Wistful Musings of a Kiwi Au Pair in America: J'adore Suisse

Hi all!
I have now been in Switzerland just under 1 week and wow what a week it has been! I have discovered that the couchsurfing community is particularly active over here, which has been fantastic for me, I've already met two couchsurfers and have plans with some others later on. It's like having instant friends, and I am going to Yvoire, France (just on the coast of Lake Geneva) with one of them on Saturday. In the past few days I have been all around the city of Lausanne, a lovely old city with a beautiful cathedral built in the 13th century and all these cobbled paths and village buildings! So lovely! Also, just down the road is Lutry, a beautiful little cobbled village on Lake Geneva which has such a charm about it, it was delightful to visit. I went to church on Sunday - a bi-lingual church where the sermon was translated from English-French and French-English (depending on the speaker) sentence by sentence, instantly! The two pastors stood side by side and said each line like a simultaneous conversation to different people. It was amazingly easy to follow and so incredible!

It has been raining here quite a lot which has slowed my plans a little - everything I want to do depends on good weather! The kids have been stuck inside too, which I can tell you has not been fun! What is very cool is that there is a 13th century castle (Chateau de Bochat) just next door to us!!! It is a little difficult to get a good look at it but from certain vantage points I have been able to see a fair bit of the outside! It is so neat to think that a real-life castle is being lived in and is literally right next door!

Yesterday, because it rained all morning, we decided to all go out to visit a chocolate factory in Broc, it houses a few different brands, one being Nestle! We were able to go on a tour which was so neat, you walk through all these different doors which are decorated in different time periods and it tells the story of chocolate, it was so interesting and really well displayed, sometimes you were in castles, sometimes boats, sometimes Mayan temples - so great! Unfortunately, the three young children were quite scared and it became more about thinking "when is it going to end?" rather than "wow I want to hear more!"

We also passed by some of the production machines, one in particular was neat because the host dad of the family actually helped develop it! They used to live in Switzerland after they got married, and he was an engineer working with the chocolate factories. The machine was a sorting machine, which picks up each individual chocolate and places it on another, smaller, conveyor belt as it heads to the wrapping machine. He said it is the fastest robot arm in the world! Interesting indeed!

Finally we got to the best room in the factory - the tasting room, where you could eat as much chocolate as you wanted for free! Honestly, I could have happily stayed there all day, but we had 5 kids, and there was a huge tour group pushing right behind us so I sort of went and tried one or two of everything and that was it! (It was still a lot!!!) They had all sorts of different chocolates, fancy ones from the different sets, plain ones, speciality ones - it was amazing!