Holy Cow, Burgers! And the Oddity of the Swiss-French Dialect

Awesome Burgers; good linguists!

The old quatre-vingt vs. huitant debate caught me out in the Holy Cow burger bar yesterday.  The place is completely and udderly brilliant, its yummy burgers are done up with imaginative and various toppings, service is speedy and its outside tables on the Rue de Carouge in Plainpalais are always packed at lunch.

I chose the Elvis Blue Cheese burger yesterday. At CHF13.90 perhaps it sounds a little dear, especially if you go for a meal option and spend closer to CHF20, but then they are super quality burgers and it is fair to say you don't actually need fries if you aren't looking for a blow-out meal. Compared to Ronald and his golden arches, which are said to be the most expensive in the world here in Switzerland, it is a no-brainer. Holy Cow every time, I highly recommend a trip there.

View from Saleve

View of Geneva from the Saleve

We took the telepherique up Le Saleve on Monday, a steep ride up the face of "Geneva's mountain" in a cable car followed by a pleasant stroll in the sunshine to find the summit of Mont Blanc hiding behind cloud. Its the second time I've been to the top of Le Saleve once before we took the girls up in the cable car, but yesterday it was just Grandad and I who went up. On the first occasion we hardly got further than that telepherique station, such is the way with the legs of little ones. This time around we were able to discover much more of the beauty to be seen on and from the top of the mountain.

Dinner at La Broche - bad food, good company

On Tuesday evening we went to La Broche on Rue Stand with a group of my colleagues, 10 of us in all. As the venue was chosen by my Genevoise colleagues I was excited by my expectation of finding a hit. Unfortunately, at the moment Rue Stand is full of road works, so finding it is not strictly easy and when you've done that finding the entrance behind the holes and the fences is tricky too. Nonetheless, when we got to the terrace, we were sat outside a very pretty stone building, called the Arquebuse (though not a gun in sight). The terrace was just the right place to be on a warm July evening.

A day trip to Montreux

Lived in Montreux

"If you want your soul to find peace, go to Montreux", so says the Rough Guide. For those who don't believe in a soul, they are a little more helpful when they expand to say Montreux can also be "a snooty place, ...and not particularly exciting."  Ironically then we visited the place a week ago on Ascension day, which is Thursday a bank holiday here in Switz. Not a great day you'd think to go visiting a place that is known for not being exciting! Still, it's the place where this man lived so it can't be all that bad.   We had to stand in line to get a picture of the statue of the man. Well, we would have, if everyone else had.

Bois de la Batie

On Sunday morning we went to Bois de la Batie, a little animal park over near Lancy. We drove. The closest the tram gets is the circle in Jonction, at the bottom of the hill, which we didn't feel like walking up with little kids. The alternative from the right bank is to walk or cycle through St Jean, and then cross the Rhone on the railway bridge.  From here you can look down on the confluence of the Arve and the Rhone and you get a great view of the city as well.

The Manora Restaurant

Manor, the department store in the middle of the city has a self-service restaurant, which seems to be one of the most popular eateries in the city. On Saturday we went there around 11.30 so that the girls could eat. It's pretty easy to feed them in this place. My top tip for parents of toddlers, once your kids can actually feed themselves find somewhere cheap to take them for lunch and dinner at the weekends and hey presto! Someone else has to do the cooking and the tidying up, it's a great investment. We aren't the only parents in Geneva to have discovered this, at that time of day probably half the people in the place have kids with them. The other half are quaint late middle aged couples where the husband is sitting waiting at a table, looking slightly lost, whilst his wife is off getting coffee and a cake for both of them, because that's what they have done every Saturday for the last 18 months.
Every 20 minutes someone walks past with a trolley, ready to clear the table. Typically this turns in to a merry-go-round, a careful dance of after you George, as the clearer struggles to determine what on our table is finished. For some reason our kids in the restaurant tend to eat from four different plates, a bit from Mummy's a bit from Daddy;s a little from each others. They pick a bit from this, a bit from that, but you know the moment you think they've finished they'll find something else to pick at. So when the trolley person comes to the table, waves their hand at the various plates you have on the table, it's like they've asked you to spot the difference between blank pieces of paper, you scrutinise each plate for potential morsels for your kids before giving the nod to the clearer to take them away. In the end the kids hoover up the rest of the food with my help. As we leave the table, a quick look behind makes me feel guilty and sad for whoever uses the table after us as scraps of food litter the floor and the girls chairs. Then sigh with relief because I don't have to clear anything up.

Cafe de Paris on Rue Mont Blanc

Last night we walked out the house leaving the nanny to put the kids to bed. Our conversion to Genevoisie is progressing well it seems. The sun was still out, it was warm and the whole experience felt really quite civilised. We had a movie to see at 8.15, which turned out to be one of those terrible "an idea I got reading A Brief History of Time" SciFi stories. Still it was entertaining enough, and we happened to pick the right restaurant to get a bite to eat from before hand.

Learning lessons; anaphylaxis, pine nuts and dialling 144

Bad pine-nuts! Bad! Bad!

We went out to dinner last night, to a restaurant I don't think I'll name. We went out with some friends of our who are a commuter couple, so we don't get to see them together that often.  Last night was one of the first times in six months that we've actually managed to all be in the same place on a Saturday night, and it all ended in the great excitement of flashing lights and near life-saving panic.

To Annecy from Geneva

Good name for a restaurant

We made a trip to Annecy yesterday, ostensibly to get some shoes for the little one. Considering they were half the price of the last pair we bought her in Switz, it was a 40 minute car journey well spent.
The town isn't all that big, about 50,000. The old town is quite a decent size, and stacked with restaurants, cafes and boulangeries.
The shoe shopping was amazingly straight forward.

At the chicken shack

"Eat chicken here"

We took the girls out to lunch on Sunday. A friend had recommended we try a place called Chez ma Cousine, good value, easy atmosphere, and ideally, for a family with small children, it opens at 11.30am.  The little chain has three restaurants in Geneva, we went to the one in Grand Saconnex. It is a very simple set up. There is nothing fancy in the decor and nothing fancy in the welcome. We arrived at about 11.45 and already there were parties sitting down to eat.
With a three year old whinging about being hungry and thirsty, it's a good thing that the "waiter" quickly arrived at our table with the menu, and almost as soon after our food arrived.

Bad weather, bad, bad weather and the musical sub-genre Post-Britpop

This morning we woke to rain, after a wonderful few weeks of Spring weather, the city has rediscovered its grey dome. Bad news all around. The big one declared she didnt want to go outside today because of the rain; but she got no choice. Tuesdays is Ludo, and when she was reminded of that the rain issue was speedily forgotten.

Parents equals pizza

We had grandparents to visit just after Christmas, and Grandparents mean just one thing, the chance to get out the house for a bit of time just to the two of us. So we decided to go for a pizza at Luigia's in Eaux-Vives. This place was completely new to me, and on first impressions I wasn't expecting a great deal. As I headed towards the door I was dazzled by the white twinkly lights crowding around the entrance. Pushing through the door into the restaurant itself, and the bling and glare are no less inside.

Trip to Carouge

On Sunday we made a trip to Carouge with the intention of visiting the rumoured to be great, Cupcakes in the city. Sadly for us the cafe was a little bit full, and a little bit too small for all four of us, with the buggy, to fit in. Instead we ended up in Cafe Wolfisburg. A rather smashing cafe come boulangerie, rather than the other way round, a format which I find irritating, because the cafe never gets proper consideration. The cafe makes a real attempt to be family friendly, with a reasonable sized family area (can get 4 or 5 buggies in there) and next to it a slide and climbing frame on the other side of a large window.
We arrived in Carouge on the number 11 tram, it was our first time on the tram heading in this direction, and given what I'd heard about Carouge, I felt distinctly uneasy as we travelled through Jonction and other decidedly "un-Carouge" looking places. I was expecting to see some kind of idyll, and was nervous as we passed steel framed building after steel framed building, housing superstores of all kinds from motorbikes to prams. We got off the bus on the border of the old and the modern, tempted by the sights we could see in front of us streets of two storey terraces lined up neatly and squarely, we soon left the steel frames behind.
Any one familiar with British towns will notice instantly the similarity of Carouge to Georgian almshouses, Carouge, the original city is a small grid system, which the low terracing suits.  With narrow streets pedestrians have a high priority and it certainly seems a wonderful place to wander around. "Why didn't we move here?" we asked ourselves, instantly knowing the answer. Having found it I'm sure we'll spend more time there, it's only 15 minutes on the tram. In fact, with Grandad arriving for his birthday this weekend we might take him back to Wolfiburg for lunch.