More melted cheese & medieval toilets

July 7, 2008

Another great day in Swiss paradise. This afternoon we went with Franco and Emily and kids to drop their oldest daughter Ashley at a church girl’s camp so we said our goodbyes to Ashley since we'll be gone by the time she's home. Then we visited my personal favorite castle (granted, there are many that I haven’t seen, but this is the best I’ve been to). When I was a missionary, at one point I lived in a city called Montreux which is across Lac Leman from Geneva and has a world-famous jazz festival every year. Right up the street from our apartment was the Chateau de Chillon, and I went there for the first time as a missionary, but I have been back almost every time I have come back to Switzerland.

It’s less crowded (although there were more people than I remembered in the past) than Mont Saint Michel, and you can actually explore more of the castle itself. You can go down into the dungeon and see where the poet Lord Byron carved his name onto one of the stone pillars in 1816. In the middle of the Romantic Movement in art and literature, Byron was so impressed by the story Francois Bonivard, a monk who was imprisoned in the same dungeon for nearly six years because he opposed the Duke of Savoy’s efforts to control Geneva and the area. You can also sit on a medieval toilet that drops straight down into the lake. Of course, this was the highlight of the tour for the kids who wanted their picture taken on the real throne (I would have, but I had already had the experience and someone needed to take the picture).

Anyway, we spent a couple of hours there, and then we stopped at the lakefront in the next town over called Vevey. The kids played for a while, and we ate ice cream between our friends Freddy Mercury and Charlie Chaplain (in statue form, of course as there is a statue of Freddy on the lakefront in Montreux and one of Charlie in Vevey.)

When we got back to Maria’s house, we had one of my favorite Swiss meals called raclette. You take raclette cheese and melt slices in a little oven in the middle of the table; then you pour the cheese over small boiled potatoes and put on a variety of different toppings such as cocktail onions, mini pickles, sausage, etc. It’s delicious and a lot of fun to melt your own cheese and make your own creation as you eat. I honestly don’t know if I like fondue or raclette better, but this was a special treat because I’ve never been able to find in the US. Yet another thing that I’ll probably have to wait a decade or so before I experience again.