le Marché de Noël

Just for Alli, here is that barrage of (or maybe just two) posts.

In Switzerland, les Marchés de Noël are extremely popular, and are EVERYWHERE. Basically, they're Christmas markets... little farmers' market type fairs with booths of candy, ornaments, hot drinks, etc. The really big, fancy ones have le Père Noël (Father Christmas) visiting, and rides or games. Just about every town has a Marché de Noël at some point... Montreux (a town near Lausanne) hosts Switzerland's biggest and most famous Marché de Noël, and on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, after celebrating the holiday again with some American friends from my dad's work, we visited the Montreux market.
It was crazy cool. It was set up like some tiny, adorable Christmas town. Each of the booths looked like a little log cabin, and there were Christmas lights everywhere. There were ornaments, clothes, a broad range of gift items, and lots of food! ... including the best churros I've ever eaten (who woulda guessed you'd find them in Switzerland?) and hot mulled wine.
We ended the night by riding on a spectacular ferris wheel that provided us with a stunning view of Lake Geneva's shore.

Lake Geneva from the ferris wheel in Montreux

Thankful for Switzerland

Warning: here come a barrage of blog posts, as an apology for my absence. Pretend they've all been published in the last three weeks.

Kaelynn's Thanksgiving visit was a lot of fun--though I was sick for the last half, which was really disappointing. Still, we got lot's of chances to explore the lovely little Rolle and have an amazing Thanksgiving.

The weather finally cleared up during the week, so on Wednesday we spent a few hours in Rolle having a picnic on the promenade next to the lake. It was an incredible day... here's a taste (yes, pun intended):

The Promenade in Rolle

Thanksgiving consists of strictly American food, and it was a bit of a challenge finding everything, namely pumpkin pie filling and canned cranberry sauce (I know you can easily make "superior" cranberry sauce from scratch, but I'm a sucker for the canned sauce). Kaelynn brought us the pumpkin pie filling, and my mom had remembered to get cranberry sauce back when she was in the States in September, so we were all good.

Vegetarian Thanksgiving!

We're so thankful for the opportunity to move to Switzerland. It's been a crazy adventure, and not entirely easy--and we miss our wonderful friends and family!--but the experience is amazing, and we couldn't ask for more.