Funmurphys: the Blog

Lausanne Day 1 (or No Matter Where You Go, There You Are)

When we checked into our hotel, the Nash Carlton, they put us in two adjoining rooms and opened the door in between. European hotels seem to compete more on the luxuriousness of their furnishings and not so much on their amenities (or at least what an American would think of as an amenity) -- so we had a sumptuous room, but no coffee maker. Ice and soda machines, what are they?

OUR CAR IN FRONT OF OUR HOTEL

The bathrooms were quite modern -- the funWife and I had an all glass shower enclosure small enough that the Fruit of the Murphy Loins believed me when I told them that when I showered I just squirted soap on the glass walls and rotated to get clean. It was nice to have 2 full bathrooms for the 4 of us - half the squabbling in half the time to get ready in the morning, even if we weren't on any kind of schedule.

After unpacking and exploring the hotel, we set forth minus my daughter to find dinner. Since there are only two directions in Lausanne, uphill and downhill, we chose to try our luck downhill. Fortune favors the bold, and from some reason it decided to favor us as well since we quickly wound up in Ouchy at a pizza place on the lakefront. Well, almost on the lakefront, as the Chateau d'Ouchy was between us and the water.

THE CHATEAU D"OUCHY BLOCKING VIEW OF PIZZA JOINT

We ate pizza often on the trip, and each time it was customized to the local taste. They are not nearly as generous with their toppings in Europe as America (and cheese in the crust is right out), so a pepperoni pizza typically had six or seven pepperoni's on it. And if you wanted pepperoni, you ordered salami, as ordering anything like pepperoni would result in green and red peppers, not pepperoni. In Venice we would order a Viennese pizza and get sliced hot dog on top for our troubles. And not even all of the hot dog.

In Lausanne they speak French, so we were forced to puzzle out the ingredients with a half dozen years of high school French between the four of us. As soon as we got comfortable with ingredients in French, we moved on to Interlaken, where they speak German and we were forced to puzzle out the ingredients all over again -- and with zero years of high school German to help out. At least when we got to Venice the learning curve wasn't as steep because Italian is a lot more like French than German is. Maybe that's why we got cocky and wound up with hot dog on our pizza.