. As in a kilo a month or 11.9 kilos per person per year. That's a 120 bars of chocolate each year. That makes them the world's largest chocolate consumers (Yes, someone collects such statistics).

Well all the chocolate does not seem to make the Swiss fat but apparently it makes them a lot smarter. In a recent rather unusual article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the author, Franz Messerli, saw a close correlation between a country's per capita chocolate consumption and the number of Nobel prizes per 10 million people. (I cant link to the article as its not open access but if you are interested you can find it in NEJM 367; 16; Oct 18 2012 issue).

The Swiss have the most Nobel prizes relative to population size and also eat the most chocolate. Simple as that. There is even a biochemical explanation it would seem to explain the possible link: the flavinoids in chocolate (in dark chocolate in particular) improve the mental faculties. The author goes on to estimate that for every 400 gram increase in the per capita chocolate consumption in a country, there will likely be one more Nobel laureate in that country!

Hmm, that's something I can resolve to do for my country this new year....drive up its chocolate eating statistics (though I wonder ........would my chocolate eating boost India's Nobel Prize chances or Switzerland's?) . I do hope the Nobel committee is keeping its eye on this blog site ........

Tristan, here I come. Can heaven get better than this?
 

Turning Swiss in Scotland

Edinburgh castle from the street where i turned Swiss

I was in Edinburgh last weekend, finding my way from the bus to my hotel. Being somewhat map challenged and also somewhat unable to always tell the difference between my right and left, I found that I could not figure out how to walk 50 m to the right, take the first left after the first light on my right and 200 meters more around the bend  ....oh dear, time to stop and ask for directions.

So here I am on a street called Earl Gray, at the foot of Edinburgh castle and Scottish history, outside a pub called The Red Blazer or some such, stopping a burly Scotsman with a pipe .....and i go "Excusez moi, où est la ootel pooaa (The Point Hotel)". Me who, still needs a calculator to convert quatre vingt dix huit into a number, me who still goes to the hair stylist and blithely asks her to please couper mon cheval (horse) instead of my cheveux, me who still begins every conversation in Switzerland with a "Parlez vous Anglais?" ..................

The Scottish gentleman looks at me perplexed. A very identifiably Indian woman, in the heart of Mother England (well ok Scotalnd is not quite England but you get what i mean), attempting to sound French.

"Whats that you said Lassie" goes the poor fellow ...........and i reply with 'pooa, ootel ,poooa ....trying variations in pronunciation trying to sound more French ..........while he says. "lady, you speak English?"

Voila! Reality dawns........I giggle, he looks even more bewildered. I manage to mumble ' Ah, yes, I should speak English, shouldn't I? I mean the Point Hotel, you know, Bread Street' .........I continue to giggle, he continues to look at me with a look of disbelief but points me in the direction I need to go. 

I find my way to the said hotel and as i sit in my room and look out at Edinburgh castle, I realise that Suisse Romandie has really seeped into me. The next time someone in Geneva asks me 'Parlez vous Francais?', I shall proudly say 'Mais, oui. but only in Scotland!' 

Camping ...Swiss style

A tent in the wilderness, you against the elements….a river to bathe in, a wood fire to cook rice and boil eggs after a long day out walking …………basic, back to nature.

Armed with tent and these romantic clichés of camping trips back home in India, we set out on our first camping adventure here in Switzerland. But there is no raw wilderness and unexplored expanses in the middle of nowhere in this country. And even if there were, you would not be allowed to camp in them. Well, though I know a few people who did  end up camping in the woods; trying anything that could conceivably be illegal, takes a lot of expat courage in Switzerland so we felt morally compelled to limit ourselves to designated campsites.

So there we were, tent in hand at a four star camp (yes camps here have star ratings too) in the Valais, our romantic notions still largely unshaken. An hour later we find ourselves on a small  square pitch of land on a street lined cheek by jowl with orange, red and green contraptions (some with multiple rooms) on either side and separated by a narrow ‘street’ to park cars.  Washing hanging out to dry, kids running amuck. An incongruous, inappropriate, irreverent thought flashes past my mind before I can stop myself .. ‘Dharavi, Mumbai’ …….. (for those unfamiliar with this, according to Wikipedia, this is a locality in Mumbai where nearly a million people live in an area less than 1 square mile).

It didn't take us long to discover the other luxuries that lay in wait ………

Wine not water ........

My cuppeth run over ..the steel barrel where the wine ferments

I came drunk to work last week ………well ok I didn't swagger, stagger or sway. I suppose I could have counted from 10 to 1 backward had I tried. I didn't slur, except of course when trying to pronounce Rolle in my French class …………………but I reeked of the stuff. Wine to be precise. Fine La Cote Chasselas, I might add. Strange looks from fellow commuters while I bore a sheepishly stoic look  but hey at least I got ample sitting place on the train that morning!!

Drinking binge at 6 am on a Wednesday, you ask? Mid week office blues notwithstanding, I did no such thing. I only slipped and fell on my way to catching the usually 30 second late train (for which I was 45 seconds late) …………Well, big deal, people all over the world slip and fall into puddles when they run for trains. Except, that in Switzerland, puddles of water are passé. If you fall, it needs to be a lake of wine …

My run to the station takes me through a winery. At this time of the year it is abuzz with activity: harvested grapes being de stemmed and crushed and the juice being pressed, crushed and left to ferment in several story high large steel barrels that line the courtyard. Invariably, the barrels overflow and it was into one of these pools that I unsuspectingly fell! A quick change of clothes (I always keep them handy at office in case of alcoholic accidents you see) and I was sober. Well, maybe not quite ………well they do say that alcohol does get absorbed through the skin. So my first drunken experience …………and I don't even drink!!

swiss trains are never late ...or are they?

Trains in Switzerland are never late………. You can set your clock by them. Not quite ……..at least not here in Geneva. Being a commuter, I know this only too well. Where I lived before our recent move, my daily routine consisted of taking a train that arrived at my little one track station at 7.37 am (or 7.38 or even, god forbid, 7.39), getting off 17 mins later to dash for the 7.58 bus that took me to office. Four minutes …………. perfectly timed for the average Swiss citizen, to athletically take long quick strides to the bus stop and reach there with all of 24 seconds to spare. Catch is ……the timetables are probably made by makers of Swiss clocks, no accounting for real people or real life.