Looking For . . . .

Knowing how beautiful Pinehurst North Carolina is at this time of year I have been looking for signs of spring. I'm afraid that they are not so overt nor easily discovered. I did find it interesting that many small flowers just seem to pop up in the middle of lawns. A friend asked me if a certain one she had in her lawn was a weed. After carefully analyzing it and showing her examples of the same flower in pots for sale in the market, I told her it was a primrose. Although the picture here is not one of primroses, it is just another example of the "lawn flower". These pictures were not taken this week, but rather last week. This week we have had a return to winter. Actually it is colder than it was in December, January or February. Today, on Good Friday, we awoke to our first snow since we have been in Geneva. It was coming down thick and white, yet none stuck to the ground. A while ago Steve had made reservations for us to go to the Interlaken region to Grindenwald and spend a couple of days. However, we were thinking of temperatures a little warmer than the 30s and with a little less precipitation. We therefore put off the trip until the middle of May. Whenever we sit in our little living room and can hear the wind howling down the chimney, we know that it is a little too raw for an outdoor adventure. We have also discovered that the Swiss take their holidays very seriously. Everything--shops, schools, businesses are all closed on Good Friday. We don't know about Saturday, but definitely Sunday (they are always closed on Sunday). We have not found Switzerland to be devoutly religious-- just devout about time off and holidays.
I will be in Pinehurst from the 28th of March to the 14th of April. I need a "home" fix every so often. Steve told someone this past week that my trips home are the cost of him working in Europe. How true.


Not your typical chocolate bunny. This week when I went to a department store to get a few things I entered on the "food" level. There is a whole section of the store dedicated to Swiss chocolate. There were "Easter" chocolate displays everywhere. The amazing thing however was the crowds of people. I couldn't make it down any aisle and the lines at four different cash registers were 15-20 people deep. It's not like this is the only place to get chocolate in town, or even the best place. I can picture this scene replicated all over Geneva. After witnessing the extent to which people love their chocolate here, I feel that I am on the low end of the scale of chocolate obsession.
This is an apartment building that looks out over the lake. The architecture is pretty typical of the period that many of the buildings in Geneva were constructed. We do not live in this apartment. We don't want any of you to get the wrong idea of our life here in Switzerland