Four Months Later: Snow and St. Nick

Greetings to all of you readers out there. I heartily apologize to those of you who were waiting with bated breath for the blog post that never came. Well, here it is, complete with yet another new form of multimedia for you to enjoy! Don't scroll down and look: that would be cheating. Just keep reading and you'll get to it. I promise. This blog post is dedicated to Mrs. M. Ash, who told my mother I needed to update my blog, who then e-mailed me to that effect.

Yesterday was the four-month anniversary of my arrival in Switzerland! This means I have already finished more than a third of my "year," which is actually more like eleven months, since I arrived in August and will leave sometime in July. I've been pretty busy lately, which might explain the lack of frequent posts, but no worries, you will be filled in. Photos will be included. And I have the feeling it won't all fit into this post, because I don't have the stamina to write that much in one sitting and I doubt you have the stamina to read that much in one sitting.

Let's pull a Mr. Jones history experiment (Mission Valley, anyone?) and start with the most recent events, working backward. Okay, so I just ate dinner. Before that I rode the bus home and before that I went to a glasses shop in town and had my glasses adjusted for free, which I had thought impossible in the Land of the Swiss. Before that, I went to the library, and before that I practiced piano at school. And before that, I ... well, you get the picture.

Speaking of pictures, let me share with you a side-by-side comparison of a photo you have seen before and a new one of the same subject covered in SNOW! That's right, we had our first snow a couple of weeks ago in Zumholz. I noticed a strange phenomenon that day: as we neared the city, there appeared to be less and less snow visible out of the bus windows. And once I was in the city, there was no snow at all accumulated on the ground and I had to deal with precipitation in "winter mix" form. It was nasty. I guess Zumholz has a slightly higher elevation than Fribourg; it's tucked away in the pre-pre-Alps. So, the beehives in summer...and winter. I love snow. Good thing I picked Switzerland, right?

And here's one of my house I took during my early-morning walk to the bus stop, which explains the darkness, despite DST:

Last weekend was an eventful one. There were two events, in fact: the festival of St. Nicolas, and my belated Thanksgiving adventure. St. Nicolas is officially on December 6, which was a Sunday, so the festivities in Fribourg took place on the 5th, a Saturday. Not much ever takes place on a Sunday here. Anyway, I went to the St. Nicolas thing on Saturday with two girls from my class, Coline and Fitore, and an American exchange student, Katelyn. It was pretty chilly but I barely noticed because it was so crowded that I felt like I was huddling with the entire city of Fribourg to keep warm. We started off by Collège Saint-Michel, where the parade began. It consisted of a walking choir wearing some black epic costumes and in some cases carrying candles, followed by another walking choir wearing orange and red epic costumes, followed by St. Nicolas seated on his donkey plus his entourage of minions, who wore black robes, had their faces painted black, and carried switches which they supposedly use to beat children who have been naughty. (The nice ones get chocolate, clementines, and peanuts.) It was a little like the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade on a smaller scale, what with the Santa character ending the parade. St. Nicolas threw gingerbread squares to outstretched hands. I snatched one off the ground and shared. It was delicious. And I was definitely obeying the 10-second rule because I guarantee every gingerbread square that fell to the ground was snatched up well within the space of ten seconds.

These were the parade members with epic orange and red costumes. Notice the decorated tree in the background.

Here's a closeup of the same decorated tree, a little later when it got a little darker. Nice, eh?

From Saint-Michel, we made our way through a "shortcut," which at least a third of the people there were also taking, to a crowded street further along in the parade route. We watched the same parade go past again but failed this time to get any gingerbread. Then we walked in the direction of the cathedral from which St. Nicolas would address the crowd. Unfortunately, we were a bit too late and ended up around a corner from the cathedral and couldn't see St. Nicolas. We could hear him, though, due to a lovely microphone setup. At least, we could hear his voice. It was a bit tricky to understand, though, for whatever reason. The speech was in French and German. This St. Nicolas had a terrible German accent. Clearly a native French speaker. I'm guessing he made some general remarks about the state of things in the world, etc. Every once in a while, there was a cheer from the people closer to the cathedral, so I'm assuming they could hear him better. After the speech was over and the crowd dissipated, we went and drank more cinnamon tea (black tea steeped with cinnamon stick). It's delicious. You should try it sometime. Then Katelyn and Fitore and I went to a restaurant and ate fries and sat around and talked for a couple of hours while Katelyn and I waited for our buses.

Here's St. Nicolas and one of his entourage, who actually had red eyes until I took the Picasa Redeye tool to them. This is a red-suited minion, not a black-suited one. Those were harder to photograph due to low light conditions.

Okay, I think I'm running out of steam. The Thanksgiving story is going to have to wait until next time. I'll give you a cliffhanger if you like, though. Then it would become really great episodic literature.

I had been wondering where exactly the turkey was. I never knew for sure whether it was frozen or fresh when purchased. All I knew was that my host mother had to go to five stores before she found one. About an hour before I wanted to start cooking, I ventured out and asked of the turkey's whereabouts. "It's in the fridge," they said. I asked if it was thawed. Affirmative. So I went to the refrigerator and opened the door, and I saw....

There's your cliffhanger. Don't you just love them?

And I know you've been thinking this whole time, what about the special multimedia thing? Well, here it is and it didn't come without hard work. I recorded myself playing the piano in the auditorium at school, which is where I practice since there is no piano at home. I apologize for the sound quality. I recorded it as a voice memo on my iPod. Once I got a recording I was happy with, I had to figure out how to get it into my blog. It took me a couple of days, and this is what I did: I changed a setting in iTunes and used it to change the file to mp3 format, then used a free file-hosting website to upload the file to the internet and give it its own url, then found the code for the Google Reader media player and pasted the mp3's url into the code. And here it is. If you just skipped the last sentence, I don't blame you. I wish I could have skipped it too.

This is the sixth movement of Brahm's Fantasies for Piano, Opus 116. It's an intermezzo.

Brahms Intermezzo Op. 116 No. 6