Appenzell

Took a trip out to Appenzell (where the cheese comes from) in Eastern Switzerland. The snow was deep in some parts, but the roads were dry and clear.

Thousands of other nutters had decided this was the first day of spring and had dusted off their bikes and decided which of the open passes to do. I went on a round trip to Appenzell via Wattwil and wondered at the beauty of Switzerland at the foot of Santis mountain and in Wil, a beautiful medieval town which looks like it was fortified in the 15th century.

Sun was shining and it was warm.

Great day.

Had a great pizza experience this eve in Montreux. Well, to be precice, the pizza was crap, but the experience was an experience.

The pizza first? Calzone - 46 square meters of crust, 20 cubic centimeters of filling, which consisted of cheese (a good start), ham, tomato and egg. Sadly the egg was scrambled and for some reason, the chef (I am being charitable with that description here) decided it was a good idea to include some anchovy fillets. WTF???? Repulsive and positively the worst Calzone I have had anywhere in the world.

I am sure I will be able to prod the errant pieces of vomit down the bidet plughole in the morning, once they have softened a bit.

So - the 'experience'....

I sat on my own in the middle of the restaurant and watched people. They watched me too, with more than a little suspicion.

There, on my left, was a French-Swiss guy of about my age, evidently with his son (15 or 16, public school - either Charterhouse (the 'buggers' school) or Stowe (the 'buggers' school), or Pangbourne (the Navy school. OK so that's another buggers' school too).

And it was clear the son's mum was no longer the dad's wife ... are you with me here? Because they were speaking English... but not just because they were speaking English. The old chap (my age) was telling the young lad that he would 'clear it' with his partner for the lad to come and stay occasionally. Apparently the new partner has a young nipper and expensive taste. The dad told the story about the Fust dishwasher he had before the new partner arrived ("Brand new old boy, with the instructions still in the machine, never used") . But dad came home one day and the partner had ordered a new one - a Miele - all stainless steel. Apparently she still does not know how to work the machine. I guess the disintegrated instructions have blocked the outflow :-)

And then on the other side of me was a male couple (camp as a row of tents). The dominant one was very stylishly dressed, had a shaved head and a liver-coloured labrador dog which he fed from his plate and had tiramasu for pudding (the guy, not the dog). The other half of the couple was watching his weight (raw meat and wasser mit gaz, no pasta, no pizza, no wine, no coffee).

And just next to them was a really strange couple. He was 70+, wearing a baseball cap, had tan-coloured, thinning brown hair (almost like he had combed it through with some brown boot polish) and a 'tantastic' complexion. His tee shirt said, and I quote, because i wrote it down on the napkin: 'Wild West Wealth Summit 2007" and the web link:

http://www.millionairemanifesto.com/

It's possible they were from the US.

He could hardly get around the place (pissed, or crippled - not sure) and She sat there serenely with highlighted blonde hair and a cerise pink suit, very tailored, very expensive with gold buttons and HUUUUGE cuffs. I reckon She was a runner-up in the Miss Texas 1974 contest. She had clearly had some work done on her face (bits of it were too smooth, gently tucked and looked 'pulled' in places) compared to her veiny, wrinkled hands.

I am not a very pleasant person, am I? Well. I just think that someone in Montreux may be writing a blog about a crap pizza and a strange, but observant guy in the restaurant, with big hair and big bags under his eyes. I had better be careful if I go back to the UK - apprently the government are going to tax supermarkets who give away shopping bags, 'willy-nilly' to cutomers. I have to hope that they don't catch up with me and see my sagging eyes as a revenue opportunity. Bugger that.

Engueta - or for viewers in the UK "Enjoy ur meaw".

It's that time of year... When a few friends feel it necessary to regale ALL the people they think are their friends about how wonderful and nuclear and solvent and academic their families are. All this festive syrup is contained on a cheap, thin piece of inkjet-printed A4 paper, stuffed into their Christmas card - with, of course, a second class stamp stuck on the envelope and 'posted in good time'. These are organized people...

You know the sort of thing. The letter follows a familiar form:

"Happy Christmas to one and all!!

Husband Bob has been terribly busy, which makes him very tired. But was promoted again this year and we are looking forward to his bonus :-)))))). I am keeping out of trouble with tennis lessons, the WI and a part time job at the local solicitors' office. Son Tarquin looks like he will get a double first from OXFORD. All he does is work, it seems, poor lad! Daughter Annabel is lovely and has such a wonderful social life."

When actually the letter should say something along the lines of:

"Bob farts incessantly, never shaves at the weekend, is a brief and inadequate lover and he's really getting on my tits. If it wasn't for the fat pay cheque - or for the fact that the tennis coach is married (and in love, would you believe???!!!) - I would leave the fat, farting bastard tomorrow.

Tarquin is a lazy little long-haired bugger. We had to fight like hell to stop him being thrown out of that third-rate shit-hole "Oxford Brooks" - a place that has the nerve to call itself a university. Ha ha. :-(. God knows - Tarquas hardly seems employable at the moment; smacked out of his tree, or drunk, or both - most of the time. And NEVER bothers to call home, even though we pay his extortionate mobile phone bill for him. Ungrateful waster.

Annabel is a slut and shags anything that moves. Men have stopped looking at me in the street and just drool at her. Little tart. And we suspect she is running the amphetamine and vice business in Croydon. At least she shows some evidence of a blossoming business acumen, bless her.

Happy Christmas? Probably not."

I am thinking of doing my own round-robin this year - so watch this space....

And sorry if you are someone who does write these letters, but hopefully you will now think twice about embarking on your odious annual holier-than-thou epistles to the unwashed no-hopers who you like to call friends. We could all do without them from now on. If you want to write something, write it - to each person - and ask them how they are, rather than be 100% on transmit. For me, this year. No cards, no cheap pieces of A4. Instead, I shall be buying some goats for families in Ethiopia via a dodgy website. Hopefully, the recipients will have some tasty recipes for cooking the pesky critters.

They can be tough when they get a little old.

And so can the goats.

Happy festiveness.

Pigging-out at swine Eat-a-thon

Wednesday was pig and sausage day - well some of it was...

The Neu Hausli (pronounced 'Noy Hoosley') Restaurant in Waedenswil offers a 'Metzger Menu' (butcher's menu) which consists entirely of pork dishes. And I do feel a bit guilty, having written at length about fat Americans, to now be writing in praise of an eating event that encourages excess.

There are 14 dishes to choose from - which, if nothing else - proves that you can eat every bit of a pig, except its squeak.

The six course 'menu' seemed to be a good idea and course one was a bean soup with leaks, followed by blood sausage, flavoured with cinnamon. Sounds odd, tastes great. Course three was a sausage (another one) containing mashed (pig) liver. It was a strange grey colour and looked like something you might 'rod' out of a blocked drain. However it tasted much better than it looked - flavoured with herbs and accompanied by sauerkraut.

A quick swig of ice-cold vodka followed - apparently as a 'digestif' - to you and me this means it is designed to cut through the fat you'd just jammed down your gullet.

Onwards and upwards - a plate of very thinly-sliced liver arrived - I think it was fried in butter, but I am told it was cooked in oil.

Then into the smoked pig - first 'speck', which is a thick slice of back bacon served with re-hydrated green string beans, followed by 'rippli' which is ham, served warm, with two slices of apple that seemed to have been sitting in some sort of liqueur.

And finally 'gnaggi' which apparently is the lower end of the pig's foreleg. Quite fatty, but the meat near the bone was so succulent it melted in your mouth.

By this point I was full. Strange, I know. So full that I refused the deep-fried, battered apple slices with vanilla sauce. And the numerate will have noticed that the six-course menu ended up being eight courses, even though I refused the last fence for fear of exploding.

All of this should be accompanied by beer, but we decided to polish-off a few bottles of Rioja - seemed to work as well as beer for me...

Then pfluemli - a plum-based liqueur served in hot water with sugar. Dangerous thing a 'pfluemli' because it doesn't really taste like it contains alcohol. And finally coffee.

Thanks to Markus and Eva Baumann, my fantastic neighbours, for inviting me - it was a great evening.

America is fascinating, flabtastic

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA


I have just finished breakfast of one omlette, two pieces of toast, some sort of flat-bread-pattie-thingy and two cups of repulsive coffee. In the process of scoffing this lot, I was fascinated that I had amassed 16 separate pieces of packaging waste.

This is bad - not least because I hate eating anything out of plastic.

And then I looked around the restaurant and saw the mass of flabby humanity tucking into huge plates, piled high with: bacon (3x thickness of Swiss bacon), sausages, grits, eggs, toast, muffins, ketchup, cheese, bagels brimming with cream cheese, sugar-sprinkled waffles the size of truck tyres, pancakes swimming in maple syrup and cubes of roasted potatoes. Some of these good folk were so fat, they got their backsides wedged into their chairs. You could have got two of me sitting side-by-side in one chair - and my arse is not so small.

Some of the men's bellies were so large and round that they had to belt their jeans up under their armpits - any lower and the belt would have been on the downward slope and their trousers would have fallen down. And one woman's flab started just below her ears and gently sloped out and down for several feet before coming back up and in just above the top of her legs, which were clad in a fetching pair of bright pink trackie bottoms.

And after breakfast I wanted to take a stroll, but was warned not to by the friendly receptionist. She told me: [1] There are no sidewalks, [2] the traffic is heavy and dangerous so i should not walk along the pavement (road to you and me) and [3] - don't go into the woods without a dayglow orange baseball cap because it's huntin' season and there will be guys out there blasting away at anything that looks like a deer... Apparently my salt and pepper grey hair is the same colour as the species of deer around here and some of the guys only need a hint of movement in the undergrowth before they unleash several rounds of rifled shotgun slugs into a bush. Holy crap.

So, lots of fatty food and no chance of a spot of light exercise for fear of being run-over or shot. Not healthy. Surely there should be a law against shooting people who are not morbidly obese - or at least a defined season for hunting the overweight. A 'Fat Hunt', of sorts...

This phenomenon - of fatness and the aggressively anti-exercise environment I found myself in, so fascinated me that I looked up the Center for Disease Control website, the US medical authority, to see if they had any pearls of wisdom. But apart from stats and maps of obesity in the country and learned papers on fatness in the US, they failed to mention in plain English that the reason people here are fat is because they eat too much of the wrong foods and don't exercise. The nearest the CDC gets to this is, and I quote:

"Whether you want to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, it’s important to understand the connection between the calories your body takes in (through the foods you eat and the beverages you drink) and the calories your body uses (through normal body functions, daily activities, and physical activity)".

Still awake? Normal bodily functions - does this mean we should all consciously remember to go for a dump; set it up as a daily reminder on our mobiles? Daily activities - can you lose more weight watching baseball or American football on TV? We should be told.

I fear for this country - and not just because of its all-pervading, rabid religious extremism and neo-conservatism. Nor because of its interesting foreign policy. Obesity will do this nation in...it is the threat within.

Its been a funny old day. The weather is crap and clouds obscure the sun I know is there... But there was brilliant sunshine today - beautiful, pure, Swiss sunshine. And I hope those shafts of light continue to illuminate my life.

That's all for today...no pictures, no wit. But this is today.

India 3

The horn is more important than the brakes.

A few beers on Friday night didn't set me up too well for the 06.00 start for Mysore on Saturday.

The intention of the driver, Raghu, (pictured looking bemused at having to chase across the paddy fields, through coconut glades and around market stalls at Mach 2 on the way to the tourist trap that is Mysore) was that I visit the palace in Mysore. Other pictures can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamroscoe/sets/72157602230328682

I was far more interested in catching the local colour on the way, than tramping round some gold-encrusted palace in bare feet having had my camera confiscated at the entrance gate. But Raghu insisted. So after a 5.5 hour journey (because of photo stops) - instead of a 3 hour journey from Bangalore - I did tramp around the palace.

But this blog is more of a road movie than a tourism briefing...

En route we stopped at Restaurant Kamat in Lokaruchia (same as the one we had eaten lunch at earlier in the week) and had the same meal - 'Idli' (pronounced to rhyme with Diddly and spelt with an 'i' at the end and not a 'y') which is mashed rice, steamed in banana leaves, served on banana leaves with a selection of curry, chutney and yogurt on the side. The curry was a sambar and contains onions, turmeric, chili power and 'nine or ten other ingredients'.

The yogurt consisted of coconut and peanuts mashed together, chili and cardamom leaves. So, this was a meal for two, including mineral water, coffee and a persistent fly that danced on most of the food I was about to put into my mouth.

Worryingly, there was a cow-shed within 5 meters of the restaurant, so I only hope the fly had the decency to dance on my food as a main course, prior to wallowing in the cowshit round the corner for dessert. Cost of the meal: 87 rupees - less than a quid, about 2 francs.

Back on the road, I asked Raghu about the constant sounding of horns on the road - coupled with a total lack of aggression on the part of the honkers and honkees. He said it was easy to explain: "If you don't use your horn a lot, you have to slow down." Brakes are important, but the horn is indispensable. Work that one out...

There were women working in paddy fields and a couple of labourers having lunch of rice out of newspaper leaning up against their ancient bicycles. I was so pleased that they didn't mind me taking their photos as they were a couple of real characters. Raghu interpreted for us.

Then, as I was about to leave, the extortion began. I ended up paying them 100 rupees for them being my models and Raghu said that was maybe a little on the high side (about 2.5 francs - or a quid to the Brits). He said they had told him that now they had enough money to go for a drink. Good, I thought - they can have a couple of pints of Kingfisher down the pub after work, shoot the breeze and relax for a while. I was pleased to have been able to help them enjoy a little light relief. Raghu then went on to tell me that I really needed to be briefed about what 'having a drink' meant in certain echelons of Indian society.

Apparently these guys will go and buy 180ml each of highly distilled sugarcane-based alcohol and neck the lot in about 5 minutes. No chat, no quiet cigarette and a leaf through the Times of India - just hardcore drinking to get drunk. I wonder if they are distantly related to the Finns?

Raghu explained that some of the cane alcohol distilled in the countryside was dangerous stuff. Not infrequently a number of the men in a village get blind-drunk. Literally. Sometimes the impurities in the alcohol cause permanent blindness - some even die.

Then on to a market near the Tipu Sultan's summer palace at Srirangapattana. Tipu Sultan suffered a defeat at the hands of the British (surprise, surprise) in the late 1700's. Apparently the East India Company wanted to get a grip of the agricultural and mineral resources, so they teamed up with the British Army, under one Colonel Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), beat the crap out of the local army and paved the way for another bout of enlightened and sensitive colonisation (nicking gold, the Sultan's clothes, furniture and weapons - most of which are in safe-keeping in British museums).

Funny how the army fought so the commercial enterprises could succeed then - unlike now, when firms like Blackwater do the fighting for the armed forces in Iraq.

But I suspect the market was probably open for business as the battle for the palace and surroundings was in full-swing. A market guy selling cuts from a recently-slaughtered goat really thought he had a chance to sell me a leg. But when i made it clear that I could not possibly buy it - he went on to offer me the goat's absolute culinary peak - it's head, which lay on the floor with a slightly surprised expression on its face. This was less difficult to refuse.

The market sold mainly fresh fruit and veg, literally tons of onions, spices like turmeric, flower blooms and blocks of sugar. And just outside the market a guy was collecting silkworm cocoons from sundry blokes on bicycles who turned up with the produce neatly packed in patterned silk sheets.

Leaving the town, I noticed a refreshingly frank and direct sign on a scruffy-looking roadside doctor's surgery - "Treatment for Piles and Fistulas". One wonders why this speciality has sprung up here. With lowest winter temperatures of 18 degrees C, I cannot imagine that anyone finds it necessary to sit for long periods on radiators.

On the way back to the hotel there was a bus in a field - somehow it had veered off the main highway. This is so surprising because most buses have at least 60% bald tyres - so why were there not more buses veering off the road and into the local countryside? Just approaching Bangalore at 18.00 hours, I noticed a huge increase in lorry traffic - the rule there is that freight travels at night - starting at 6pm sharp. And the lorries are worse than the buses - at least half of them have no tail lights and nearly all their tyres are bald. And the stats are bad - 80,000 killed, 1.2 million injured and 300,000 permanently disabled annually on roads in the country.

As was explained to me - the horn is more important than the brakes because otherwise you would have to slow down. Seems some poor buggers get to slow down on a more permanent basis than they bargained for. Shame.