Swiss Tales

This is where we live in Luzern, on the lake with a large garden and a giant Redwood tree in front of the patio (you can see it out the window) it's just about 2 miles outside the city on a jut of land surrouned on two sides by lakes.. and mountains all around. It's an hours drive to Bern or Zurich. Trains go directly to Milan or Lake Como and you can get a connection to Paris. Everything is accesible by public transportation which I love, the bus into Luzern runs directly in front of the house and takes you to the Bahnhof (trainstation) which is quite handy.. You can also walk about a mile up the road and get a boat that goes directly into Luzern.

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You have baseball and we have "Schwingfest" these are the referee's taking a little break during the match..



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The mountain behind us is called the Pilatus and it's the beautiful background you will always see in a photo of Luzern. We took a gondoli to the first level (there are three) and they had the most wonderful playland for the kids...


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FASNACHT '09 The carnival in Luzern. Lars was a viking and Liv was a crocodile..the spectators really get in to the activities here, most families dress up..

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These were quite over due.. here are the kids taking a little dip in the hot tub.. just after we had a pretty big snowfall obviously...


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Test post. just making sure everything still works! In the mean time, here is a picture of some cousins.

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Juerg started training his young olympians.. it was actually a terrible day because it was very windy and cold, so they didn't stay out very long..

We're moving house this week, so going to be offline for at least a week.. it was the last day for Lars at his French school, I couldn't look his teacher in the eye when I said goodbye....


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Someone just sent me this picture from the last visit with Father Christmas the kids had.. there was a nice little puppet show and then they all got a little present from him...City Green with Dillon, Riley, Max and Otto.


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These were from the New Year's party at Mirjam and Hendrik's there were 19 kids all under the age of 8 years old... ours were the only ones that fell asleep at 10;00pm


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Happy New Year All! Some friends of ours, Sandro and Katalina are departing on a one year cycling trip from Austria to Singapore they're leaving today and have set up a website if you want to read it this should be quite interesting.. www.horizontreisen.at/rueckenwind

Sandro used to work with Juerg at Reuters and they've done alot of cycling together.

Here are some pic's from our friend's party Mirjam and Henrik (coming soon)

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This is the giant whale Lars received.. he plays endless games of the whale devouring loads of things..


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oops that should be down in the Paris section... La Defense...


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This was the kids table.. sorry not many pictures here..




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Garrison Keillor: Sitting on top of the world
By Garrison Keillor
Published: November 13, 2008


Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation.
It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning.

He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool.

Chicago is cool.
Chicago!!!


We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor - he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher."

The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back.
He'll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law.

I just can't imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference - the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis - you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin.

Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early Nineties, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review, instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could've written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama's is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.
Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons.

His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails - imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.

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Liv pretending to be a kitten...speaking of which we found a little kitten a few days ago, so cute and stripy, looks just like Sonja's sweety cat, and we fed him for 3 days and decided we'd keep him if we couldn't find the owners and now he's wandered off or as I think our builder took him... Juerg said he collects abandoned cats and the cat mysteriously dissapeared yesterday about the time the builder left here... hmmppff oh yea and go obama!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I sent my ballot out 3 weeks ago and hope it will be counted this time.. remember the scandal of all the overseas votes not getting counted in the Bush - Gore election!e they have the truffle fest and donkey races every year.. we had a lovely time and the fall colors where beautiful when you could see through the fog.. it was nice to see the place again we did a similar trip when Lars was just three months old and we visited alot of the same places



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Here's Liv at her little friend's birthday party...she's growing up!


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Remember when having a bath was great fun???? It still is for Lars and Liv, I always have to put them in an hour before they go to bed because they play in there for ages...


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These are couple of pictures from Lars' first day at school, here's his teacher Sophie and that's his friend Max about to enter the door...


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The Chateau


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The kids just before bedtime... clean and fresh..

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Hello family just to give you a bit of an update. We arrived safely last Saturday and we are staying in a pretty cushy apartment in Euxes Vives in the center of Geneva until our furniture arrives next week. Absolutely beautiful weather and we,ve been to the beach almost everyday, I have even sunburnt my back so much that I need to seriously stay out of the sun for awhile, I just haven't figured out how you keep yourself covered and your children at the sametime?

We've met up with most of our old friends and of course everyone is just about to leave on vacation as you do in July and August here.

Juerg took Lars to play with his friend Max up in Messery and so Liv and I went to my favorite sushi restaurant in Geneva, I saw Lewis Hamilton walk by the window and then he came in the restaurant [for those of you who don't hang out with the rich and famous like i do, he's the top Formula One driver and really good looking and about 21 I think] he was with his pussycat doll singer girlfriend; but Liv and i just ignored her and went up and had a lovely chat with him, for some reason I told him we had just moved here as if he would care and he is so nice that he was asking how i liked it;I remember reading in one of the london trash magazines that he moved here to get away from all those annoying fans in Britain......so not bad for our first week back!

more later and some amazing photos of this beautiful place, i can't believe we live in such an amazing place!

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I've got a real mish-mosh of photos here..and i'm trying to do this rather quickly as I am sure I won't be able to post for awhile.. the movers have been and they've packed everything into boxes, I'm sitting on a table with the computer on my lap as I type this.. we'll be in Geneva for a couple of weeks until our furnture arrives and then we'll be in our house for awhile and then we'll find out what's in store for the fall... we're starting some restoration and remodeling on our house, this is what we found under the surround that the previous owners put on the house.. any ideas on how to clean this up??? That's some real French design there.


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