The day started out rainy, which was just fine with me. We got to slow down and lounge around. After a lazy morning, Edwin and I went to a grocery store to get ingredients to make raclette (more on that later). We then stopped at a patisserie and picked up some sweets for dessert.
We waited for the rain to clear to visit the last Swiss town we have time for: Bern. This is the place I would live. I think I’ve said that about almost every town we’ve visited in this country, but this one is not too fancy, gorgeous, and very upbeat. Maybe the festival full of music, beer, gelato and happy people had something to do with it. Like many other Swiss towns, it has a clear blue river rushing through it. I mean, what?! I love the Potomac and all, but it’s not even in the same universe.
After we walked around Bern “City of Bears” for a few hours and listened to music, saw their famous bears (they used to be confined to a very sad Bear Pit, but the city expanded their domain to wooded hillside with a water hole someone maybe in the mid-1900’s) in dish where you cook your veggies and meat (tofu in our case), and ate french fries and gelato, we drove back to our place and made dinner.
So, raclette is a Swiss dinner in which you cook veggies and meat (tofu in our case) on an electric skillet and use cheese spatulas to heat below. Once the food is cooked and the cheese melted, you scrape the cheese into your food and enjoy. It’s a fun way to cook, talk, drink and eat all at the same time.
Now it’s time to get some sleep so we can catch our flight back to Portugal tomorrow. Bon nuit.
My Corner of the Village 