Thermal, alpine baths

The great thing about living in an alpine environment is that there are numerous hot springs hidden in the mountains that have been turned into baths and spas for public enjoyment.  These thermal baths range in type and style, from the kid-friendly thermal baths in Leukerbad to the luxurious alpentherme in Leukerbad with its multiple treatment rooms to our favorite thermal bath, Lavey-les-Bains, which has multiple pools, saunas, steam rooms, waterfalls, pools with underwater music, and many other features.

Most of the thermal baths not only derive their heat from the hot springs, but also use the mineral-laden elements from the hot springs in the water for health benefits. As a result, people with ailments can actually receive "prescriptions" from their doctors to soak in the baths due to the water's healing powers.

This past rainy, Sunday we checked out another thermal bath in the mountains, Thermes Parc, using coupons from Switzerland's equivalent to Groupon.  Hanging out in a mineral thermal bath is a great way to pass a lazy, rainy Sunday in Switzerland.  Although a bit smaller than previous ones we have visited, this thermal bath had a lazy river and was super clean and modern.  When you purchase your ticket at the registration desk, you get a waterproof, electronic wrist band that is used to enter the baths and open/close your lockers. Here are some pictures (not my own) of some of the baths we have visited over the past year:

Lazy river at the Thermes Parc

Baths in Charmey, Gruyere

The "spa village" at the alpentherme

The Roman/Irish treatment area at the alpentherme

Our favorite baths, Lavey-les-bains

The alpentherme baths in Leukerbad

TGIF!

I just finished two big projects at work this week, so I'm feeling especially relieved and in a celebratory mood for this weekend. We are relaxing in Geneva this weekend since the upcoming month will be full of busy (and fun!) trips home to the US and visitors in Switzerland. TGIF everyone, hope you have a fantastic weekend!!

Lake Geneva regional specialty: Filets de perche

Aside from its traditional specialities of cheese, chocolate, and wine, Switzerland continues to surprise us with some lesser-known, regional specialty foods.  Filets de perche or "perch filets" is one of specialities of the Lake Geneva region of Switzerland.  Perch is plentiful in Lake Geneva and fishermen pull fresh catches out each day and sell them to local restaurants.  Not being a huge fan of dining on lake-fish (generally they taste too fishy for my liking), I haven't been terribly excited to try this local specialty.

A few weeks ago, after a Sunday morning at the driving range with friends, we drove to a restaurant called Au Vieux Navire in a little village on the shores of Lake Geneva that is known for its filets de perche dishes. In formal Swiss dining fashion, we started the meal off with an "aperitif", which is essentially a fancy cocktail drink.  We then all opted for the variety dish of filets de perche.  It consisted of filets de perche cooked three ways: (1) with lemon and parsley, (2) with tomatoes and basil, and (3) the "piece de resistance"... with champagne FOAM and lobster sauce -- really?! To call this fish delicious would be an understatement, it was amazing. Needless to say my opinion on filets de perche has changed...

We finished the meal with the "crepes suzette" desert, which is essentially crepes flavored with an orange caramel sauce. The fun part was that they made the dish in front of us.  Lunch and a show! We will definitely go back to this restaurant soon -- I'm going to try to convince my dad in a few weeks that this place gives George's weekly fish fry in Meredith, NH a run for its money ;)

Oops... yesterday's video wasn't working

Here is (hopefully) a working version!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2RDlF3UaeU

The neighborhood market

Every Sunday that we are home in Geneva, Ryan has a favorite morning activity.  He usually wakes up before me and sneaks out to the farmer's market that takes place at the square outside of our apartment. He loves to wander around and come back with all kinds of yummy food.  You can find fresh veggies and fruits, cheeses, meats, breads, and prepared foods from many different countries and cultures.  One morning when I was able to get myself out of bed early enough and in my pursuit to show you all more of our "hood", I accompanied Ryan on his weekly ritual and taped his Sunday adventure for your viewing pleasure...

Half of a beautiful hike

As the summer starts to come to a close, I have been asking Ryan to do some hikes with me while the weather is still good.  I got my wish on Saturday as we headed to Chamonix to hike to Lac Blanc, an alpine lake that sits at around 2200 meters and has sweeping views of Mont Blanc and its neighboring glaciers in the background.  The hike is well known by tourists and easily accessible.  You take a cable car up to around 2200 meters and hike horizontally across to the lake.  So we headed off to Chamonix excited for our day of hiking.  But, there was a slight problem... our lazy butts slept in and dilly-dallied around the house for a few hours, so we didn't get to Chamonix until around 2PM and the last cable car down from the hike left at 4:30PM = not enough time to do the entire round trip hike to the lake.  Oops. We decided to still do the hike, but just go half way for fear of missing the last cable car down and being stranded in the mountainous terrain.  Disappointing as that was, we still managed to get in some good hiking and saw some amazing scenery.  I'm used to hiking in the white mountains of NH, so hiking above the tree line with rock fields, snow still on the trails, and 25 degree temperature differences to the valley below is super intimidating but it presents some unbelievably gorgeous sights at the same time.  Ryan even went to the market before we left for Chamonix and got us a superb lunch of truffled ham, greek salad, and a fresh baguette that we enjoyed while overlooking the views. So in the end while we were disappointed that we didn't have time to check out the lake, it was a perfect Saturday excursion and we're excited to return one day (hopefully this fall) to check out the actual Lac Blanc!  

Check out the glacial valley behind me, you can actually take a train up to this glacier and go through a tunnel into the glacier

Don't lean left!

Riding the chair lift down

Mont Blanc is the tallest peak on the right

The week of fun blogs!

In the spirit of blogs, I wanted to share a few fun blogs that I have been enjoying this week:

Kressley is one of my sister's friends who recently started an adorable, crafty blog.  She creates amazing treats and handmade gifts that my sister always shares pictures and stories of with me, so you can imagine how excited I was to wake up one morning and find this blog post from her in my inbox as an ode to my love of (American) English muffins!  Yum!

My sister's wedding was featured on a wedding blog this week.  I thought the photos were gorgeous when I first saw them on the photographer's website; but, seeing them on this cute blog with the story of their wedding just makes them even more beautiful!

This past weekend I met a new American friend, Ashley, through a friend of one of my good friends, Lauryn.  Ashley recently moved to Geneva and has a great blog chronicling her life experiences.

Happy blog reading!

J'aime Paris!

Last weekend we visited Paris for a few days.  I had been a few times when I was younger but it was Ryan's first time visiting the city.  Paris is only a 3 hour ride from Geneva on the fast, TGV trains, so we caught the 5:45PM train from Geneva and made it to Paris by 9PM.  How convenient!

We bought our train tickets back in June after finding a good deal on the price.  Little did we know the reason that the tickets were such a good deal was because it was a holiday weekend in Paris, translation = Paris was empty aside from tourists.  We still had a fabulous time checking out the city, but it definitely felt a bit desolate to see a lot of restaurants closed and no Parisians strolling the streets.  Oh well, I guess that just means we will be "forced" to go back another time :)

Since the weather was perfect for strolling, we mainly explored Paris by foot, map in hand, checking in the sites and stopping many of Paris' little cafes and restaurants along the way.

I love that Paris is to close to Geneva by train, it makes for a fabulous weekend get away!  Below are some pictures and stories from the weekend.

Notre Dame cathedral in the evening, so gorgeous

We started off the second day with breakfast at La Duree, a famous Parisian tea house

In true tourist fashion, we purchased a lock, locked it to the Pont des Arts bridge, and tossed the key into the water below to symbolize our eternal love

Our secret mission was to find and attach our lock to Kourtney Kardashian and Scott Disick's lock, which we found after much google searching and picture analyzing. A lot of other people (presumably Americans?) had the same idea in the past because Kourtney and Scott's lock was buried under this bundle

The weather was perfect for strolling, so we waltzed towards Notre Dame to take in the architecture in the daylight

Checking out the Louvre -- did you know it has 16 KILOMETERS worth of galleries inside? that's almost a half marathon within one museum!

In front of the Louvre pyramid, evoking my days of obsessing over the Da Vinci Code mysteries...

More Louvre gorgeous-ness

Louvre

My camera died right around this time, so apologies for the iPhone photos from here on. On Saturday evening we took a tour of the Seine river by boat that took us past the major sites in the city. I would highly recommend this tour to anyone visiting Paris.

One of the river tour boats

On Sunday we met my friend Leah's brother and his girlfriend for brunch in Paris.  They just recently moved to Paris.  What fun to have friends from home in European cities!

Lake life in Switzerland

 During the summer months, life circulates around Lake Geneva. Being a New Hampshire laker at heart, this is something that makes me really happy because having the comfort of a lake nearby is something that I enjoyed growing up. There's just something so calming and relaxing about being able to have a lake to escape to for a run, a dip on a hot day, a wakeboarding session, or just for a few moments of peace to listen to the waves and feel the sun on my face.

So in honor of my favorite element of summer, here are some interesting tid bits about Lake Geneva and how we have enjoyed it this summer...

Lake Geneva is the largest body of water in Switzerland. It spans 60 miles long and 11 miles wide at its largest point. The depth goes up to 1,000 feet deep! The right side of the lake is in France while the left side of the lake is in Switzerland. The snowy mountain cap you can see on the lower right side of the picture above is Mont Blanc, which you can see from Geneva on a clear day.

Mont Blanc in the distance from Geneva on a clear day. The fountain in front is the "jet d'eau" or "water jet", a landmark in Geneva's skyline. It towers above most of the buildings in town and has become one of the symbols of Geneva.

The harbor of Geneva. When we go for runs, we typically run from our apartment to the middle of harbor in the picture above and along the left side of the lake in the picture. There is a walking/running path on the shore that stretches in both directions for several miles. There are 3 beaches in Geneva proper, one is on the right side of the photo on the jetty sticking out into the lake, while the other is on the very left hand side of the picture, to the left of the boats. The third is farther to the left (and outside the picture) and consists of a large public beach and a wakeboarding center. 

The wakeboard center has boats that you can rent for wakeboarding sessions. I don't even want to tell you how much it costs to rent one of these boats, hence why we haven't wakeboarded this summer, instead we have enjoyed the beach at the wakeboard center.

The rocky beach at the wakeboard center. You can see the jet d'eau behind the trees on the left of the photo.

Enjoying the wakeboard center.

For the past two weeks there has been a festival on the shores of Lake Geneva which consists of carnival rides and local and international food stands (like the one above). It is called the "fete de Geneve" or the "Geneva party" and its an annual summer celebration in Geneva. The best part about the festival was the fireworks show, which is a fantastic display of fireworks coordinated to music. Check out the grand finale video below...

An surf-tastic, French weekend in Hossegor

Last Thursday was a holiday in Switzerland (essentially Switzerland's version of July 4), so we hopped a plane with some of our good friends from Geneva to go to Hossegor on the southwestern coast of France for the long weekend.  Our friend Thibault's parents have a vacation house in Hossegor and they were gracious to host our rowdy bunch for the weekend. The ironic thing about Hossegor is that it is also the same town that my sister and I spent several weeks in during high school when we went and stayed with family friends who also had a beach house in the same town! How ironic, right? So in addition to having a kick ass weekend at the beach with our Geneva friends, I also got to (shortly) reunite with our family friends who were there for the weekend!

While in Hossegor, we basked in the sun, caught some waves (Hossegor is known for its large waves and surfing community), went to Thibault's parents' driving range, had some AMAZING french meals cooked by Thibault's parents (duck, foie gras, etc etc), and hit the town for a few nights out. It was a perfect summer weekend and we can't wait to hopefully return next year! It is so nice to know that as we get close to the 1 year mark of living in Switzerland, we have made some really fantastic friends and have had such wonderful experiences here. We are really enjoying our summer in Europe!

Everyone at the beach

Pre-duck destruction

Hanging out on the porch

Getting surfing lessons before entering the water

He looks so professional! 

More porch time with my love 

Exiting the water after being DEMOLISHED by a killer wave

Hanging out at the beach

Check out all of the kite boards!