The wonder of your-ope!

I appologize for the song lyric pun. Really I do.

Onto what I actually wanted to say.

On the bus wednesday, I watched a random kid roll a joint. This led me to several conclusions:

1. It is very hard to roll a joint on a bus,
2. especially if you are already high while on the bus rolling your second joint
3. Therefore this kid must have some incredible skill,
4. The drug thing in europe is EXTREMELY lax (which it is, not that I divined that from this incident in particular.)
5. and that I get home far too late.

In the intrest of not being too exagerative (that isn't a word, but it should be), I do not in fact get home all that late, (well I do, but that is just the swiss school system for you) I ride the 5:42 bus most days, which gets me home squarely at 6:30.

I also want to talk about two awesome things this entry, Fleischkäse and Sirup. Let's start with Feischkäse because it is more intresting:

Fleischkäse is... actually I don't know what it is. In a word, Yummy. The picture to the left was dinner about oh, two weeks ago. This picture cannot convey the tender juicy goodness that is Fleischkäse. You can eat it warm or cold (I prefer cold for sandwiches, warm with salads and so...). Children apparently love Fleischkäse. Translated Directly it means "meat cheese" which I can assure you it most definately isn't. An Austraillian exchange student told me she thought it was meatloaf, which it also most definately is not (because I hate meatloaf, really, except the singer, I find him quite awesome...). In short, I have asked everyone I know what Fleischkäse is made of and no one seems to have any idea. Hopefully it is not something that I would find repelling (that would be a whole other Kalbsbratwurst adventure for me***). Hopefully I never run into a Butcher at a dinner where this is being served....

As a nice little sidenote, I love deer, when it is prepared the swiss way (I had it in america and found it absolutely disgusting.) It has some brownish sauce and you eat it with spätzli (those noodles that are cooked in a million pounds of butter) and red cabbage. They served it in the cafeteria last friday and I had it 3 times with my family. It is tender and...wild tasting. I can't describe it any other way.

Onto sirup. If you are an American, you are sure to screw up sirup at least once during your stay in Switzerland. Sirup is, well, syrup. I am in fact drinking some right now. In america, when we want a raspberry Koolaide sort of drink, we make a big jug of it, take our glass, and put the rest in the fridge. That doesn't work in Europe. The fridges are small (my host mom goes shopping evey 2-3 days, as opposed to a week in america....). That is where sirup comes in. It is sort of a koolaide liquid concentrate. You put a little in a glass, add water, and you (or I at this very moment, have) raspberry flavored water juice stuff. The reason you are likely to screw this up as an american is simple, you expect the juice on the dinner table to be finished, when it is half of the time, in fact, only sirup. Normally you would realize this because everyone gives you a really astounded look when you happily fill your glass. It is sort of a Murphy's law of Juice that when you pour yourself a whole glass, it inevitably winds up being sirup, and when you pour jsut a little, it winds up being juice. Then there is the whole sirup to water ratio that you have to get right in order to have juice that is not too sweet or too bland. I have not perfected the technique yet, and I have been doing it for 3 months...

My fellow americans, in the juice wars, we can just not win.

***It just occured to me that I haven't said anything about my Kalbsbratwurst experience. In short, Kalbsbratwurst is delicious, my favorite meal in fact. What I did not think about until recently was what it is made of. To cut this short story even shorter, baby cows (kalb = calf). I probably would not have eaten it if I had known that at the beginning, but now I am addicted and have absolutely no qualms about eating baby animals of any variety. It is so wrong, but tastes so good...

I also miss video games. My family has none. I actually assume this is a normal state of swiss households. I am currently overthemoon that I at least remembered my Nintendo DS, otherwise I would have only a cell phone to game on (NOT GOOD!!!) With the upcomming console war (PS3 on Nov. 17th and Wii on the 19th) I would go insane without something to play, especially for the first time in my life, I won't have a console until months and months after launch. Sigh. I have also yet to find an arcade. Woe is I.