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.