Cannabis tea and other peculiar drinks of Switzerland

A vending machine at the station was selling Cannabis Ice Tea. Surprisingly cheap, too.

This is green tea with mint. Quite disgusting. Like drinking brown colored tooth paste.

Loose tea.

Magic wine.

Last supper, Lausanne version

Our last night in Lausanne, my colleague suggested we have pizza again. I suggested we not. Our boss just wanted a salad. In the end we compromised and went to a cheap looking place that had salads, pizzas, and other food.

I ordered some local version of cheese fondue where they mix tomatoes into the cheese. Instead of bread you dip potatoes in the tomato cheese. It was pretty good, but normal cheese fondue is better.

Salad, with the boss's beloved mushrooms. Apparently this type of lettuce is called "Lion's tooth" in Lausanne. Every menu everywhere in the city had Lion's tooth salad with something. We asked our English speaking waitress what these lion's teeth were, and she said she did not know the English word (which is "dandelion", coming from the French "dent de lion" = lion's tooth) but she pointed to a photo of salad and said: "This".

The second pizza of the day for my colleague.

 

Omiyage (souvenirs)

Omiyage shopping in the supermarket. Supermarkets are the best place for souvenir shopping. They are cheap and they sell stuff that the locals actually use.

When travelling, the Japanese custom is that you have to give small gifts to anyone who knows you have been travelling. This means that it is common to hide this fact from as many people as possible, since otherwise your bag will explode with all the gifts you have to buy. I bought chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

I bought two sets of Swiss army knives made out of chocolate.

They also had wrist watches made out of chocolate, but they were too big and fragile for my bag.

Sightseeing in Lausanne

A postcard conveniently showing everything interesting about Switzerland.

A shop selling famous Swiss things like knives and clocks.

Since we got off work early on Friday, we had a few hours for sightseeing. There is not that much to see in Lausanne, but we went to take a look at the "Old Town" part where there is a cathedral and a castle. We also stumbled into a museum that was nice.

I suggested my colleague should by tights like these, but he did not.

We used to have a dog like this when I was a kid. 

 Japanese things

This is a sushi place, and when we were looking through the window a Japanese looking woman came out and asked if we were interested in something. We said no.

They had a Japanese film festival.

I have a Japanese friend who works as a "kirigamist", paper cutting art.

 Old buildings and things like that

This fountain looked famous. Behind it is a clock that has moving characters on the hour every hour.

The cathedral has an impressive door, but someone had kindly parked a big truck full of building equipment in front of it so it was not so easy to take pictures...

The cathedral, the most mentioned tourist attraction of Lausanne.

Inside of the cathedral.

The door once the truck was gone.

Outside the cathedral a group of Japanese people showed up and said: "Wow, now it finally looks like 'we are in Europe!'...".

Lausanne as seen from the cathedral.

This was also mentioned on all sightseeing maps.

 Street art

This 8 bit art is part of a famous trend of street art.

This graffiti was funny.

 The museum

This is how we entered the museum, but I think the main entrance was somewhere else.

Freaks of nature collected by the museum.

More freaks of nature.

Dinosaurs are cool.

The museum was proud of their mammoth.

I have a friend who works in a place called Citrine. The small yellow stone on the left is a citrine.

Glow in the dark minerals.

Radioactive particle trapping device. You could see the traces of radioactive particle in this sheet of goo.

I like swords. Or at least beating people up with swords. Which I have not done lately.

I also like playing cards. Which I have been using a lot lately.

Swiss money

Switzerland is famous for banks, and they had some cool money. The 5 franc coin is really big and heavy, so I collected a bunch of them to use for magic tricks later. The bills are very colorful.

Everything in Switzerland was very expensive, even compared to Swedish or Japanese standards. A PET bottle with Coca Cola cost 3.5 franc, which is about 350 yen. In Japan it would cost 150 yen.

The only thing that was cheap was strawberries. They were about half the price you would pay in Japan, but that is because strawberries are ridiculously expensive in Japan.

The Swiss 5 franc coin is much bigger than the Japanese 500 yen coin, though the value is about the same.

Pizza!

The last day of work, we got off work early enough to go have lunch somewhere other than the student cafeteria. My colleague wanted to have pizza, since pizza in Japan is usually not very exciting compared to European pizza.

Lausanne is close to Italy, so we found lots of Italian restaurants. We picked one more or less at random and went inside to have pizza. The staff did not speak English, but they spoke French and Italian (neither of which we spoke). The menu was in French, but that is close enough to English to understand pizza toppings.

Our boss was very skeptical about having pizza but the pizzas were very good and he later said that he actually was glad we had pizza. No one forced him to come with us but he usually wants to spend 100% of the time together. The only two times he has not come with us on trips abroad were when we went to have "junk food kebab" in Germany (he had a meeting with someone else) and when we had goat testicles in Greece (he refused because he thought it would be disgusting). He loves mushrooms and was very happy that there was pizza with mushrooms available. I don't think I have ever seen a European pizza place without mushroom available on at least some pizza, but he found it exciting.

I ordered a "Calabrese" since that is a type of pizza I often have at a friends place in Sapporo. I wanted to see how similar they were. They both have spicy sausage, so they were fairly similar.

My pizza loving colleague in the end ended up having pizza for lunch, pizza for dinner, and then pizza for lunch the next day too... I like pizza too, but when visiting a new country for the first time, having only pizza seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

The second Lausanne dinner

The restaurant of the second Lausanne dinner was located very close to our hotel. Less than five minutes walking. So of course we decided to walk there. Our professor was skeptical of our sense of direction. There were lots of other participants staying at the same hotel, so we left the hotel in a group of 15 or so. In an intersection, the group stopped and no one seemed to know where to go, but me and my Swedish colleague at least managed to convince one British cancer researcher that we knew what we were doing and she followed us when we walked ahead to the restaurant. The rest of the party came later, but about 5 minutes later so either they went the wrong way or they were standing around indecisive for a long time. Our professor stuck to that group this evening.

A "small" starter.

The food was again very good. We got "meat fondue". This means boiling different types of meat in oil and then dipping them in different sauces. There was curry sauce, garlic sauce, spicy sauce, etc. There were three types of meat: chicken, beef, and horse. In Sweden we also eat horse, but some of the other guests were skeptical. The food is somewhat similar to Japanese shabu-shabu, though the meat is much thicker.

Horse, beef, and chicken.

Some people instead wanted to have cheese fondue, including the woman sitting next to me. I managed to steal some cheese fondue from here at an unguarded movement. The famous Swiss cheese fondue was good, but the cheese fondue you can get in Japan if you go to an expensive place tastes pretty much the same. Something I like in Japan is that you get not only bread, like in Switzerland and France, but you also get various vegetables, sausages, etc. to dip in the cheese. More variety.

Cheese fondue

Stolen cheese fondue

Some vegetarians had a potato, cheese, and egg dish instead.

The green tea did not taste like any green tea in Japan (where there are several sorts).

When the dessert showed up, we were all pretty much full but it was still good.