As I've previously mentioned, our first day in Switzerland was Swiss National Day (aka Fete Nationale Suisse!) which would be similar to our Fourth of July. Sean's little village had a great festival going on. There were great food (and wine!) vendors, yodlers, horn players, a carousel....
There was also a village-wide boat cruise. This created some interesting drama. Cousin Swiss Mister doesn't speak much French. Sure, he can order wine and filet de perch, and can probably drop a few inappropriate lines on a cute girl.....but he's not great at the language! Anyway, he didn't realize that you had to get tickets for this boat cruise. So there are tons of people from the surrounding villages in town (I think like 4 villages shared a boat) and everyone seemed to have tickets but us. We learn that you have to get them from the cop. Then we learn Cousin Swiss Mister has some history with this cop....something about illegally parking his car. I was ready to give up the boat cruise and just hang out in the village, but he came through and got the tickets. He was so proud. Here he is holding them.
So the time came and we loaded up on the boat with the rest of the villagers. We went on a cruise all over Lake Geneva---we went first what I imagine was east along the shore to Vevey and Montreux. Then we headed back west to Lausanne, and finally back to Cully. Here's the awesome boat and a picture of the beautiful Swiss countryside from the cruise.
It was a beautiful day for being out on the water---some sailboats were taking advantage as well.
As we went towards Montreux, we got closer to the Alps and you could see snow on the mountains. In August!
There was lots of entertainment on the boat as well. Here, you see the Swiss drinking out of shot glasses. But what was crazy is they were drinking wine from the shot glasses. Apparently that's normal there. At the dinner and fireworks later, all the wine was served not with goblets, but with shot glasses. Made for a cool souvineer!
There was also a full band on the boat that played the whole cruise. They were cool, but I would have enjoyed them having the yodlers come along....it was just beyond amazing to me to be listening to yodlers in Switzerland!
Then the Swiss Air Force did a flyover of the boat. Also pretty impressive!
Here we are enjoying our time on the boat cruise!
And then the sun set on our lovely cruise. However, the night was still young and the fun continued! They had great music playing and fireworks back on the shore in Cully. They also had some great wine and food for everyone.....pictures of food will come in a later blog all about food in Europe, but there was an interesting type of hot dog you'll have to see! Oh, and I didn't get a picture because I inhaled it, but there was the BEST crepe I ever had full of Nutella....sigh. It's amazing I didn't gain 30 pounds! It was all the walking....
Stay tuned next week for Day 2 of our European Vacation.....which includes Lausanne, France, and a fight amongst our water taxi drivers!
1 comment:
Good one. I enjoyed it at 4:30 AM as I'm battling jetlag. Argh!! je parle petite pau francais.
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