Chateau de Chillon

No, Romania did not satisfy my craving for castles.

Chateau de Chillon, near Montreux and on the far side of Lac Leman from Geneva, was touted to me as Switzerland's best castle. It's built on a little island just off the lake shore, and it is a honestly, truly, wouldn't be out of place in a fairy tale medieval style castle.

It still took me almost twenty months of living in Switzerland to go visit. My bad. But a couple weeks ago I had a friend visiting and the desire to be a silly tourist, and so hopping on the train and chatting two-thirds of the way around the lake sounded like a lovely way to spend the day. It helped that it was a totally gorgeous fall day. Switzerland is a beautiful country.

Seg-Fault

Sunday evening I baked a batch of cookies. They were pretty good; I ate a few. I brought the remaining two dozen to CERN with me Monday morning, and perched the box on the edge of desk. I work in what is essential a cubicle sans walls, so this box of cookies should have been visible to everyone walking past in the hallway. I even put a handy sign by the cookies to indicate that people could take one.

Yet, Tuesday evening I took the above picture.

Does this surprise anyone else? Untouched cookies? In a very large building populated by physicists? Physicists known for demolishing free food at every opportunity? Seriously, some conferences post guards around the buffet table to make sure we don't "sample" it out of existence before the meal is supposed to start.

Freaky Pharmacy

pictures from www.frenchgardening.com

So Halloween has come and gone, and I didn't exactly get to celebrate it as I had intended. France and Switzerland are aware of Halloween; the stores carry some cheap costumes and make-up and fake spider webs, and I even saw pumpkin carving kits in one. But they don't really seem to get it. Christmas cookies are already on sale. Certainly they don't understand pumpkins. They call all squash pumpkins, which I am staunchly opposed to. Butternut squash are wonderful in their own right, but I'd rather stick with lovely sugar pumpkins for making cookies and pies, thank you very much.

But I didn't get to celebrate Halloween and try to educate those around me into the wonders of pumpkin baked goods, because I wasn't feeling well. Instead, my Halloween was devoted to a terror of an entirely different kind: dealing with French pharmacies.