Vices Abound!

So we have just finished a splendid visit from the Luce / Evison family: Sam, Stacey, Max, and Nora. Stacey is a friend of Sue's from high school - they worked together at the Sizzler and used to sneak into San Francisco to check out punk clubs in the early 80s (yikes, dating myself...).

We spent the week showing them Basel and enjoying the museums as well as getting out into nature: one day snowshoeing in the Jura mountains, and one day sledding outside of Interlaken. For those who care, the modern source of all truth (Wikipedia) notes that the modern sport of sledding was actually invented as recently as 1870 in beautiful St. Moritz by some bored English tourists. The sledding proved quite the thrill for the kids with a 3 km long track down to the gondola that takes you back up to do it all over again. Eric captured it correctly though: "this is way more dangerous than skiing!". We saw one girl taken away on a stretcher, but that did not dissuade us - the little kids seemed to enjoy it the most (yet again, would never be allowed in California...)

On the last night the kids wanted to play waiter - a common game in our house, but frustrating if you are actually hungry because of the long drawn out process it takes: they want to draw up a menu, make tickets to go into the restaurant, and then everyone has to order and they have to dish out the food. This night was especially funny, as they named the restaurant "Angry Panda" after our the giant panda we had scavenged on big trash night - he sat in the corner on a chair with a pretend cigar the kids had made hanging out of his mouth. Karl as well had a fake cigarette, and insisted on keeping it dangling out the side of his mouth during all the order taking.

So Karl and his cigarette brought back two memories:

I had posted back in September or so pictures of the candy cigarettes the kids love. At the time, I had also taken a picture of Karl smoking one of them, but thought: "I can't post that - our friends in California would flip! They would wonder what has come of us that we think pictures of children smoking is funny!" Well, I guess we have been out of California long enough that all of the political correctness has drained from our bodies...

But I was also prompted to post the picture based on an event that took place in Austria during our skiing vacation: at one of the dinners, the hotel ended our meal with schnapps for Eric and me. The tray they brought out, though, instead of having two shot glasses, actually came with four glasses: schnapps for the adults, and then two glasses of Sprite for the kids. I don't think we are in Kansas anymore, Dorothy...
Now, don't think we have gone completely off the deep end. Even though they want to learn poker we refuse to teach them, and as for women: Karl has a healthy fourth grade boy hatred of all girls, and the crush Bennett has on the girls in his class is that he wants to "crush" them - as in a swift right hook. His words, not mine...

But one vice you can't get away from in Switzerland is chocolate. And who would want to, really? We hear that the Swiss hold the world record for chocolate consumption: 11.6 kg (25.6 lbs.) per capita per annum - that is just over 2 lbs a month... We are not there yet, but we are working on it...