Venturing Through Venice

We spent three fantastic days in Venice. The full album for Italy is available.

We arrived in Venice on the high speed train from Bologna in the late afternoon. From there, we took the very slow water bus down the grand canal to our hotel. The bus was amazingly slow, zig zagging across the canal every 100m or so, but eventually we got there and dropped our stuff off. 

Then, we walked to the other side of St. Mark's square to Locale for dinner with Tom and Ginny. Locale was a multi-course tasting menu with a wine pairing and it was excellent. The wine pairing in particular went very well with the dishes and included a vermouth and soda, an orange wine and a desert wine. Each dish was a riff on a classic venetian dish but updated. 

The next morning, we went down for breakfast at the B&B, which was a complete disaster. The only thing Catherine could eat was the coffee and everything else was pre-packaged breads and spreads. So I grabbed enough to keep me going and Catherine was stuck eating an energy bar.

We then made our way over to Tom and Ginny's hotel where the four of us took a water taxi to a glass workshop on the island of Murano. There, they were working on flowers for a chandelier and then they did a demonstration making a glass horse in one go (about 4 minutes). Then, we went through the shop, which was almost an art gallery. There were many stunning pieces, some practical, others purely sculptural. 

From the glass workshop, we took another water taxi over to Burano. Burano is a fisherman's village known for its brightly painted houses and lace makers. The lacework is painstakingly manual and the end result really isn't that captivating for the effort put in. Each woman specializes in a different stitch so a given pieces is made by 3-5 different people. It's not surprising that it's a dying art. 

The small island was swarmed with people taking posed pictures in front of the brightly colored houses. Instagram is probably the best/worst thing to happen to the island! The houses remind me of pictures of Newfoundland. There are two stories about why the houses are so brightly colored. First, the houses are easier for the fishermen to find in the fog of the lagoon when they return in the wee hours of the morning. Second, they were just drunk and thought that it would be a great idea. It's hard to tell which story is real, but the parallel to Newfoundland doesn't help settle the matter.

For lunch, we had some delicious food at the Black Cat. It started with Prosecco from the tap and a full plate of appetizers consisting of various seafood. For the main Ginny and I had the go fish rissotto, which was the main reason we came to the island. It's made using a fish broth of little go fish that come from the lagoon. They used to be the garbage fish that you'd catch by accident. Then, it's rice and not much else and it was spectacular. Full of flavour, very creamy and the rice was the perfect texture past el dente but not mush. Tom and Catherine had the spaghetti and clams, which was also excellent and tasted of the sea and garlic. 

After lunch, we wandered through the shops on the island and then eventually made our way back to the dock. From there, we took the water bus back to the main island in Venice. It was a much slower trip than the water taxis, taking 40 min. Water taxis are speedboats, while the busses are much larger and designed to carry many people. So it's not that surprising, but we were definitely glad that we had the taxies earlier that were setup by the hotel. 

Back on the main island, we slowly made our way back to St. Mark's square on foot. Along the way, we stopped for some window shopping and at a few bars to have spritzes and cicchetti. Cicchetti is the Venetian equivalent of tapas and tends to be very heavy on the seafood. There was also a lot of olive oil and even some veggies like artichoke hearts from big artichokes.

We had dinner at CoVino. It's a super small restaurant (only 15 seats) with two seatings a night. In Venice, they typically don't expect to turn a table over. Once you have the reservation for dinner, the table is yours for the night. CoVino is an exception because of its size. They were saying that it's gotten so popular that Venetians can never go there for dinner because it's always booked out at least two weeks in advance by tourists and a Venetian would never book that far in advance. It was another prix-fixe menu with a really eclectic wine selection. The food was excellent but the portions for different dishes were very unpredictable. I had some roasted clams with tomatoes to start. My main was a seafood pasta that filled me up and then for desert, I had watermelon soaked in absinth that was very refreshing. 

After dinner, we strolled our way back to the hotel through St. Mark's square at night. The square was lit up with candles in every arch casting magical lighting over all the tourists. It was very lively with four different restaurants dueling it out with their string quartets playing Vivaldi and other classics.

On our last in Venice, Catherine's joints finally caught up to her and we had to take it easier. We had breakfast at a cafe near the hotel where Catherine could get some eggs and I had some pastries. Then we did a quick visit to Ca' Rezzonico which was a trader's house and is now the main repository of 18th century art and furniture in Venice. It even has a transplanted apothecary with herb jars, alembics and all the other tools of the trade of an 18th century apothecary. After a quick visit, we went back to the hotel so that Catherine could rest up her joints.

Around lunch, we ventured forth going towards RosaRossa, a pizza place that Catherine found online with gluten free pizzas. It had the best gluten free pizza either of us has tasted, so Catherine glutted herself while I had the spaghetti nero, or spaghetti with cuttlefish and ink. It's a classic Venetian dish and has an intense briney flavour that can be a little overwhelming. It would be perfect for an appetizer, but was honestly a little much for a whole plate. 

After lunch, we walked over to the Rialto bridge, which is both beautify and packed and then made our way back to St. Mark's square. There, we waited in line to see the St. Mark's Basilica which was a little nuts. The inside is dripping in gold, mostly in the form of mosaics showing stories from the scriptures. The floors were intricate geometric mosaic patterns that were stunning, but usually overlooked under people's feet. Finally, there was a treasure trove, litterally. A ton of relics and treasures that were stolen from Constantinople in the sack of the 4th crusade. The Venetians were bastards to convince the crusaders to do that sack! For a long time, the Basilica was the Doge's personal chapel, which was also criminal given its size and treasure contained within.

After seeing the Basilica, we stopped for a quick coffee and then went into the Doge's palace. Most of the main floor burnt down in 1483 so the rooms were rebuilt and re-decorated after that using the full wealth of Venice. There was some amazing artistry. Most of the work of government was done there and different rooms were for different assemblies. There were many assemblies like the council of 10, the naval council, the court and the council of all citizens. They had a very complex form of government that survived for 1000 years. Most of the visit was about the art, but it made me want to learn more about how their government was setup. Actually, most of the museums in Venice are about the art that's been produced in the city. We weren't able to find the museum about the history, government, or how Venice is constructed, which I found a little odd. 

After the Doge's palace we met up with Tom and Ginny for dinner at a pizza place we passed the day before. Catherine's second pizza of the day wasn't as good as lunch, but it was still quite tasty and cheap. It was a great low key way to finish up the trip.

In the morning, we woke up before dawn and took a 5am water taxi to the airport. Of course you can take a boat to the airport! It was a little magical seeing the city in the wee hours of the morning when the lights are on but the city is covered in a quiet blanket where all you can hear is the lap of the lagoon. 

Exploring Emilia-Romagna

We spent the first chunk of our time in Emilia-Romagna in the Po river valley home to some of the best food in Italy. The full album for Italy is available.

We started by taking a train out of Switzerland to Tirano Italy. The train ride was spectacular winding its way down the mountains by many gorgeous glaciers. From Tirano, we took another train to Milan. It was a slow going, cramped train but had some nice scenery as it made its way down Lake Como. In Milan, we split with Ginny and Tom as they rented a car to go to Lake Garda, while we continued on by train. We debated popping over to the Milan cathedral as it is supposed to be one of the most stunning in the world. However, given the amount of travel we were doing, we decided against it. Instead, we just took the next high speed train to Bologna. From the train station, we took the bus to the airport to pick up a rental rental car and then drove to our agriturismo near Reggio Emilia. 

It was my first experience driving in Italy and I was to find that it is fairly stressful. The rural roads are barely larger than a lane but in both direction with sharp ditches on either side. It's a little antsy passing somebody when you're both going 60kph. The freeways are more chaotic than I'm used to because each lane has a different speed limit, 30kph different and of course people don't actually follow that limit. The net result is that there is a very large variance in speed of cars so there's a lot of passing. In between the freeway and the rural roads, there are a ton of roundabouts. I got used to them fairly quickly but it made the driving feel slow because you were hitting a roundabout every 3-5 minutes and had to keep track of where to go at each point. 

The agriturismo was very nice. Called Verdenoce, it's a renovated barn with large rooms in the middle of a vineyard. We were on the top floor in a larger room than we paid for. Since we were only staying two nights, it probably made sense to give us that room to fit in other guests staying longer. Breakfasts each morning were great and consisted of eggs, bacon twice as flavorful as what you get in the US, some dehydrated zucchini drizzled with balsamic and oil and a large assortment of pastries & bread.

After dropping off our stuff at the agriturismo, it was fairly late, so we went out for dinner. We went to Ristorante Mazzalasino which was listed in one of our guidebooks. It's a locals hole in the wall restaurant just on the edge of the town. We were the first people there for the evening and had to stick our heads into the kitchen for them to open the door. Then we had some chaos trying to order because they didn't speak English and eventually had to call in one of the off-duty waiters who did. The food was excellent and very cheap. It was cooked by the matron of the family who was very friendly and accommodating. We started with an antipasta plate composed of many different cured meats from the area. Then we had some pasta. Catherine had some gluten free past that they cooked specially for her, while I had a sample of different pastas. It included raviolis of pumpkin where the pumpkin flavour just punches you in the face and others of spinnach/ricotta. For the main, we had a donkey stew, which is the speciality of the house and was great. For desert, I had a cake dripping in amaretto. Everything was accompanied by local lambrusco. In North America, we think of lambrusco as a sweet, sparkling, red wine, but the version that is drunk in the upper Poe valley is dry, low alcohol and refreshing. It was a lot of fun. Total cost for this feast: 50 euros for the two of us.

In the morning, we got up early as we had a tour scheduled on the other side of Parma (about an hour away) that started at Antica Corte Pallavicina. Antica Coreta used to be a toolhouse on the Po river in the 1400s. It's been restored and now operates as a hotel, a Michelin star restaurant (where everything is grown on premise) and producer of Culatello di Zibello.

Our tour started by going to a parmesan reggiano factory. They were finishing up making the cheese for the day. It has to be done in the morning to meet the DOC requirements. The milk is trucked to the factory the night before and sits in a vat overnight. All the milk must come from cows in the area fed on grass. In the morning, it is pumped into very large inverted copper cones where it is seeded with the previous day's production and warmed to separate the curds from the whey. Each vat produces enough for two wheels of cheese. After separating, the curds are pulled out of the vat and squeezed into molds to form the wheel. The wheels are then soaked in a 50/50 saltwater bath for a week and then aged in a barn for 18 or 24 months. During the aging time, the cheese is cleaned with brushes and turned regularly so that it doesn't get holes as it hardens. When we were there, the consortium inspectors were on-site grading the cheese and applying the parmesan reggiano seal if they met standards. To grade the cheese, they take the wheel off the shelf and hit it with a small white hammer. Based on the sound, they know how solid the cheese is and thus its grade. 

From the cheese factory, we went to the restaurant's farm. It's used exclusively to provide produce for the restaurant except for the meat that is aged. There is a climate controlled aging house for the first few months that the hams age. Culatello di Zibello is a cured ham like Prosciutto di Parma but includes only the meat of the ham instead of the whole leg like Prosciutto. Once the leg is deboned, the meat is salted and massaged with wine and then stuffed into a pig bladder and wrapped in twine. The meat is then aged for at least 12 months, close enough to the Po river to have high humidity from the fog coming off the river. This allows the beneficial mold to grow. The resulting meat is amazing and has very deep flavors. 

After leaving the farm, we went back to the castle, where the culatello are aged for most of their life in the basement. When you first enter the basement, you're assaulted by the smell of the mold. The Japanese lady who was taking with the tour with us thought it was absolutely disgusting and almost wretched. It's interesting because there are some fermented Japanese products that smell vile to me, but this cellar smelled pretty good. I guess your tastes in fermented foods is very cultural. In the cellar, there are hundreds of the meats hanging from the ceiling. Each one is about 8lbs and sells for around $300-$400. Some of them have been tagged for specific people or restaurants. We saw one tag for Alain Ducasse, the famous French chef. 

After visiting the cellar, we had a little bit of time before lunch at the restaurant, so we did the self walking tour through the flood plain near the castle. It was nice to get outside even if it was disgustingly hot. Along the way, we saw their black pigs. It's a species that was traditionally raised in the area but has almost been driven out by a white pig that grows faster. The chef at the restaurant is trying to bring them back both for tradition and because the resulting culatello has even more flavor.

Lunch was included with our tour and was in the less formal osteria version of the restaurant. It included their sweet sparkling red wine, which wasn't very good, but somehow worked really well with the culatello. The meal started with a large plate of meats, parmesan and pickled vegetables. Of course, the culatello was the star of the show. After that, I had some delicate spinach/ricotta ravioli while Catherine had a ratatouille risotto. The risotto was different, but it worked really well. The main was game hen in balsamic vinegar. Finally, for desert, I had a pastry, while Catherine got a ginormous bowl of fruit. It was just big wedges of apples, pears and oranges. We would find out later that in Italy, you aren't expected to eat the whole fruit bowl (which would have been impossible), just take what you want. It's unclear if it gets re-served to other patrons.

After stumbling out of lunch, we drove to Parma. We saw the church, including a gorgeous baptistry and then walked around town doing a little shopping for Christmas gifts. Parma's a small, quaint, town.

In the evening, we returned to the agriturismo where we got a recommendation for dinner. We ate at an Argentinean steakhouse, but it was still Italian so you could get pasta. So, I had a guitar string tagliatelle and ragu. The pasta is square in profile because it's made by making a sheet of fresh pasta and then pushing it through metal wires like guitar strings. Catherine had a fantastic steak with arugula and a balsamic vinegar sauce. On the side, we had a bunch of roasted vegetables and salad.

Our next day was focused on Modena. We drove into town in the morning and made our first stop the church. Like most medieval towns, the church is the center of life. This church includes an adjoining tower which acted as the watch tower for the town. We climbed up inside the tower, which was interesting because the stairs are on the inside of the wall but the middle of the tower is all open. From the top, there is definitely a great view of the town. Back on the ground, we tried to find the carving of a hermaphorodite on the outside of the church, which is famous, but we couldn't find it. There are a lot of other interesting figures though. From the church, we went across the palace to look at some historical rooms with paintings in them from local artists. The rooms are part of the town hall.

We had lunch at Trattoria Il Fantino, which is a low key, but very busy place. I had some piadina, which is a local Emilia-Romagna flat bread. They were served in a basked with a bunch of accompaniments including lard, a soft cheese, arugula, sliced meats and ribs braised in wine. You slice the flatbread in half and then stuff it with your choice. Each piadina was about the size of a dollar pancake. Catherine of course couldn't each the piadina, so she just had a plate of the ribs and some potatoes. We washed it down in more of the local dry Lambrusco. Very reasonable for lunch. 

From lunch, we went to Acetaia di Giorgio, a traditional balsamic vinegar house. It's the oldest house in Modena, starting commercial production in the mid 1800s. It is actually a house. Traditionally, families would make their wine in the basement and their vinegar in the attic. They only make the highest grade of vinegar, labeled Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena. It is made only of grape must that is first cooked down. Then, it is aged in a solera of barrels for 12 years or 25 years for the extra old designation. The barrels are left open so that during the summer, the vinegar slowly evaporates and condenses into a rich, tongue-ringing syrup. Each barrel in the sequences gets a little smaller because of this evaporation. Each year, some of the vinegar is removed from the oldest barrel and then replaced with vinegar from the next barrel in line. This process is repeated and then new must is added to the first barrel. The barrels can be made of different woods and so producers use different woods to bring more complexity to the flavours. The barrels are not charred the way wine or whiskey barrels are and so they can be used forever. Acetaia di Giorgio only makes 2000 bottles of vinegar a year, each of which is only 100ml large. We tasted a number of their vinegars. The 25 year was definitely more complex but there was a larger difference between the vinegar made in juniper barrels vs. the mixed barrel version. The juniper was spicier. 

After our tour, we drove to an agriturismo just outside Faenza surround by kiwi and grape orchards. This agriturismo is a restaurant and working winery. It's a little weird because they had tractors running around beside the pool and tennis courts they built for guests. When I booked the stay, they said that their restaurant would be closed so we got some recommendations from Fabio in Faenza since that's where he grew up. It turns out that we could have eaten at the agriturismo, but we went into Faenza anyways. In Faenza, we walked around town. It was very lively, especially in the main square. We also looked at some of the ceramics shops which the town is famous for. We went to La Baita for dinner. It's a deli/wine shop during the day and restaurant at night. The sommelier was very knowledgable about the wine. The area primarily grows sangiovese for the reds and so is very distinct than lambrusco territory further up the Po river. The most interesting thing we tried was a white made of Albana. It was apricoty and floral with a touch of minerality. 

Next was a morning in Ravenna. We drove into town relatively early so that we would have enough time. Ravenna is known for its mosaics. On the outside, the churches looked like the Byzantine chapel I saw in Istanbul: flying buttresses made of simple looking bricks. The insides are why the town is a Unesco heritage site. Inside, there are jaw dropping mosaics from the 800s that are still crystal clear and have lots of gold. There's a huge variety of scenes but of course, all of them are stories from the good book.

Ravenna is also home to a number of mosaic workshops. Some just create simplistic reproductions of some of the famous pieces in the churches, but others are much more unique and have true artistry. We browsed through some of them between churches. For lunch, we stopped at Osteria dei Battibecchi right across from Dante's tomb. It's a relaxed place and we took our time eating on the square outside the restaurant, complete with a bottle of prosecco.

After lunch, we went back to the car and drove to the Bologna airport where we dropped off the car, then took the bus into town and checked into our B&B. We stayed at the Christina Rossi B&B which is run by a brother and sister about our age. I think they owned the building and rented out rooms on the upper floors, while serving breakfast in their living room on the first floor. It was an interesting setup and was quite comfortable.

After checking in, we went to the two towers to meet up with Fabio, one of my roommates from Pittsburgh. He lives in Bologna and now works for a mining equipment company. He was fairly late because he ran into some serious traffic getting home from work. So in the meantime, we just watched the people, mostly students, bustling around the square.

Before dinner, Fabio gave us a whirlwind tour of downtown. There are many churches, the most interesting of which is the basilica, which has had a few foiled bombings in the last few years. The reason: it contains a picture of Mohammed being tortured in hell. The town has a lot of arch-covered sidewalks, apparently because buildings were taxed based on their square footage of the ground floor. So, people would build out over the sidewalk! No taxes, more room. He also took us to the university pub which serves bad wine but is an institution as old as the university (which was founded in 1088). It's packed every night and fairly often you can see the chancellor of the university or the mayor of Bologna hanging out.

The madonna in the church of
Santa Maria Maggiore in Ravenna. She is
depicted with a swollen face
and is thus considered a place
to pray for those with chronic health
issues.

Fabio couldn't join us for dinner as he had to get home to his wife and daughter, but he dropped us off at a classic Bologna restaurant. We had a great bottle of red wine Fabio recommended from near Faenza. For a start, we had a meat plate including a large portion of the local speciality: mortadella. Frankly, it was good in the same way a good hot dog is good, but it was still Bologna, which isn't my favorite. Next, I had tortellini in broth, which was divine. The broth was clean and flavourful and the tortellini were little pockets of meaty goodness. For the main, I had a veal dish which was basically a croque madame, but with a veal patty instead of ham. It was tasty, but was a very heavy dish with a heavy sauce. For desert, we had a very sharp lemon sorbet, which acted as a great digestif to cut through the heavy food.

The next morning, we had our cooking class. It was a private class with three dishes. We specifically wanted to learn how to do fresh, gluten-free pasta so we did a tagliatelle with ragu, a chestnut gnocchi and poached pears for desert. We made the tagliatelle using a gluten free pasta flour and super rich eggs. The flour was heavy on the starch, so it was dry and you used less of it, but it also had a lot of psyllium husk and a little xantham gum. Those two binders (along with the quality of the eggs) were probably the key. Our instructor actually said that the eggs were special pasta eggs. I know that in the US some chefs will add extra yolks to get a similar effect to Italian eggs. The ragu was all about the meat. There's a touch of tomato paste, but other than that, it's just sofrito, some ground meat (pork and beef), a rich chicken and beef broth and some salt. No pepper. And of course a couple of hours of low heat cooking. We made the pasta and rolled it out using rolling pins, which was a first for me. It wasn't that hard using a pasta rolling pin because it is so long and has enough weight that you barely push down on it.

The chestnut gnocchi  was made of just waxy potatoes, chestnut flour and eggs. We formed them using a fork to get the ridges and pick up the sauce. They were very easy to make. The sauce was a two part one. The bottom of the dish was a parmesan cream, made of just those two ingredients warmed up. Then the gnocchi was tossed in a porchini, broth and onion sauce. Having two sauces was an interesting approach and it worked very well.

For desert, the poached pears were done in red wine spiced with warm spices, thyme and bay. The herbs added another layer of the flavour which was really nice. It was served with a lemon pudding, but we didn't cook the corn starch long enough and it was very thick. We could have done without, or with a very light lemon curd to contrast with the richness of the pears.

Of course, lunch was eating the food we had just prepared. Can't go wrong there. After that, we took a cab to the train station and then took the high speed train to Venice for the last stop on the trip. 

Pondering Pontresina

The second half of the week in Switzerland was based in Pontresina, in the Bernina Valley and just a few miles from St. Moritz. See the full album.

We started the week arriving by train in the morning and going to our hotel, the Grand Kronenhof. It's one of those very old, high end European hotels with clinking china, amazing workmanship and floors that creak with age. Staying there was definitely a splurge by Catherine's parents.

We arrived too early to check into our rooms, so we changed into hiking clothes and stored our bags. Then, we took the hotel shuttle to the Punt Muragl funicular. The funicular starts its trip going through a forest, then it comes around a corner and pops out of the tree line before arriving at the restaurant and hotel at the top. We had a quick lunch at the restaurant where I had the Grisons soup. It's a soup served all over the valley in the mountain huts made of barley, sausage and a little cream. It's great fuel for a hike! Everybody else had rosti, which is shaved potatoes that are fried almost exactly like hashbrowns. They are then topped with cheese, or a sausage.

Our hike for the day went along the ridge back towards Pontresina. In the first half, we hiked up 300m to a hut and had some glugwine. Then, we continued along the cliff slowly making our way down to the Pontresina chairlift. Some sections on the way down were a little tricky and included cables on one side and a nice long fall on the other. Along the entire hike, we were graced with spectacular views of St. Moritz on its lake and two glacial valleys visible across the Bernina. As we hiked, the clouds came in and out across the mountains creating incredible lighting to see the scenery. Along the chairlift on the way down, we were treated to a series of wooden carvings of animals in the area. It wasn't a long hike, but it was definitely had a high reward to effort ratio.

For dinner on our first night, we dressed up and went to the main dining room at the hotel. It is very old school with jackets required, more silverware than you know what to do with, and the courses are presented under silver lids that are lifted by the waiters in a choreographed dance. The food itself was traditional french and thus high on technique. It was good but we had better meals on our trip. At the end of the meal, we ordered some mint tea, which caused the wait staff some consternation on how to serve it. They decided to serve each portion with a pot with the leaves in it along with a small silver pitcher of hot water. Of course, since everything was silver, they had to include little cloth covers for the handles so that you don't burn your hands. I learned that the little pitcher of water is for cutting your tea. After a while, the tea steeping in the pot will get really strong, so when you are pouring later cups, you can cut it with fresh water. This makes sense for black tea, but not so much for mint, which caused the debate by the wait staff. Of course, we learned this from Bob and Susan after Catherine and Margaret just used the pitcher to refill the pot to get more tea.

They next day we took a bus to the Sils tram on the other side of St. Moritz to do our hike. Catherine decided to sit this one out and meet us for lunch instead at the top of the Silvaplana tram. The hike started at the top of the tram and followed a path that walked by a number of cute alpine lakes. We took a little accidental detour and climbed up to the top of a chair lift instead of cutting across the side of the hill. That ended up being frustrating because we could see the tram stop that was our destination at about the same elevation, but we had to walk down and then back up. That final upward slope was exhausting! It was going up the ski path, so it was fairly steep and consistent. We ended up spreading out a lot and being at the front, I got to see a number of marmots so I got some pictures. When we got to the top, Catherine was waiting there patiently and we instantly ordered some food so that it would be there when everybody else stumbled in. The food was not very good, but at that moment, it didn't really matter.

After lunch, we took the tram down the hill and the bus back to the hotel. After stretching out, we went to the hotel's spa. It was smaller than the one is Scoul, but just as ridiculous. The main pool ended in these ginormous glass windows that looked out on the mountains. The jacuzzi pool also had various water massage stations that you could use to loosen up specific muscles, or, you could just lay down on these metal chairs and have bubbles come up under you, turning your whole body into jelly. They had two steam rooms, one with eucalyptus oil in the air and the other with saltwater. Both were great for my mild sore throat. The spa also had a relaxation pool which was mostly in the dark and had soothing patterns projected on the ceiling. The pool itself was circular and there were a number of stations around the circle. At each station, you lie with your head at the outside of the circle on a stone bench and then put your feet on a metal tree so that you are lying on your back almost floating. Your head is just partially underwater so that your ears are and they have soothing music playing through the water. I don't float that well so it wasn't as relaxing as it could be, but it was still pretty wild setup.

For dinner that night, we went to the restaurant in the hotel steinbock. It served traditional mountain food and is known as having the best rosti in the area. The rosti is huge! Each plate is a full cheft's skillet and about an inch thick, crisped to perfection. For my main, I had a venison ragu with chestnut spaetzle that was spectacular.

Friday started out as a cloudy, slightly rainy day so we spent the morning lounging around the hotel. In the afternoon, Margaret,Tom, Ginny and I tried to get raclette but it's a dish primarily served in the French part of Switzerland. There is one restaurant in Pontresina that serves it, but they weren't open for lunch and were completely booked at dinner so we couldn't even pop in in the evening for an appetizer. I guess I'll have to go to the French side on some other trip.

After missing out on raclette, Catherine, Bob and I did a short afternoon hike. We took the chairlift up and then walked up a valley full of hundreds of marmots to the closest hut. The hut was run by a very friendly Swiss woman who bakes a cake or two every night and carries them up to the hut to sell each day. Today was a carrot cake that was a lot lighter than American carrot cakes. It was almost a corn/carrot cake, which is a combination we should definitely try.

The large furrow shows how the glacier is a
small fraction of its old size.

Friday dinner was at a pizza, burger and pasta place near the train station. They had a very large menu including a lot of game meats so I ordered some roe deer in a juniper sauce, while others had pasta, pizza and burgers. 

Saturday was our last day for hiking in Switzerland. It was a crystal clear blue sky day and our hike started out by taking a horse drawn carriage up the Roseg valley to the hotel/restaurant at the trailhead. We had a quick coffee stop and then started our hike up the valley. Catherine and Susan did a more mellow hike that stayed along the valley floor to an alpine lake at the base of the glacier while the rest of us hiked up the ridge for 1000m to the Surlej mountain hut before cutting across to the Silvaplana tram. The Roseg valley is pretty spectacular. It comes out of the confluence of two separate glaciers. You can see how much the glaciers have receded because the old glaciers' extents can be seen as gigantic scree furrows down the mountain side. Very clear evidence of a changing climate.

For dinner on our last night, we had probably the best meal in Switzerland. It was at the Krostenbuli restaurant as part of the hotel. Their food is primarily local dishes but done with a modern presentation and bold flavours. I started with an ossobuco ravioli, had a main of artic char with a cognac sauce and then a desert of passion fruit panna cotta with pineapple and coconut. We also drank some really interesting local white wine and then cleared them out of red wine from the winery in Lebanon that Margaret visited when she was there for her friend's wedding. It was a great way to end the first phase of the trip.

Scouting out Scoul

The first week of our trip was spent hiking around the Engadine valley in Switzerland. See the full album.

We landed in Zurich in the evening and then took a cab to the hotel. Near downtown, things started to look really familiar and then I realized that it was the same location as one of the pedestrian detection datasets I used during my thesis. After starting at those videos for so long, of course I could recognize the real thing! After unpacking, we met up with Catherine's family, who had arrived earlier and went out for a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant where I had a chicory risotto.

The next morning, we took a train through to mountains to Scoul and got there around lunch. We checked into the GuardaVal and then had a quiet lunch in the sister hotel and then went for a quick hike. This was my intro to hiking Switzerland style. You take a chairlift, gondola, tram or bus up the hill and then hike around and see the scenery from high up. In this case, it was a quick walk where we went up the gondola and then walked to the top of the Ftan chairlift and back. Catherine and her parents took the gondola back down, but the rest of us rented these mountain bike foot scooter hybrids and took them down the hill. Wheeee!

We had dinner at the hotel's restaurant, which was a stuffing, multi-course affair with an excellent wine pairing. It was delicious but took over 3 hours so we were ready to hit the sack by the end of it.

In the morning, we took a local bus to the Svizzer National Park. The road to the trailhead was very narrow and windy. At one point, it went across a gigantic scree field that looked like it gets washed away and re-graded every year. Only the Swiss would think it's perfectly reasonable to have a local bus run a regular route along there!

The first part of the hike was a slow ascent through the forested park to an Alpine meadow. Catherine joined us for most of it and then turned around to catch a taxi. She didn't want to push her joints too much. In the alpine meadow, there was a viewing area where people sit down with their binoculars and try to find wildlife like the Chamoix. We didn't see any there, so we continued up over the ridge into the next valley. This took us out of the national park and instantly we were surrounded by cow patties. This would be a theme when hiking in the Alps. You share the trail with the cows with their bells clanging away.

We went down the side of the ridge and came upon a hunting cabin where there were a couple of hunters who had caught a Chamois. They brought out their scope and showed us more Chamois eating on the side of the mountain on the other side of the valley. They also showed us some marmots hanging out near their den.

After the cabin, we headed down the valley and came across a herd of sheep with their shepherdess. They also had bells and were quite cute as we walked through the flock along the trail. The last stage of the trail into Tarasp included stops interpretive telling the story of Snow White (or at least a local version of it), including little wood vignettes like a table with 7 bowls. At the end, we caught sight of the castle in Tarasp up on the hill, which of course was supposed to be the castle from the story. 

We got back to the hotel fairly late, so there wasn't much time between stretching out and dinner. For dinner, we took a bus to Sent and had dinner at the Aldier. It was delicious, traditional mountain food. I had veal in butter and herbs, while Catherine had some delicious lamb. We traded bites.

For our last day in Scoul, we took a bus to Ftan and took the chairlift up into the hills. We then walked over to the Alp Laret, a family mountain cabin. They served some amazing food! Catherine had a buckwheat cake with fresh berry cream, while I had the soup of the day which consisted of two big dumplings (the size of matzo balls) made of bread, ham and herbs, served in a clear ham broth. From there, we walked up the hill and along the alpine meadows, seeing cows everywhere. We were originally thinking of going to an alpine lake, but we wanted to get down in time to go to the baths and it was cloudy so we just went along the meadow Chamanna Naluns where we stopped for another snack. This time it was mostly french fries and sparkling apple juice. Then, we took the gondola back down into Scoul. Catherine made it the whole way on the hike!

Snow White's Castle

After peeling off my clothes and stretching out, I went down to the baths. Catherine had done it the day before so she described what to do. They are huge! They're somewhat affiliated with the hotel, but are also open to the public. They consistent of a huge series of pools and each one has a board detailing the temperature, salt content and any specific rules. One was outside with a lazy rive and pods to get water massages. The main inside pool included jacuzzi space both sitting and lying down as well as wading space. There was also a pair of hot & cold pools colored with red & blue light so that you can go back and forth between them. One room had the decor of a roman bath and was filled with saltwater denser than the red sea. I still couldn't float, but other people could. Finally, there was a series of steam rooms and saunas that you are supposed to use in various stages of undress. All the pools were packed by people enjoying their bathing and relaxing.

After the baths, we went to dinner over in Sent again. This time, we went to a pizzeria run by an Italian couple. They were hilarious and energetic so it was a nice low key dinner. They even had gluten free pizza crusts to that everybody could get their pizza fix in. After dinner, we went back to the hotel's bar and had fun trying small samples of various Swiss spirits and liqueurs. The bar explicitly tries to carry very local products, but there were some from other areas of Switzerland too. There were a couple of new drinks that I hadn't had before. Marc is a Swiss brandy made from local grapes and then sometimes aged a little. There were also a number of sweet liquors made with local mountain herbs. Finally, there was a good selection of Schnapps including apricot, pear, cherry, vielle prune and apple.