Marché des Artisans

It seems like everyone has a crafty hobby around here. There are small, personal farms scattered around the countryside, small speciality shops selling handmade goods and every year in August Martigny holds an Artisan Market. The older part of town gets blocked off to stop cars driving through and stalls are set up where locals can sell their wears, whether it be food, whittled wooden sculptures or handmade clothing, there's something to impress just about anyone.

The thought of buying something locally made was quite exciting since we were about to move into our very own apartment and what better way to make it feel homely than to decorate it with a special little token of a small town in Switzerland. Poring my way through the many stalls, I realised that handmade, speciality items come with a special price tag too so sadly I didn't get my token to put in our new apartment but I did enjoy wandering through the stalls and dreaming about how all of the nice things that would look good on our shelves at home. 

A very comprehensive display of mushrooms, each colour coded to show if you would die if you ate it.

Glass blowing.

Walking around Martigny

The small parts of Switzerland that we have seen so far have not lacked in the beautiful department. Surrounded by mountains, fields, lakes, orchards, wild flowers and anything else pretty that you can think of, it is sure to impress!  Before we came to Switzerland, I had no idea that it was going to be so beautiful. I knew it was going to be pretty damn spectacular, but I was in no way disappointed when I saw just how pretty it is.

Martigny might be small, but it definitely doesn't disappoint with scenery. We had gorgeous views of mountains from our hotel window and the snow capped mountains still amaze us Brisbanites. If you're not into outdoor activities, mountain scenery or locally made produce then Valais isn't really the place for you. It's a fairly rural place filled with vineyards and orchards (mainly Apricots) and as I've said before, the shops shut fairly early so it's definitely not for shopaholics.

Another thing that Martigny is quite well known for is it's art and the art gallery called Foundation Pierre Gianadda. The gallery houses displays of roman artifacts found in sites dug up throughout Martigny. It also boasts a rather large sculpture garden and exhibits work from famous artists. At the moment there is an exhibit of Nicholas De Staël. I've heard that people come from miles to see this gallery. I guess it's so well known because of the amount of advertising they do. On every shop window in Martigny there is a bright, yellow sticker with this dudes name on it and I've seen posters in all of the surrounding towns.

I also discovered yesterday that the gallery has an automobile museum filled with really old and very well maintained cars from all over Europe.

Along with the art gallery, there are sculptures scattered everywhere in town. On every roundabout there is a sculpture by some famous artist. My favourite would have to be the minotaur which happens to have his junk hanging out. Okay yes... I still think it's funny when I see statues with rude parts. It's something I will have to learn to deal with now that I'm living in Europe.

While we lived in Martigny for a short time we enjoyed strolling around the town and seeing what the little place had to offer. Our favourite place to eat is a tiny little Focacceria near the church in the centre of town. It has FANTASTIC pizza and calzones for a very reasonable price. We go in, struggle with our French until the guy speaks English to us, order a generous "tranche" of onion pizza (oooooh so good!) and go back outside to wait where it's a little cooler. The tiny little shop was a little hot to stay in during the warmer months. Now that the temperature is dropping rapidly, we tend to hang around inside to keep warm. We loved that place so much while we were living in our hotel that we frequented there during the week until we were sadly told that they were going to vacation for three weeks. THREE WEEKS! We were wondering what we were going to do... Those three weeks flew by while we were busy settling into our new apartment in Saint-Maurice. Now I catch the train to meet Roy in Martigny for one of those drool-worthy onion pizzas once a week.

There is more history here than you can poke a stick at and luckily it is pretty well signed, albeit in Frenglish (which makes for a good laugh). In most large towns in Valais, there are castles strategically perched on the side of giant mountains ready for anyone who dares to invade this little oasis. Going for a nice Sunday hike took us up to one of these Castles called Château de la Bâtiaz which overlooks the whole of Martigny. It's a great spot to sit and watch the river rush by underneath and to admire the mountains that do a great job of showing us humans just how small we are.

Even though Switzerland may be small, there is still so much more to explore. There's four official languages for god's sake. How small could it be?

doing the groceries

One thing that I find funny and annoying is the fact that shops are closed to Sundays, there is no "Late night shopping" and in my little town, the shops shut for an hour and a half everyday, right around lunch time. I can get used to there being no shops open on Sunday because it forces us to be more creative with our weekend. It forces us to get out and be active and explore this land that is filled with amazing scenery and culture. But to close for an hour and a half each day kind of gets annoying.

Most apartments in Switzerland come with a fridge built into the kitchen bench, in our case it's about the size of a bar fridge. And don't get me started about the freezer space. Lets just say... I wouldn't be able to freeze my sneakers if I suddenly lost my mind. So with a small fridge and shops open for limited time it could get rather annoying if one had a busy work schedule. Luckily for us I don't work, which leaves me plenty of time to go to the shop and buy supplies.

I bet your town doesn't have free bikes to borrow...

A really cool thing about Valais during summer is that they have a bicycle service called Valaisroule in most major towns. If you only want the bike for a couple of hours, you can do it for free! It's available from Wednesday through to Sunday from between 10:30am - 6:00pm. You can reserve a bike via email for 5CHF or you can just turn up and use a bike if it's available. For four hours the bike is free but for every hour after that it's 2CHF (pretty cheap if you ask me). They also have electric bikes which you can hire for 2CHF an hour for a maximum of four hours.

All you need to do is give them a 20CHF deposit, show them your ID and fill out a form. Easy as that!

Red flag or red tape?

Something that Roy and I have a chuckle and a sigh about is the bureaucracy in Switzerland. I'll give you a little bit of background info off Wikipedia about the little country we now inhabit, just so you can understand a bit more of what I'm talking about. Switzerland is officially known as The Swiss Confederation or Confœderatio Helvetica in Latin (hence its ISO country codes CH and CHE). It consists of 26 Cantons, one if which is the canton that we live in called Valais. To my understanding, it means that each Canton basically governs itself. The cantons have a permanent constitutional status and, in comparison with the situation in other countries, a high degree of independence. (source)

Upon arriving in Switzerland, one has about two weeks to get oneself registered with their local commune (town) in order to obtain a permit to stay or work in the country. This involves a trip to the local town hall with passports, work contracts, passport sized photos and money (everything comes at a cost). We took a trusty work friend of Roy's along for some French translating which was a HUGE help. The administration lady sat us down and typed away on her computer to begin the process of getting us into the database. She asked us the usual questions one might expect when registering to stay in a foreign country, but then she even asked us our parents names and our mothers maiden names. I'm still wondering what purpose this served. After the 20 questions, we left feeling a tad drained after the 'interrogation' but we were relieved to have gotten that out of the way and now all we had to do was sit and wait for our permits to arrive in the mail.

About a week and a half later we pestered the concierge at the hotel to see if we had received any mail until finally they told us we had received 'a' letter which contained Roy's permit. I started thinking "uh oh.. maybe they're not going to give me one... maybe I won't be allowed to stay here.. blah, blah, blah". A few days later I also received a letter in the mail, much to my relief. Even though we provided our marriage certificate and we both lived at the same address, they sent them out separately. Way to freak a girl out!

So, the permit was all done which was great. We moved out of the hotel in Martigny after three weeks and moved into our apartment in Saint-Maurice and we were told that we were going to have to go back to the town hall in Martigny, de-register with that commune and register in the commune of Saint-Maurice, even though it is about ten minutes up the freaking road and in the same canton.  Oh and we had to fork out 75CHF just to change communes. We can only imagine what it would be like to move to a different canton.

We've been told by other expats that you eventually get used to the bureaucracy and that it all seems to work quite effectively. We're also told that even the Swiss have to go through this kind of thing when they move. Maybe I'll come back to Australia after two years and wonder why it's so relaxed.

To the land of Chocolate, Cheese and bloody huge mountains!

Having planned our new life in Switzerland for the last six months, it was a relief to finally cross the border from France into the picturesque, landlocked country where we will be spending the next two years of our lives. As we crossed the border in the train there was no "Welcome to Switzerland" or "Bienvenue en Suisse" sign telling us that we'd arrived.. just a short message over the train speakers and a glimpse of a square, red flag with a white cross on it hanging on the door of an old farm house. It was rather exciting for us both imagining what our new life was going to be like. We rolled up to our train stop and prepared for the mammoth effort of removing our luggage from the packed train.

I could go on in details about what we did but I guess that could get a tad boring so I'll keep it brief. For the first three nights we stayed at a guys place who we found on airbnb. It was a nice change from the hotels we'd been staying at for the past month because he welcomed us in and told us to use his house like it was our own. He and his girlfriend even made us dinner and cocktails on our first night which was a very nice welcome into Switzerland. His apartment had views of the alps and lake Geneva. I had already fallen in love with Switzerland by this time.

After having a nice break in Lausanne, we moved our huge haul of luggage down to Martigny into a hotel extremely close to Roy's work (in the same building). We were lucky because the IDIAP have a deal with the hotel so our rent was cheap, breakfast was included AND we had a cleaning service everyday. Along with these perks, our room had great views of the mountains.

When we first went to Martigny we went out for lunch with Roy's friend from QUT who now works at IDIAP. They took us to a place that serves what the Swiss call "Chinese Fondue". I'm guessing they're a little obsessed with inventing fondue because most of the world call it "hot pot". I guess it could be like fondue, except you're not really dipping the meat into the broth to get a nice coating of broth on your meat like you do with cheese fondue, you're putting your meat in the broth to cook it. Oh well, we'll leave them to call it Chinese Fondue.... I had a huge salad with GIANT chunks of cheese on top. I thought it was a bit of a cheese overload but by this time we hadn't experienced "Croute au fromage"

So yeah... back to the living in a hotel. It was okay at first. It was comfortable, it had internet, tv, a small fridge (which we regularly stocked with beer) and as I said before, breakfast was included. We became regulars at the restaurant at breakfast time. Towards the end of our stay the wait staff were bringing us out a pot of coffee instead of asking us... how's that for service? The hotel got a little frustrating after about two weeks. Roy was sick of living so close to work, I was sick of how small it was and even though it was nice to have cleaning ladies everyday, it got a little annoying them coming in everyday and tucking the blankets in the end of the bed and moving our stuff.

We lived there for three weeks!

Our "Kitchen"

Finding apartments in Switzerland can be a bit of a nightmare I'm told. We began the process of searching but we lucked in because Roy's friend and his girlfriend were moving out of their apartment (which her Mum owns) which opened it up for us to rent if we wanted. We were originally wanting to rent a place in Martigny since it was a nice sized town with decent shops and close to work for Roy but the convenience of renting this place was just too good. We had a look at the apartment to see if it suited us and then met up with the landlord over some Chinese food and discussed (with translations from Roy's, friends Girlfriend) the terms and conditions of renting. We were sold! The apartment is huge, a bit old but very suitable for Roy and I. And the bonus.. it was available about a week and a half after we signed the lease which meant NO MORE HOTEL!!

The day of our move we did a huge shop for essentials and carted them back to the hotel room. The cleaning ladies must have thought we were going to live there forever with the amount of stuff we had in there. We hired a van from the local furniture shop, loaded our crap in it and headed over to Roy's bosses place to pick up some furniture that we bought off him. Roy had his first experience of driving on the other side of the road and he did well! No accidental driving on the wrong side.

That's just the stuff we had in our hotel.

So now we're in our apartment in the nice little town of Saint-Maurice. One thing we have to get used to here is that everything closes on Sunday's and at 6:30pm on weekdays. In larger towns like Martigny the shops are open non-stop during the day but in a small town like Saint-Maurice the shops close for about an hour around lunch time everyday. I have to plan my shopping trips well because of this. I always have to make sure I have enough milk, toilet paper and food for the day because there's no such thing as going to the shop to pick up milk after dark.

Paris!

Ah, yes... we went on one of those tour buses! We only had one full day in Paris and I wasn't feeling so crash hot so we opted for something that could take us to all of the city sights without us having to do much walking. Conveniently the bus left from just around the corner of our hotel. We hopped on the double-decker beast, received our tickets and complimentary, cheap plastic earphones from the driver and made our way up the stairs to get the best view.

The little box that we plugged our earphones into had a commentary of the Paris sights in about ten different languages. There was a few bus tour circuits of the city to choose from which you could hop on and hop off at any stop during the trip and change to a different circuit to see the other parts of the city.

Obey sticker on the sign. :D

Oh dear!

Olympia Hall

The architecture was interesting with all these triangular shaped buildings.

Our first stop off was the Louvre Museum. Despite the look of the large crowd, we didn't have to wait all that long to get inside. A quick bag check at security to make sure we weren't carrying anything dodgy and then down we went into the main lobby. It was quite amazing looking up and seeing the glass pyramid above us.

This elevator entertained me for quite a while. 

Once we got into the actual exhibits of the museum, the decor changed significantly. Out in the lobby it was quite modern but once in the main sections it changed to grand old pillars and ornate ceiling decorations.

While these sculptures looked amazing, it was hard for me to really appreciate them with little knowledge of ancient art or history. They were nice to look at and to imagine what it would have been like back then but once we saw a few of them, it got a little boring. I think if you were to stand and appreciate each and every piece of work in the Louvre, you would be in there for about a month. There is so much to see. Roy and I did a quick scan of the map before we went in so we could see what we wanted to see in a short amount of time. It was quite easy to get lost though with so much to look at.

 Of course no trip to the Louvre would be complete without seeing the most famous pieces of art. Venus de Milo drew a fairly large crowd, although not as large as the most famous one....

There was no way that I was going to get closer to this one. There was a large crowd in front, all with their cameras snapping away. I'm still not sure why this painting is so damn famous. I think it's so popular because people just want to see it because it's famous and not really for the appreciation of the piece itself. But hey, I was one of those dopes taking photos just because it was famous!

Ahhh, so after we saw the 'must-see's' of the Louvre we headed back outside for some fresh air. It gets quite exhausting when you have to fight people for space. Lucky for us, we had some really nice whether that day, so we took advantage of it and got some lunch to eat in the nearby park.

A rather tasty chèvre fromage au aubergine tarte.

Croissant au chocolat.

We saw a rather strange thing whilst eating our lunch....

I'm not sure if it was an identification tag or some kind of advertisement but it got me thinking about advertising in the future. I wonder if humans will continue to exploit animals and use them for advertising purposes... I'm sure it was just an ID tag, but it did look very strange walking around with all of the other normal pigeons.

After we finished our very tasty lunch we discovered a small summer fair. I couldn't resist going on a ride and we thought it might be fun to go on the tallest ride there so we could catch a glimpse of Paris from up above.

I didn't get any photos whilst on it for obvious reasons....

So after our fun times in the fair we headed back to the bus stop to hop on our tour bus again. By this time the buses were getting quite full with other tourists checking out the sights of Paris. We let two full buses go by hoping to catch an emptier bus but after a rather long wait in the sun for the next bus, we discovered that it was full also. We hopped on anyway hoping to find ourselves a seat upstairs but alas.. they were full. Not wanting to settle for a seat downstairs in the boring section of the bus, we opted to stand in the stairwell (probably not the safest option). We were still able to get some nice views of the city from our spot.

It was a challenge trying to hold onto the bus whilst taking photos as we went along. Eventually some passengers hopped off which made room for us to take a seat. 

Notre Dame (unfortunately the Hunchback was having an afternoon nap so we didn't see him)

Obélisque de Louxor

Avenue des Champs-Élysées

Arc de Triomphe

We were told by various people that it is amazing to watch the traffic driving and weaving around the Arc de Triomphe but since it was a Sunday, it wasn't all that spectacular. It was a rather tame and quiet day that day.

Now our bus was driving up to another very famous Paris sight....

The tower was a lot more beautiful than I had imagined. I had imagined a rather rigid and emotionless structure but instead there was beautiful, ornate fixtures on it which you can't really see it in the photos. I also thought it was going to be grey and metallic but instead was surprised to see a rather organic, brown colour. It's really something to be seen in person because even though it looks spectacular in photos, it's even more beautiful when you see it up close. Aside from the beauty, it was very crowded and full of people trying to sell souvenirs and trinkets. Having been to India and China, I wasn't bothered at all by these sellers because they didn't approach you which was nice. We thought about taking a lift up the tower but once we saw how long the lines were, we decided against it and sat in the park nearby and admired it from underneath. 

After sitting and relaxing under the shadow of the tower, we hopped back on the crowded bus and headed back to our hotel for some rest. It was a long and exhausting day of touring the grand city of Paris. One day is definitely too short for Paris but since it's a short train ride away we'll be back for more. We're looking forward to spending New Years in Paris with some friends this year.