Leysin, Switzerland

Robbie has to be in Germany for 2 weeks for work, so we have our first opportunity to travel outside of Italy!  We made it to Germany two days ago, but on the way decided to stop for a couple of nights at a little ski town in the Swiss Alps called Leysin that some friends had recommended.  The drive up was beautiful--the leaves are all changing for fall and the mountains are breathtaking.  This is the first time I've lived anywhere with seasons, so I don't get tired of seeing all the beautiful fall colors.  Partway up one mountain (still in Italy) we stopped so Robbie could get a few pictures of the mountains and the trees. And of us.

We crossed into Switzerland in the middle of a tunnel in the mountain somewhere.  It's funny how quickly things changed once we left Italy--as soon as we came out of the tunnel we saw rolling hills and pastures with cows, sheep, and goats.  There were log cabins and big piles of wood along the road, and everything was green and gorgeous. The roads were really winding and normally I'm not the greatest passenger on long, twisting-road car rides but Robbie made me take some motion sickness medicine before we left and I'm glad he did. I enjoyed the drive much more.

We got to Leysin just as the sun was setting.  If we had driven straight through, it would have taken about 6 hours from our house.  We checked into the hotel, and decided to just have dinner at the buffet in the hotel rather than drag Michael out around town.  It was quick and easy, and we went back to our room to get to bed.

In the morning, this is the view we woke up to out our big picture window

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We got dressed and headed into town to find breakfast.  It was such a tiny, quiet little town.  However, it was also the off-season so I'm sure it's packed and bustling once the snow falls and the ski slopes open.  We found a little croissant and sandwich shop, got a couple of cappuccinos and pastries and had breakfast outside.

After breakfast Michael was ready to take a nap (and we had a bit of a rough, not-sleeping night before so he needed it) so I hiked back up the hills to our hotel with him to get some rest while Robbie walked around the town a bit more and took some pictures.

He met us back in the hotel room and we got ready to go ride the ski lift to the top of the mountain.

The views up there were amazing too.  We walked around a little up top, and had lunch in the ski lodge thing up at the top.  The food wasn't super great (most of the stuff on the menu was cold--meat and cheese plates, salad, and cold soup) but the views made up for it.  And the deck with the tables rotated really slowly so you could see the views all around as you ate. 

 6,719 feet

We walked around a little more.  Michael and I sat and watched the ski lift cars go in and out for a while.  He played with rocks and practiced walking on hills.  We watched a guy paraglide off the mountain, and big groups set out for hiking, rock climbing, and mountain biking.  The weather was beautiful--we were expecting cold and snow, but it was probably at least 70 degrees down in town (a little cooler at the top of the mountain, obviously). 

We headed back down the mountain so Michael could take another nap.  Once he woke up we went to walk around the town a little more since I hadn't had the chance to yet.  The guy who checked us in at the hotel recommended a cheese shop for dinner called Le Formagerie, so we went down there and had some fondue for dinner.  It was really good. 

We had a really great time on this little stop, even thought it was really only a day.  The next morning we packed up, checked out, and had a quick breakfast at the same croissanterie, and hit the road for Germany.  Robbie got some really beautiful pictures and was feeling at home back in the mountains again.  A couple things we didn't know about Switzerland until we got there (mostly because we never really thought about it): they speak French.  We know pretty much no French.  Enough to say 'hello' and 'thank you' and that's about it.  It's interesting how your brain works when you're learning a new language. Whenever someone asked us a question, we automatically answered in Italian.  Even though we knew they weren't speaking to us in Italian, our minds went "foreign language--Italian." They also use the Swiss franc as their currency. They accepted the euro everywhere we went, but we got change in Swiss francs and now have a handful of those we can't use until the next time we go back to Switzerland! 

I'm pretty sure there will be a next time. It was one of the most beautiful countries I've ever seen.  Now, two weeks in Germany!

Our Apartment!

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time, but it's taken us a while to get things unpacked and clean enough to actually take pictures.  Several people have asked about our apartment, so I thought I'd take pictures and do a digital tour of the place! 

After a ride in a tiny elevator up to the 5th floor, this is the view just walking in our front door.

Entry way and view down the hall

Immediately to the right  opens up into our living/dining room.  The first of three balconies is just outside the big door in the living room.

Living room, with a cameo by Michael

Dining room, with a cameo by Michael's breakfast

 

This apartment came fully furnished down to dishes in the cabinets.  There was tons of furniture here but since we brought all of our stuff, we had them remove most of it before we moved in.  We kept a few pieces though--the couch and chairs, the grandfather clock, and the cabinet in the back by the dining room table.  I love having some of that old furniture in there!

 

Another one of my favorite features of the apartment are the gorgeous marble floors.  The main part of the house is all marble.  The bedrooms and office have hard wood floors, and the kitchen and bathrooms are tiled.

 

Just across from the entry way is Robbie's office.  This is the one room that will probably never be clean, just because we end up putting all the stuff we don't know what to do with in there and shutting the door. That's totally find with me, because we can close the door and not have to see it!

 

Office

 



Just down the hall on the left is our kitchen. I really thought I pared down all my kitchen stuff when packing to come out here, but I still have way too much to store in this space. It's probably 1/3 of the size of my kitchen in California and I only have three drawers and three cabinets to store things in. We're getting used to it now, but for the first couple weeks after I got home from the grocery store I would stand in the kitchen with my bags thinking "okay... now where am I going to put all this?"  We go to the store several times a week mostly because there's nowhere for it to go!

Kitchen

We do have a dishwasher, which many of the houses we saw didn't have.  The sink only has one compartment and no garbage disposal.  Our refrigerator is much smaller (I think it's shorter than me), and the oven is a convection oven (with all the temperatures in degrees Celsius).  We don't have a microwave yet either, but we just got a little stand that would hold one so it's next on our list. The second balcony and the clothesline are outside that kitchen door.

The next room down the hall on the right is Michael's room.  We kept all his jellyfish decorations from the California house--they filled up that room much better!  His room is good sized, and is this clean for about two and a half minutes a day.

Next down the hall is the laundry and "my" bathroom.  We have two bathrooms and they're both pretty small, so we each took one to set our stuff up in.  The green bathroom is the smaller of the two and has the shower.  The orange bathroom has the tub and is just across the hall.

Next is our bedroom:

And finally, little Robbie's room/guest room with the third balcony.

I was so worried about the poor movers who had to move all of our stuff in.  Hardly any of it would have fit in the elevator and I thought they'd have to lug it all up five flights of stairs.  But I guess they are used to moving people into tall buildings with tiny elevators and tight staircases--they had a lift. There were two guys at the bottom who loaded the lift up with boxes, sent it up to little Robbie's balcony, and two more guys unwrapped and unloaded everything in the apartment.  It was much more efficient than carrying it all up the stairs for sure!

Although our apartment isn't the biggest place we saw, we don't have 15th century frescoes on the ceilings or Murano glass chandeliers like some of our friends, it's a good home for us. And we get to watch gorgeous sunsets off the balcony!

Ravenna

I've been wanting to visit Ravenna (A UNESCO World Heritage Site) for weeks since I read the city was famous for its 5th and 6th century tile mosaics.  Robbie wasn't super excited for this day trip but since we have decided we wanted to see as much of Italy as possible, he was ready to go explore too.  We are the worst, laziest tourists ever.  Half the time we just drive to a place and wander around, then when we get home we research everything we saw and realize that either we missed some really cool stuff and need to go back, or that something we saw is way cooler than we thought it was and we need to go back to see it again.  This time I actually looked up some of the good places to go ahead of time and wrote down the names of things I wanted to make sure we saw.  But we still drove down there not knowing where anything was, followed the signs to the city center, found a place to park, and decided to just wander around until we found something.

Our first stop (which was not on my list) was a mosaic museum we found called TAMO that had some really neat old and more modern mosaics.  One whole section of the museum was dedicated to mosaics of Dante's Inferno, so we wandered through looking at the depictions of the harpies, the centaurs, the devil, and eventually paradise.  Each mosaic had the passage from the poem posted next to it, so if you can read Italian, you'd know what you were looking at.  It was amazing how much detail is in these mosaics--how you can see expressions on the faces of the subjects in the mosaics, and how many different colors and pieces are used to make them up.  They were really fun to see up close.  And Robbie started to get excited about mosaics.

 Lucifer

 

 Close-up of the tiles

 

 The Harpies

 

 Paradise

 

 Paradise

 

Paradise

 

These were the modern mosaics and were very bright and colorful.  The museum also had displays of older mosaics, and pieces of mosaic floors.  We were glad to have stopped here.

 

 TAMO museum

 

 

Mosaic with tiny, tiny tiles

 

Once we finished here we needed to get something to eat, so we asked the people at the desk for a recommendation. She pulled out a map of Ravenna with all the major sites listed and pointed out a few good lunch areas. Score! A map!  So we had a quick lunch, then walked down the street a little ways to see the tomb of Dante.

 

Dante loved Florence and lived there for most of his life, but was exiled for political reasons before he died.  So he died and was buried in Ravenna.  His mausoleum is near the center of town.

 

 The mausoleum

 



 

In a small garden behind the mausoleum was this mound with a stone marker that said Dante's remains were buried here from March 23, 1944 to December 19, 1945.  They were worried that the mausoleum could be destroyed during the bombings of World War II, so they buried the urn with his remains here.

 

 

Apparently Florence has repeatedly requested that Dante's remains be moved back to Florence since that's the city he loved and where he did much of his work, but Ravenna has refused.  In the tomb, there is an oil lamp burning.  The city of Florence supplies the oil for the lamp as a penance for exiling Dante.

 

Our next stop was the Bisilica di San Vitale, with some gorgeous mosaics depicting Justinian and Theodora (Theodora was the empress of the Byzantine empire. She lived from the year 500 to 548). The pictures really can't do these mosaics justice. When you walk into the church, they glitter and sparkle.  They're very beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Theodora and Justinian and their court

 

 

Next we walked a few yards over to the Mausoleo di Galla Placidia.  According to our map, she was "daughter, sister, wife, and mother of emperors [and] reigned the Western Roman Empire and halfway through the V century had this small Mausoleum built."  One of the signs inside said she is almost definitely not buried here so I guess it's more of a shrine to her.

 

 

 

Next we walked back across town to find the baptistery.  Stopping for a quick second to take a picture of Piazza J.F. Kennedy (which we thought was random).

 

 

 The Battistero degli Ortodossi is one of the oldest sites in Ravenna, dating back to the 4th or beginning of the 5th century.  In the middle of the ceiling you can see Jesus being baptized in the Jordan river by John the Baptist.  The man with the beard off to the right of Jesus is the human personification of the river.  The twelve disciples are represented in the second tier.

 

 The ceiling of the baptistery

 The baptistery with the pulpit

 Close-up of one of the disciples

 

This baptistery was right next to the Duomo, so we took a quick walk in there too.  There were some mosaics on the floor, but the ceilings here were mostly frescoed.  There were some really neat old wooden pews, and the characteristic that was so striking to me was the large Latin lettering that went around the upper inside walls of the main church.  Most of this cathedral wasn't as ornate as the others we've seen except for the little side chapels or capellas.  They were full of gold, paintings, and sculpture.

 



 

Right next to the Duomo was the Museo Arcivescovile.  You weren't allowed to take pictures, but the museum housed many artifacts from the old cathedral and other sites around Ravenna.  The most famous piece was the ivory throne used by Maximian which was sculpted in the 6th century.  There were also gold and silver crosses, tons of jewels that were worn by the bishop (diamonds, amethysts, emeralds, sapphires, and more. They were beautiful but very opulent). This museum also houses the Chapel of St. Andrew which is covered in mosaics.

 

By this time, Michael was pretty much done with the sightseeing so though there were a few other places we wanted to check out, we headed back to the car to drive home. We did get to see quite a bit, but I wouldn't mind another visit sometime to see the other UNESCO monuments. It was a fun day, and I think Robbie is a converted mosaic lover.